Artificial intelligence and university degrees

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) spell the end of university education? Or can universities reclaim their prestige? Maybe we need to go back to the past to find a solution.

There is a risk that universities could become "legacy institutions": institutions with a glorious history but not much of a future. Certainly, in terms of teaching, learning has become democratised.

You Tube and other online platforms have opened up a new world of learning, such as TED talks. Meanwhile chat groups and other fora have created in effect learning webinars.

Yes: the "university experience" is different from what dinosaurs like myself enjoyed as undergraduates decades ago. But young people make their own reality. They live in a different world with different expectations.

The remaining university monopoly is that piece of paper upon graduation. As long as that piece of paper retains its value, parents and carers will encourage students to go to university.

But now AI even threatens to erode that piece of paper's value.

A great deal of university assessment is done via some of form of essay-writing. AI is increasing in its ability to write essays.

AI is currently the dumbest it will ever be. Everyday AI is becoming more expert at writing essays.

In the 1970s and 1980s we dinosaurs led a revolution in university assessment. Before the revolution, a person's assessment would be done by (say) a three-hour unseen examination paper.

In some universities, the tests were called "finals". They determined that student's future status as a graduate (or as a failure to graduate). It was a time of great stress knowing that the entire assessment would be summed up in three hours. Too bad if the person was having an "off" day. We may even recall suicides of fellow students or at least their nervous breakdown as D-Day approached.

We successfully campaigned for our successors to be granted "continual assessment". In other words, the importance of the unseen question paper was reduced and instead students were assessed along the way, such as by writing essays.

Now AI can write those essays.

The answer may be to return to the old style of unseen examinations. It pains me to write this, after all it is a reversal of what we campaigned for all those years ago.

But at least with unseen examination questions there can be no question of AI assistance.

There will be the restitution of the integrity of the degree.

Yes: this will be a return to the era of stress and risk of nervous breakdowns. But it will also eliminate the "impostor syndrome".

This syndrome will emerge from students who have used AI to do their essays and obtained a good result for the essays. Will they feel like imposters knowing that the credit for their work lies not with their own ability but that of AI?

It will also reassure their eventual clients or customers that their credentials have been earned by the students themselves and not by AI.

This will also bring integrity into the assessment process. Students writing essays are usually obliged to sign a form of undertaking that this essay is their own work.

But students using AI are actually making false declarations because they have received assistance from AI. It is not their own work. Thy are making a false declaration. This is not a good basis upon which to begin a career.

From a university marketing point of view, the unseen paper replacing take-home essays may be used to demonstrate the vigour of the university's education. As the use of AI erodes the value of university degrees, so a university can boast of its use of the unseen examination paper as its restoration of the integrity of its own degrees.

By implication, universities still using essays may be seen as permitting students to obtain easy – and less worthwhile - degrees.

The arrival of AI is forcing us to reconsider a great deal of contemporary life. For those of us who campaigned for "continual assessment, that era is now ending. We need to go back to the era of the unseen examination paper to maintain the integrity of a university degree.