That is a question that is being asked over and over these days.

In today’s Martin Center article, Duke University student Zev Van Zanten offers his thoughts.

He begins, “Will agentic AI let teachers spend more time teaching, or will it remove even more of the human touch from the academy? This is one of higher education’s most important questions following the release of the now-defunct Einstein and Canvas’s own agentic AI teaching agent.”

Van Zanten fears that the AI revolution will save time for educators but do nothing to improve the education that students receive. He continues,

Take rubric design, for example. Designing formal guidelines for every assignment is a long and tedious process, but rubrics done right aren’t an arbitrary way of assigning points based on the satisfaction of silly requirements. Rather, they, and by extension grades, measure how well students meet key learning benchmarks. Similarly, grading is not mindless box-checking; it is how teachers measure students’ performance and oversee their academic development using their own professorial expertise. Both of these things are difficult and tedious, yet they are core to the instruction process.

Take rubric design, for example. Designing formal guidelines for every assignment is a long and tedious process, but rubrics done right aren’t an arbitrary way of assigning points based on the satisfaction of silly requirements. Rather, they, and by extension grades, measure how well students meet key learning benchmarks. Similarly, grading is not mindless box-checking; it is how teachers measure students’ performance and oversee their academic development using their own professorial expertise. Both of these things are difficult and tedious, yet they are core to the instruction process.

Education requires engagement by teachers, and unfortunately, many of them today don’t really want to engage with their students. That’s one reason to be skeptical about the educational benefits of AI.

© National Review