WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY....


THE DEGREE THAT MEANS NOTHING


Comment by Dr ALAN FINKEL AC, Founder and Executive Chair of Proudly Human, former Chief Scientist of Australia and former Chancellor at Monash University.


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any years ago, as information became freely available on the internet but before the average person had heard of AI, there was a push to shift from teaching knowledge to teaching students how to think. As if there were a trade-off. The fact that the imagined trade-off was, and is, an illusion with damaging consequences was made clear by a former Vice-Chancellor friend of mine, Steven Schwartz, who wisely asked, “What’s the point of teaching students critical thinking if they don’t know anything to think about?”


Professor Schwartz’s question was a call-out to educators to preserve their role in teaching facts. The reality is that intelligence is linked to internalised knowledge. It is hard to be a critical thinker if you constantly turn to your smartphone for the facts you require to underpin your logic. To the contrary, we need instant access to internalized knowledge on which to build IQ on which to build critical thinking skills. Many students nowadays are outsourcing both the content and the thinking to AI, and institutions are mostly looking the other way. This is ironic because the students who outsource their learning to AI will be the losers who fail to develop the core knowledge and skills they will ultimately need to compete for the human-in-the-loop jobs that will be in demand. The winners will have deep domain knowledge and critical thinking skills. Steven Schwartz’s provocation will be even more relevant in the future than when I first heard it.


The harm when students use AI to write their assignments is not confined to their own loss of agency. It also affects the tutors and professors who are expected to mark student essays knowing that what they are looking at was generated by an AI. This is demotivating for the academic, who then becomes tempted to use AI for the marking. That spiral of abrogation of responsibility on both sides is capable of destroying university education from within.


This spiralling problem is not confined to online courses. Even sandstone universities and in-person courses are being impacted. In April, following an internal review, Stanford University felt it had no choice but to replace its 100-year-old honour system and bring back proctored exams and timed assessments. The significant use by students of AI to generate answers to assignments is a concern to academics and university executives. The most robust solution is expensive and old fashioned. That is, return to in person, supervised assessment. That does not mean that 100% of the end-of- unit mark will come from a three-hour exam handwritten into an exercise book, although such exams could be a part of it. Other robust assessments include evidence of clinical competence for nurses and doctors, performance in laboratory experiments for engineers and scientists, performance in tutorials, oral defences of essays and theses, and in-person supervised essays throughout the unit.


The solution does not need to be at the whole-of-unit level if the assessment takes a whole-of-course approach. The key thing is that an agreed majority of the final mark be assessed through AI-free approaches, referred to by some educators as ‘lane one’ assessment. The smaller fraction, known as ‘lane two’, can openly encourage appropriate use of AI by the students, furthering their ability to productively use AI tools. That’s not quite enough. The lane-one assessment must be a hurdle. Fail that, and you fail the unit. Pass it, and your final mark will be the sum of the lane-one and the lane-two assessments.


There is no more essential teaching responsibility for a university than to ensure the learning outcome. That requires an investment in teaching and assessment. How that is done is up to each university. What is clear, though, is that it cannot be outsourced to AI. If it is, that will be the start of the end of universities as institutions of higher learning. School leavers


28 www.education-today.co.uk July/August 2026


will choose cheaper, faster, employment pathways. On the surface of it, there should not be a concern about assessment because national university regulators already require that learning outcomes be met. The failure to assure those outcomes is because the regulators have no ongoing process to evaluate that every degree, every year, meets an acceptable threshold.


The problem for universities that do invest the leadership, money, academic expertise, integrity, and commitment to ensure the learning outcomes is that other than by reputation, the degree they grant cannot be distinguished from a degree that fails to ensure the learning outcome. And reputation has its limits; it only works when employers know the university.


What is needed is an audit process and an internationally recognised certification mark. The starting place is agreed standards. Should, for example, there be agreement that 70% of the final mark be from lane-one assured assessment and that it be a hurdle? That is what I propose, with room for negotiation on the exact percentage.


In a financial audit, how the company meets the standards is largely up to the company. It can name and structure its accounts to align with its business needs. It can use general-purpose spreadsheets or highly sophisticated specialist programs to manage its accounts and procedures. What brings comfort to the investors and assurance to the regulator is that an independent auditor reviews the company’s accounts and procedures and issues an audit report that is presented to the board and the shareholders. For a stock exchange listed company, it is publicly published. Like in a financial audit, how a university meets the standards is up to the university. There is no single, right way to teach. There is no single, right way to assess. What would bring comfort to parents and future employers would be for an independent auditor to evaluate the university’s teaching and assessment programs every year to determine whether the learning outcomes were achieved, that the agreed percentage of the final mark was from lane-one assured assessment and that the lane-one assured assessment was a hurdle.


An assured-assessment certification mark would tell employers, parents and students that the degree came from a university whose teaching and assessments ensured the desired learning outcomes for every graduate. Such a certification-mark program would visibly and materially contribute to the enduring quality of university education and respond meaningfully to the provocation from Professor Schwartz.


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