Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

Economist Cameron Harwick says it's on professors to respond, and it's going to look like relying more on tests and not on homework—which means a diploma will have to be less about intelligence and more about agency and discipline.

This approach significantly raises the stakes of tests. It violates a longstanding maxim in education, that successful teaching involves quick feedback: frequent, small assignments that help students gauge how they’re doing, graded, to give them a push to actually do it.... Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom is probably going to have to go. If AI makes some aspect of the classroom easier, something else has to get harder, or the university has no reason to exist.

The signal that a diploma sends can’t continue to be “I know things”. ChatGPT knows things. A diploma in the AI era will have to signal discipline and agency – things that AI, as yet, still lacks and can’t substitute for. Any student who makes it through such a class will have a credible signal that they can successfully avoid the temptation to slack, and that they have the self-control to execute on long-term plans.