In “AI, Your College Student, and the End of Individual Achievement,” Naomi Schaefer Riley laments the effect that artificial intelligence (especially the new ChatGPT site) is having on education in America.
If you haven’t heard, ChatGPT writes essays that sound like actual student work. Need a paper on Moby Dick? No problem — it will do one for you.
Students used to say, “Why do I have to learn math when we have calculators?” Now they’ll say, “Why learn to write when we have ChatGPT?”
The problem goes much deeper, though. Riley points out that group projects and even group quizzes are increasingly popular with teachers. That, no doubt, stems from the influence of education schools where mushy, feel-good theories abound and individual achievement is regarded as “inequitable.”
There might be a silver lining in this, however. The more schools and colleges graduate students who are incapable of doing things on their own, the more employers will stop looking at educational credentials when they evaluate applicants and turn to other means of deciding if someone is worth hiring or not.