Education has become a system designed to issue credentials rather than create knowledge

According to an article in the Weekend Australian magazine, most university students use generative AI in some form. I guess this explains why chatbot usage plummets during the summer break and soars again when classes resume.  

And it’s not just students; lecturers are using chatbots to write papers, produce lecture notes and mark assignments. The result is a self-sustaining system. AI creates exam questions, writes student essays, grades them, and then uses feedback to improve its essays. (No wonder grades are inflating.) 

To combat cheating, professors have enlisted AI chatbots to identify students who use them, while students are becoming increasingly sophisticated at avoiding detection. They consult multiple chatbots, combining their output into something ‘original’.  They sprinkle their papers with grammatical and spelling errors to make their work appear more human. 

The monumental absurdity of this situation recalls a joke from the old Soviet Union. Workers described their economic system as simple: ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us’.  Paraphrased for our universities, the saying might go, ‘We pretend to teach, and students pretend to learn’. Degrees, essays, lectures, and PowerPoints provide the illusion of learning while AI does all the heavy lifting. 

To rescue higher education from total AI takeover, some nostalgic souls propose a return to handwritten examinations, pens and copy books.  

This might work for mathematics and other subjects where multiple-choice or short-answer exams can be used to assess mastery of the material. The humanities and arts, however, rely on long-form writing (essays, theses, and term papers) to assess understanding. They will find it impossible to revive handwritten examinations because university students can no longer write longhand.  

The Australian National Curriculum requires students to learn cursive writing, but schools ignore the requirement because handwriting isn’t tested in national assessments. As a result, most undergraduates can neither write nor read cursive. They have been cheated of a useful tool. A written exam would take days as students laboriously printed each letter like medieval monks illuminating a manuscript. 

Some teachers have already given up. They say AI should be ‘taught’ as a tool for the future, thereby turning plagiarism into pedagogy. We heard the same argument when calculators arrived, and now, few school-leavers can add or subtract unaided.

The deeper problem isn’t technology. It is education’s purpose. Education has become a process rather than a pursuit, a system designed to issue credentials rather than create knowledge. Students enrol for the ticket, not the transformation. 

Which raises an awkward question: if everyone is pretending, why not drop the act? Why hang around for three or four years when your assignments can be churned out by an algorithm in minutes? The traditional university model, built on the idea that a degree represents hard-earned knowledge, is turning into an expensive, time-wasting charade. 

When AI becomes ubiquitous, taking on the role of both teacher and student—setting assignments and marking papers—it will be possible to pass a course without learning anything at all. We will have reached the apex of credentialism.  

Universities could streamline the whole process by simply selling degrees outright: fast-tracked, fully automated, parchment optional. Platinum packages could guarantee high honours. Employers would have their useless certificates, and institutions could devote themselves to what they have learned to do best—property development. 

Unfortunately, civilisation depends on passing real knowledge from one generation to the next, not on generating plausible imitations of education. AI can synthesise information, but it can’t seek the truth. It can mimic understanding, but it can’t care. And when a society forgets the difference between learning and performance, between a mind and a computer algorithm, the result isn’t progress; it’s parody. 

Maybe, in a decade or two, we’ll look back and tell our own version of the Soviet joke. Until then, we’ll keep pretending. Students will pretend to learn, professors will pretend to teach, and administrators will pretend it all adds up to something called a university. 

The AI chatbots, at least, will be honest enough not to care. 

Steven Schwartz is the former vice chancellor of Murdoch, Macquarie and Brunel University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.