01
The proxy collapsed
An essay or problem set gives an instructor something to assess, but it does not reveal every step that produced it. AI-assisted writing makes that distinction harder to ignore. I want an assignment to say which skill the artifact is supposed to demonstrate.
In the original essay, I described an exploratory coding of 71 responses to a public discussion about AI in coursework. Reading those responses shaped my concern about detection and enforcement. But this was one self-selected discussion, and my own categories included student or student-sympathetic voices. It cannot establish what faculty or institutions generally believe.
02
The same grammar as my research
A submitted essay is a benchmark output. A grade promotes that output to a claim about a person's capability. Promotion without adjudication — no provenance for how the artifact was produced, no named cognitive operation it was supposed to demonstrate, no verifier with contact to the real skill — is the same failure I catalogue in agent evaluation. A gameable verifier does not become trustworthy by being defended harder.
The redesigns I would want to test make the intended skill explicit and add opportunities to show the process: an oral defense, a derivation, or a discussion of revisions. Each introduces its own costs and measurement limits. I see a connection to evaluation research, not a single assessment method that works for everyone.
03
Going back anyway
The 2025 version of this note read like a verdict on school. It was a verdict on assessment. The parts of a university that AI cannot cheapen — a cohort, laboratories, structured depth, sustained access to people who know more than you — became more valuable, not less. So I enrolled: first year at XJTLU, beginning autumn 2026.
I want to use coursework to reach problems, laboratories, and people I would not otherwise encounter. I still want a record of what I can do beyond the credential. I don’t know how quickly institutions will redesign assessment, and my experience alone cannot answer that.
04
Still open
What I watch for is an institution willing to publish its verifiers: to state, per assignment, which cognitive operation it develops and how anyone would know it happened. A syllabus that can explain its own zeros would collapse the distance between education and evaluation entirely — which is where this notebook has been pointing all along.