RRegarding the role of artificial intelligence in higher education, the landscape is dark. Students are mass cheating In our evaluations or open books, online exams using AI tools, all the time make yourself stupid. The next generation of graduates, apparently, will finish their diplomas without ever having as approaching a critical thinking.
Since my course is entirely examined through closed books exams, and I worry large amounts of water and energy required Power Ai DatacentresI usually avoid using the Chatppt. But according to my experience, students see it as a tool largely acceptable in the learning process. Although AI debates tend to focus on “cheating”, it is increasingly used to help research or to help structure tests.
There are valid concerns about abuse and the overuse of large languages (LLM) models in education. But if you want to understand why so many students turn to AI, you need to understand what brought us to this point – and the educational context against which it takes place.
In March 2020, I was about to be 15 years old. When the news announced that schools closed as part of the cocvid locking, I remember having broken out in the corridors. While I celebrated what we all thought was only two weeks off, I could not consider the disturbance that will escape the next three years of my education.
That year, the GCSE and levels A were canceled and replaced by notes evaluated by teachers, who have notoriously favored those in already efficient private schools. After new school closures and an extended period of traming, the education secretary of the time, Gavin Williamson, again canceled them in 2021. My level A cohort in 2023 was the first to return to “normal” – England, at least – which led to a punitive repression on “normal” inflation which has left many lower classes.
At the same time, universities across the country were also struggling with how to assess students who were no longer physically on campus. The solution: online online assessments online for articles that have not already been examined by course. When students of locking years have graduated, the university system did not immediately return to its early provisions. Five years later, 70% of universities Always use a certain form of online assessment.
It is not because, as some will make you believe, the university has become too easy. These changes are a response to the fact that the vast majority of current home students did not have the typical experience of national exams. Given the long periods that we spent far from school during our years of GCSE level and A, there were inevitably parts of the program that we have never been able to cover. But beyond the failed content, the backwards and the repeated backwards of the government in the format of our exams from 2020 increased the uncertainty that continued to shape the way in which we were evaluated – even though we had progressed to higher education.
During my first university year, half of my exams were online. This year, they all returned to handwritten and closed assessments. In both cases, I have only been confirmed in the format of my exams in the academic year. And, in one case, third year students who find themselves exactly the same article that I were examined online and within a longer time, to recognize that they had not passed a handwritten examination at any time of their diploma.
And so when Chatgpt was published in 2022, he landed in a university system in transition, characterized by even more uncertainty. University examinations had already become incoherent and largely variable, between universities and within the faculties themselves – only used to increase the attraction of AI for students who felt on the back, and to make it more difficult to detect and monitor its use.
Even if it was not for our botched exams, being a student is more expensive than ever: 68% of students have part -time jobs, the highest rate in a decade. The student loan system also leaves those of the poorest history with the largest debt amounts. I am already one of the first year to reimburse our loans over 40 years rather than 30 years. And it is before tuition fees increased again.
Students have less time than ever to be students. AI is a time saving tool; If students do not have time or resources to fully engage with their studies, it is because something has been wrong with the university system itself.
The use of AI is the push because it is practical and rapid, yes, but also because of the uncertainty which prevails around post-coexis exams, as well as the increasing financial precariousness of students. Universities must choose an examination format and stick to it. If this implies open lessons or exams, there must be a clarity on what the “proportioned” use of the AI looks like. For better or for worse, AI is there to stay. Not because students are lazy, but because it means being a student changes as quickly as technology.
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Elsie McDowell is a student level A from southern London. She was winner in 2023 from Hugo Young Award, 16-18 years old
