American academic standards have been in decline for a long time, and with the rise of artificial intelligence, we face a full-blown crisis. It’s easier than ever for students to coast through to get their degrees without actually learning anything.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor James Andrews looks at this deplorable situation:
There is a lot at stake. Fear of losing aid drives institutions to over-engineer online course design, and the result is predictable: professors buried in learning-management-system (LMS) shells, performing compliance theatre instead of teaching. Each online course ends up looking like a custom software installation cobbled together by a dozen people who never met. They are brittle, prone to breaking, and demand endless tinkering: updating links, reformatting fonts, fixing bullet points that somehow pass muster one semester and get flagged the next. Compliance reviews depend less on standards than on whoever happens to be checking that week. The same course can be praised one term and rejected the next, depending on the reviewer’s interpretation or mood. Faculty teaching online have been conscripted into the role of instructional designer, a job few enjoy and even fewer do well.
Read the whole thing.