The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last couple of years has generated a controversy in the world of academia. While a large segment has hailed its promising benefits to the educational process, some others have warned against its potential threat to human intelligence and agency.
The major misgivings of the latter camp revolve around the looming spectre of plagiarism and its resultant low IQ syndrome.
Indeed, reports from various American research centres reflect an incredibly rising tendency among students to use AI generative tools to complete their assignments and answer at-home tests and quizzes.
A 2023 survey carried out by Study.com, for instance, revealed that more than ‘89 per cent of students used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment, 48pc of [whom] admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz, and 53pc had it write an essay’.
The role of the educational system in this regard remains ambivalent. While most academic institutions in the US have initially scrambled to introduce the new technology into their campuses, apparently with no clear foresight of its inherent downside, those same institutions, troubled by the widespread misuse of AI tools, are now caught in a stampede to fight back with advanced detection software, ironically turning students into guinea pigs in the AI laboratory.
Obviously thus, what was initially promoted as a helping tool for data collection, brainstorming, and proofreading has inadvertently developed into full-scale machine learning.
Alarm bells about such a conundrum have recently been set ringing by a growing minority of American educators whose major concern now lies in the increasing difficulty they face in objectively grading students’ work, much of which is AI-generated. Such a dilemma has made it incumbent upon those educators to reassert their authority as the sole guardians of quality education by unleashing a backlash against AI in the form of ‘the blue book revival’.
A blue book is a stapled booklet made up of blank lined pages on which students put their answers to exam questions. It is worth noting that blue books had been common across the US before the Covid-19 pandemic when most universities converted to online teaching and machine-operated assessments. Such an old method is currently witnessing a widespread reawakening across the country, manifesting itself in a booming demand for the reprinting of blue books.
It is reported that blue book sales have soared 30pc at Texas A&M, almost 50pc at the University of Florida, and a roaring 80pc at the University of California Berkeley in just two years.
Thus, in light of the absence of clear institutional policies regulating the use of AI in education, on the one hand, and the frustrating difficulty in detecting AI-assisted plagiarism, on the other, college and university professors have found it essential to go back to the olden days when students submitted handwritten tasks in classroom settings, under close supervision from the tutors.
Not only are students now forced to articulate their thoughts in pen and paper, but they are also required to perform oral presentations to make sure they are not simply scribbling memorised chunks when answering essay questions.
Initially, students frowned upon the return to old assessment procedures, but, over time, such a format started to gain traction among a large swath of them, realising its benefits, most notably personal engagement, critical thinking, self-reliance, self-gratification, and better memorisation.
Elyes Hanafi,
PhD in American Studies
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