Your College Is Running An AI Arms Race And Pretending It Isn't
Your College Is Running An AI Arms Race And Pretending It Isn"t
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Your College Is Running An AI Arms Race And Pretending It Isn't
Nobody wrote it, nobody read it, everyone got marks. The degree is quietly becoming a formatting exercise.
Let's do the honest version of the assignment cycle. It's due at eleven. At nine forty you paste the question in, you get eight hundred words back, you spend twenty minutes taking out the words that give it away, you break up the paragraphs, you introduce two spelling errors on purpose, you add a line that sounds like you. You submit at ten fifty. It gets marked out of ten. You get seven. Nobody reads it. You will never think about it again, and neither will the person who graded it, because they are handling two hundred and forty of these and they know exactly what's going on, and there is a version of this same cycle running in a department office where somebody is generating the model answer key the same way. Two machines are now talking to each other and both sides are billing a human for the conversation.
The part that makes this genuinely funny rather than just bleak is the enforcement theatre bolted on top. Colleges have responded to a technology that writes fluent prose by buying software that claims to detect fluent prose. These detectors do not work reliably. They never have. They flag students who write cleanly, they flag anyone writing in a second language, they clear anything that has been lightly rewritten, and the false positives land hardest on exactly the students least equipped to fight an accusation. Meanwhile there's an entire counter-industry selling humanisers to defeat the detectors, so the actual technical arms race is between two products the institution is not party to, and the student is paying subscriptions on both ends. And underneath the comedy sits the thing nobody in the building wants to say. The assignment was already dead. AI didn't kill it. AI performed an autopsy in public.
Think about what a submitted written assignment was ever really measuring in a class of two hundred and forty. Not understanding. Not thinking. It was a compliance signal. Did this person do a task by a deadline in the format specified. That's it. That's the whole information content, and it was that way for years before any of this existed, back when it was the same file passed down three batches with the name changed and the margins adjusted. We've been running a
system that mostly checked whether you'd show up, and we called it assessment, and now a free tool can produce the show-up artifact in nine seconds and the emperor is standing there with a plagiarism report. The response, so far, has mostly been denial with paperwork. Some institutions have banned it outright, which functions as an honesty tax. The students willing to lie face no consequence and the students unwilling to lie fall behind, so the policy actively selects against integrity, which is a fairly impressive outcome for a rule written to protect it. Others have a policy that exists in a PDF nobody has opened. Very few have done the obvious thing, which is change what gets assessed. Because the fix is not mysterious. It's just expensive in the one currency Indian higher education has least of, which is faculty time. Vivas. Defend your own submission for four minutes. Open-book problems where the answer isn't on the internet because it involves your own data, your own lab reading, your own city. In-room writing.
Group defence. Anything where a person has to stand behind the thing with their voice. Every teacher knows this. Every teacher also has a teaching load, an attendance register, three administrative committees, an accreditation file due, and a class strength that makes four minutes per student a fifteen hour proposition. So nothing changes, and the degree keeps drifting toward being a certificate of formatting. And here's the part that should worry you more than the ethics, because the ethics conversation is honestly a bit boring by now.
The skill that assignments were badly, inefficiently, accidentally building was the ability to sit with something confusing for an hour without an exit. That's it. That's the actual thing. The struggle in front of a blank page, the twenty minutes of not knowing, the bad first paragraph you have to
write before the good second one arrives. It was never about the essay. The essay was a byproduct. The tolerance for confusion was the product, and it's the one thing every serious job you eventually want will require, and it is exactly the thing the nine-second workflow removes. You can outsource output all day and it costs you nothing you can see. What it costs is the thing that only builds under discomfort, and you will not notice the absence until you're in a room where nobody can generate the answer for you and you find that you've never sat in that chair before. None of which is an argument for banning anything, because that ship has sailed, been scrapped, and sold for parts. It's just worth being clear-eyed about what's actually happening on your campus right now. Nobody wrote it. Nobody read it. Everyone got marks. Everyone got promoted. The system is intact and functioning perfectly and producing nothing.
That's not cheating. Cheating implies somebody's still trying to win.
-Devangshu Purohit