How to Grade Student Work When AI Can Write It

Hey, welcome to another episode of AGI Schools Out, where we have been talking for two years now about preparing students for their future, not our past. And I've had a lot of really good guests. I've really started to think about AI and education in a different way. And there's not a guest I could think of that's a better person to talk about what the future of education really might look like if we leaned in than my friend, Mike Jones. Mike is... you got a great history. Why don't you just go ahead and tell everybody a little bit about yourself and then we'll dive in.

Sure, absolutely. I mean, I could go way too far back. But in short, I started becoming a computer-oriented thinker in high school back in the 90s. And I remember graduating from high school, installing the first email server for a small business and thinking, wow, this email thing is going to change the world. And now here we are standing on, you know, this incredible idea that is artificial intelligence. And After the last 15 years that I spent at the intersection of learning and technology at a higher ed institution, I came to understand that the way that we measure learning in our current environments is, I wouldn't say it's broken because that would be too inflammatory of a term, but I would say that it's becoming antiquated and We have answers in higher education for the way that we assess student learning, but we've gotten away from it because we've become way too dependent upon the artifact, and AI can deliver artifacts. And so that's kind of my angle on this. It's like, how do we do that? How do we do backwards design from AI? the way that we are accredited all the way through the way we assess work and what's that look like. So I'm working on writing a book chapter on that right now. We'll talk a little bit about that today. But Jason, you said something not long ago that really struck a chord with me. And we tend to compartmentalize AI too much, not just in higher ed. We were talking earlier this morning about AI for just life and AI for business and how sometimes it's hard. If we have a business mindset, we think AI needs to improve our ROI and we don't bridge the gap between how it could improve life in general. And so I think the same thing's happening in learning. We've got administrators and faculty arguing whether or not we should have LLMs allowed inside the school environment. Or maybe not even just allowed for faculty and staff, let alone for students. But then we've got students creating agentic workflows. And so there's this huge break. And faculty shouldn't have to be police officers. And we see it in the stats that the policing, the police state of AI in education is broken. It's just not reliable. So where does that leave us? Bringing me back to what you were talking about, Jason, that piqued my interest, and that is AI needs to be foundationally across liberal arts. not just in computer science. So I'm looking forward to you expounding on that to the audience here too.

Well, and I look forward to it as well. I do have a new podcast called AI and the Humans in the Loop because you've since left education and started your own business. So you and your