Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.
But that’s no more true than thinking that logging a count of reps is the goal of bodybuilding. The hard work of lifting weights is the point because that yields physical results. A popular analogy is that using an LLM to write your essay is like driving a forklift into the weight room. Weights get lifted, sure, but nothing is accomplished. I’m not hoping you can answer the exam question for me—I don’t need your essay to get me out of a jam. The process of doing the work was what you needed to walk away with something. //
“The friction matters, Sam!”
Green could just as well have been describing the process of learning. If there’s no friction, no effort, then no work occurred, and the student hasn’t learned. They would have been no less productive watching paint dry. //
A question like this is what we call “formative assessment.” I never graded the correctness of the answer, only the effort. The point was to find out if the core concept had really clicked or if that student still needed a little help making the connection. Failure is a useful part of learning when the stakes are low, as they are during the bulk of the class—encountering this question on the final exam would be an entirely different interaction.
What’s the point of building formative assessments into a course if they’re just handed off to an LLM? Suddenly, it’s a waste of time for both the student and the instructor. Small quizzes are excellent study tools to help students check their own understanding―if a student does them. Now, you can direct an “agentic” LLM browser to complete all the quizzes in an entire course with a single, frictionless prompt. //
It doesn’t seem like anyone wants to listen to instructors explain how bad it feels to try to do our job in the presence of this annihilative education antimatter. Instead, we’re offered AI grading tools to score AI-generated submissions for AI-generated assignments.
Perhaps critics like me just don’t understand the AI revolution (whatever that is), but we all have experience with human nature and the well-worn patterns of students. LLMs are a shortcut. Students often take shortcuts they later regret. We’ve all been there.
As an instructor, I want to build a clear path up the mountain for my students and see them reach the top. Instead, I increasingly feel like I’m just playing impossible defense to keep them from moving every direction but up. It’s exhausting, and I will mostly lose, which means I’m not even helping them. Students really do want to climb up there, but it’s always tempting to skip some mountains..
