AI is chaotically the best-worst thing that could have happened to education, at least at the college level… and also the high school level, and especially the middle school level.

I’d love to explain why, but it’ll have to wait because I nee0d to make a mad-dash for this point and fix it later. (Love that option.

I didn’t see this before because of of the primary driving challenges of my neurodivergance is the inability to realize, unless it is glaringly obvious, that others are not operating under the same basic assumptions that I am. 

We all do this, but most people so commonly align with the basic set of assumptions that everyone around them has that they rarely encounter a situation in which this revelation is any stronger than: Whoa, those people were “Weirdly operating under a completely different Worldview”00. If it’s one of the ones they’ve heard of, it’s even easier to dismiss.

I have been talking about how the introduction of things like generative AI are going to make education better, more-efficient, and completely eliminate most of the flaws in the system as though everyone understood what I meant. It didn’t even occur to me that my colleagues might have simple questions like: REALLY? or HOW?

I don’t have too much time to get into the details. I got into this profession because I thought it was broken and needed changing and I’ve been trying to gather enough data to form an actionable plan, but… That seems like the fodder for another post. 

Let’s skip the narrative and TLDR this: 

1. I got into education because I knew it was broken and needed fixing.
2. I quickly identified how we grade students as one of the most fundamentally broken things in all levels of traditional education.
3. AI, prevents us from considering easily assessed methods that can be fooled.
4. Therefore: We have to re-organize the entire system to only value the unfoolable assessment methods we’ve always known are better.

I think it’s only that last one that has caused me issues. One of my big realizations lately has been that it’s going to be a tough sell convincing the rest of my profession that we already have unfoolable assessment methods. I’m especially concerned that I’ve over-estimated the number of teaching veterans that could comfortably employ these methods. 

Typically, my approach to new things: I like to draft ideas and stew on them for a few weeks, but there’s a tiny part of me that is screaming for me to cut this short and just get to the point. 

This idea needs to be here, in its nascent state, because it will motivate me to finally make this blog into the bare minimum of what I consider ready for actual publication. 

Post Script: If I could easily and quickly explain an assessment method that would perfectly accomplish everything I said, I would, and people would nitpick details that I don’t have time to consider in a post this short. On the other hand, If you’re an educator and your only goal is to determine beyond the shadow of any doubt that your student has learned to accomplish this learning objective. I hope you have at least ten ideas on how you might accomplish that task. 

Thanks, tiny part. What is that point?

We have always (for longer than I’ve been doing this anyway) known the best way to assess student learning. Now it is the only way that matters. So we must adjust to make TRUE measures of learning be the only ones that count. All forms of cheating will become obsolete and eventually students will come to see their teacher’s as coaches that help them improve and not as people to impress to improve grades.

And the tiny piece of that realization that I did not have until today is the understanding that grading can be designed in a way that makes cheating of any kind pointless and impossible. That we’ve known how to do it for a long time, and that the only reason we haven’t is institutional inertia.