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Lucas Willard: This is WAMC’s Northeast Notebook. I’m Lucas Willard. Artificial intelligence has become part of everyday lives. We ask it for advice, use it to plan our days, and use it to craft our emails. But when we talk about education, there’s worry about students using it to cheat on assignments or avoid doing meaningful work.
So, some educators are actually turning away from AI and requiring students to show their understanding of subject material in other ways. On today’s show, we’ll learn how teachers and students are using – or not using – artificial intelligence.
On a sunny, September afternoon, students at the University at Albany are crisscrossing the campus between classes. But, seemingly, with every new academic year, comes advancements in AI. WAMC quizzed students about how they use the technology – and, perhaps more illuminating, how they see others using artificial intelligence.
Nia Solomon: God, I seen this girl one time. Not to put her business out there, but she was in class, and she was just screenshotting the homework and then using AI to answer it for her. So I'm like, hmm..
Jasmine Washburn: Some of my friends will straight up generate an entire essay with AI, and maybe just tweak it and they'll run it through like an AI thing to see how much percentage it's AI, and try to, like, make it sound human as possible.
Jernise Joseph: I would rather use it as a study tool rather than use it as a place where I could, just like, “Hey, do my work for me.”
Lucas Willard: That was senior biology major Nia Solomon, Jasmine Washburn, a junior studying psychology and English, and Jernise Joseph, a junior studying computer science. The students had a lot to say – about how they use AI to study, how they think others might be using it to cheat – and how some teachers are trying to move away from the pervasive tech.
Hailey Valle: Hoo! I try not to use it. I try not use it. I went for like a month without using it….
Lucas Willard: Hailey Valle is a senior studying human biology and psychology.
Hailey Valle: I feel like more assignments I've noticed are handwritten, especially like prelabs and stuff. It's not all on the computer, because when I first got here, I feel like everything was on the computer. But now it's like more handwritten. Handwritten stuff's coming back.
Lucas Willard: In addition to handwritten assignments, another seemingly pre-historic method of testing is also returning. The oral exam.
Beth McMurtrie: It forces students to really think more deeply about the subject matter.
Lucas Willard: Beth McMurtrie wrote about the return of the oral exam for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Beth McMurtrie: Because, as you know, having to explain something to somebody is kind of hard. You really have to internalize information. You have to process things at a higher level, and to do that in an oral format is a little bit tougher than a written exam.
Lucas Willard: I'm just having flashbacks to high school right now, talking about blue books and oral exams, I mean, when you're doing this research, do you did you think back to your own days in college and say, well, you know, I used to do that, and it was terrifying.
Beth McMurtrie: You know, one of my favorite courses in college was one where we had to do a debate and a presentation. And what I remember about that is it was completely terrifying ahead of time, but it was so invigorating in the moment because it's real and it's in person, and you have to rise to the challenge. And when I talked to some of these professors and some students, I talked to some students. They actually said the same thing: like something can be intimidating and exhilarating at the same time. And the students I talked to said, you know, they actually really liked being in the room one-on-one with the professor, talking about what they knew, working through what they knew. I will say that the professors I talked to didn't treat oral exams as an inquisition, and I think that's an important distinction. I mean, maybe there are points at which, say, if you're defending a PhD dissertation, they're going to throw the hardest questions at you because you just spent years and years working on something, and you now declare yourself to be an expert. This is really more like, okay, I want to get at what you know and how you think about something. I want to see where the gaps are in your knowledge, if there are any…
Lucas Willard: Scott Storm is a literacy professor at UAlbany’s School of Education. Before he taught in Albany, Scott taught high school in New York City and at the college level at Bowdoin College in Maine. During his year at Bowdoin, from 2023 to 2024, Scott brought back the oral exam.
Lucas to Scott: Were they really nervous?
Scott Storm: Yes, everyone was very nervous. I made sure to have donuts for everyone, so it really helped, and like some tea and stuff like that.
Lucas Willard: But in addition to bringing back old-school teaching methods, Scott is not totally down on AI.
Scott Storm: One of the things that my teachers that I've been working with have really been seeing is that there are some really fun and exciting ways to use AI that allows students to like have their own voice and do things that they wouldn't been able to do otherwise. But you also have to be very careful because, since AI is really based on a lot of times these large language models that really are predictive in a way that they figure out what's the next thing that the culture is typically going to say, they sometimes fall into reinforcing stereotypes and different things like that, that we don't want to reinforce, right? And so, really thinking about how to trick the AI is part of that kind of critical literacy.
Lucas Willard: How do you trick the AI?
Scott Storm: Yeah, so sometimes you just ask it to do something different. For example, the really popular example that people give is: you might have heard of that old school riddle that falls into some sexist ideas about who can be a doctor or not. So, the way the riddle works is that there's a kid in a car crash and the father dies and the kids rush to the hospital and the doctor there says I can't operate on this person because they're my son. And of course, it's his mother, right? It’s a riddle because people fall into the misogynist tropes, right? If you ask the AI that same riddle, but you switch the genders, it has a lot of trouble dealing with that particular thing because it looks at the culture, and from the culture we have this riddle many hundreds and perhaps 1000s of times, and so you have to tell the AI like, don't kind of reinforce the tropes, right? Don't reinforce the stereotypes, but instead avoid these kinds of things, right? And so that's part of what we're teaching students to do when they're thinking about responsible and ethical uses of AI.
Lucas Willard: But Scott wants to take it further than just tricking an AI with riddles. He wants to ask a chatbot what it can – and cannot – currently do, and, accordingly, give students new kinds of assignments. As he puts it, think beyond the five-paragraph essay.
Scott Storm: And really thinking about how do you do your own independent research? How do you have interviews that you then are going to want to actually analyze, and that the AI can't exactly come up with because it doesn't have that kind of data.
Lucas to Scott: This is a new form of media literacy.
Scott Storm: Absolutely, yes.
Lucas Willard: And for many teachers, reducing or preventing a student's dependence on AI can help students develop their communication skills.
Beth McMurtrie: How many times are you going to go into the workplace and your boss is going to say, "I need a five-page report by Friday, and we're not going to talk about it. You're just going to write it and give it to me. No, they're going to say something like, "Go ahead and, you know, research this subject or figure out how to solve this problem, and then come and tell us what we need to know, right? So these communication skills, which we've heard Gen Z is lacking because of the amount of screen time they have, and again, the amount of time they're attached to their phones rather than out in community. This also helps prepare them for a world that really needs those kinds of skills.
Lucas Willard: In her reporting on AI in education, Beth McMurtrie spoke with David Deming, the dean of Harvard College. And as Beth explains, Deming put out a call for educators to think about the value of education now that AI exists.
Beth McMurtrie: Higher education no longer has a monopoly on expertise. So instead of leaning into "we will make you an expert in this,” he's like, "Let's think about college as a communal experience,” which goes back to the kind of whole oral exam idea, right? Like you are paying to do very hard things in a community of like-minded individuals. So, let's lean into that. Let's lean into the communal aspect of undergraduate education. Let's have students work hard, but work hard together. He made a good point that, you know, nobody buys textbooks and reads them on their own because learning is a struggle. But it is a hard sell to say, "Hey, come here and do really hard things and struggle.” But if you struggle in community, that sounds a little bit more appealing.
Lucas Willard: This episode of Northeast Notebook was produced by me, Lucas Willard. Thanks to our editor Diane DeVore. Music by Eduardo Rivera. You can listen to this show anytime as a podcast wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
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