Dean Batson, a communications instructor at Arizona State University (ASU), thought he had designed the perfect midterm exam for his persuasion class. He asked his students to analyze publicly available marketing campaigns using the persuasion principles they had learned in class and turn in a written report. What could go wrong?
Turns out, everything. Almost all 31 students submitted papers on one of two companies: Dove soap and Coca-Cola. A quick investigation revealed those two companies were the go-to responses when ChatGPT received a prompt on the assignment.
“Right off the bat, I knew they were using AI to some extent,” says Batson. “Some of them had opening paragraphs [that were] identical. [I said] to myself… ‘This isn’t going to work. I need to change it.’”
Batson’s experience is not unique. The same phenomenon is unfolding across campuses worldwide. The rise of consumer AI, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini, has shattered the educational paradigms most of us grew up with, forcing educators to face the uncomfortable truth that traditional education was coasting on life support until the tech companies unceremoniously pulled the plug.
We’re in an age where learning can be outsourced, and academic integrity is often an afterthought. Long term, we’ll start to see professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers, who lack a fundamental mastery of their specialization.
To combat this slide toward AI dependence, forward-thinking educators have adopted three key transformations: reimagining assessment methods that prioritize uniquely human skills, developing educational frameworks that teach students to collaborate with AI rather than relying on it and creating new ways to measure learning.
Transformation 1: Changing the assessment methods
Traditional methods of assessing knowledge, such as written tests, quizzes and term papers, were easy and efficient to handle many students at once. However, educators observed that these assessment methods are untenable in a world where AI can easily generate these outputs.
Adnan Rasool, Ph.D., director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Tennessee at Martin, notes that rather than giving students a final paper that accounts for 35% of their final grade, he has implemented regular individual presentations throughout the semester, which account for 25% of a student’s final grade.
The shift forces students to demonstrate a fundamental understanding by thinking on their feet, defending their arguments and responding to cross-examination in real time. Even if students use AI to prepare for oral examinations, AI cannot advocate on their behalf in front of their peers. Rasool also noted that he and many of his colleagues have started using in-class handwritten exams featuring fewer, more comprehensive questions.
Ironically, AI’s disruption pushed educational assessment back to pre-internet era forms of evaluation, proving that sometimes the best way forward is to remember what worked before technology complicated everything.
For some educators, the deep integration of AI into daily life makes bans counterproductive. Instead, some educators are teaching students to collaborate with AI ethically.
MacKenzie Price launched Alpha School based on the premise that children born in the last 20 years are digital natives, and, as such, their education needs to be completely reimagined for an AI-augmented world. Her school relies on AI tutors who teach academic subjects for just two hours each morning, while the remaining hours of the day are spent learning prompt engineering (how to communicate with AI) and developing human skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication.
Price’s school deliberately avoids chatbot interfaces that enable cheating. “We do not use a chatbot feature… because often students use chatbots to cheat,” she notes. “Instead, [we use AI] to provide personalized learning plans that meet every student [at their exact] level.” This system ensures that students see AI as a tool rather than a shortcut. The result is AI-literate students who can partner with AI ethically while mastering uniquely human skills AI cannot replicate.
On the institutional side, Zhuoer (Joy) Chen, who works with educators at AI platform HeyGen, emphasizes that effective AI integration requires significant investment in comprehensive teacher training. She notes that educators who don’t understand AI themselves cannot effectively guide students in using these technologies to achieve better learning outcomes.
Transformation 3: Find new ways of measuring learning
“The best AI work is C-grade,” says Rasool. “One of the things [we’re doing] is instead of burning through our time trying to accuse people of cheating and then spending time trying to prove that… cheating happened or not… we’re encouraging folks to grade AI work as what it is.
“If you think this is not a C and you think this is not the grade you deserve, explain in detail how this is not a C. And 99. 9 % of the time, nobody’s going to show up to tell you how this is not a C.”
Setting a baseline expectation of AI-generated work helps create natural consequences that distinguish genuine learners who excel by incorporating original thinking into their work from students who see their grades plateau at mediocre levels due to their over-reliance on AI.
Price’s Alpha School exemplifies comprehensive new measurements through mastery-based learning where students must reach 90% proficiency before advancing to the next academic milestone, with AI tutors tracking knowledge gaps in real-time. The school validates progress through third-party Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessments, which are administered three times a year.
In this new AI-powered environment where limitless knowledge is readily available and the capabilities of large language models expand exponentially, the professional landscape is shifting dramatically. Future doctors and lawyers might no longer require encyclopedic knowledge of their fields, and the new methods for determining professional competence remain an open question.
What is certain is that this challenge requires more than just simple academic reform. The educators pioneering these changes might not know precisely what the future holds. However, they’re ensuring their students develop the adaptability and human-centered skills needed to thrive in whatever comes next.
Photo from Daniel Hoz/Shutterstock.com
