Rattled and exhausted by academic cheating, college faculty are answering AI with retreat: a return to blue books, pencil exams, and proctored writing in class.
The archaic response doesn’t defend academic standards but self-incriminates: It tells students their education is built for the 1700s instead of the 21st century.
Here’s the hard truth: If AI can reasonably complete your exam, discussion post, or weekly reflection, your questions and assignments—not your students—are the problem. Too many of our assessments still reward recall, formulaic writing, and performance. This encourages reenactment rather than comprehension.
Fighting AI misses the point. As educators, we must incorporate AI as a revolutionary curricular tool that helps us expect more from students.
We need to challenge them with complex questions, empower them to leverage AI, and integrate the technology to strengthen distinctly human work: creativity, analysis, reasoning, and judgment.
In practice, this means replacing recall-focused assignments with work that makes process, evidence, and decision-making visible. It means recognizing that conventional approaches never demanded that much thinking.
And if we’re honest, we’ll see that much of what we call cheating is simply students’ employing a powerful new mechanism to fulfill rote exercises.
It won’t be enough to bolt on AI as an extra in status-quo programming. As a capability embedded in the knowledge economy and daily expectations in the workplace, AI is upending paradigms across society.
Higher education has an ethical obligation to redesign its practices holistically and match the quickening pace of change.
Ongoing AI literacy
At San Francisco Bay University, we overhauled our general education curriculum with AI assignments and round-the-clock resources in every class. Each course now includes structured experiences in responsible and effective AI use, all tied into concrete learning outcomes.
Because we’re a startup, we didn’t have to retrofit decades-old academics or negotiate with legacy systems. Our proximity to Silicon Valley helped, too.
Change moves more glacially for traditional colleges and universities, but that doesn’t mean they can sidestep evolution. It simply changes the playbook for reinvention.
Targeting three prime areas can jump-start strategic progress on traditional campuses while honoring longer-term processes involved in more comprehensive cultural shifts.
General education is the first key. Updating classes in this category should center outcomes on AI fluency, ethical reason, human-centered problem-solving, and evidence-based critiques.
Coursework should involve AI assignments in every general-education class, reflective disclosure, and discipline-specific standards.
Next, use the accreditation cycle to create enthusiasm for change within the institution. Accreditation already demands evidence of student learning, continuous improvement, and alignment between mission and outcomes.
Accreditation can be an opening to formalize AI governance internally, and show faculty, staff, and students how AI modernizes learning.
New programs are another valuable avenue for AI expansion. Bake AI into the program design from the outset, giving it a place in assessment plans, internship expectations, faculty development, and beyond.
Treat AI literacy like you treat writing across the curriculum: not one course but an ever-present thread.
College AI isn’t the enemy
Emerging as an AI-first institution demands recognition that AI literacy is a core educational responsibility, then building systems to deliver it.
Faculty, too, must be AI-conversant and understand the flaws in cheating-detection tools. Their AI training should be mandatory and come with the time and support they need to reimagine learning practices.
Faculty innovations in AI pedagogy should win the same institutional recognition afforded to research.
None of this is easy, but the rewards over the long term will sharpen the role of the professor. As AI becomes a first-class instructional presence, AI-powered faculty avatars will take center stage.
AI instructors will know far more than the most knowledgeable human professor, and be trained to be the best version of the best professor anyone has ever had.
They will grade without bias, provide immediate and customized feedback, and tailor their methods in real time to match each student.
So what exactly will the future hold for human professors? Plenty.
They will do what they do best: guide students through ambiguity, mentor identity and purpose, encourage perseverance, and counsel through setbacks. They will solve problems, model intellectual virtues, and help students translate learning into lives and careers.
AI isn’t the enemy. It won’t eliminate us. But it will expose the difference between information delivery and education, freeing faculty to do more of the work that makes the most difference in students’ lives.
