Artificial intelligence is here to stay. Faculty members explain how to keep students engaged in their own learning and prevent them from relying on AI.
December 16, 2025
Full article available on Inside Higher Ed. Excerpts below.
Experts agree that instructors must remind their students that learning requires practice.
… Initial conversations around AI and assessments focused on cheating detection and enforcement, and—led by GPTZero—technology companies flooded the market with programs promising to detect whether a piece of writing is AI-generated. But experts agree that it’s impossible to be completely certain whether a student used AI—the technology is just too good. Instead, instructors should focus on re-engaging students, using class time well and introducing a variety of assessment types.
… One assignment he’s used is recorded journals, which require students to regularly record and upload five-minute videos of themselves talking about what they’ve learned in class, how it connects to their past experiences and how they might use it in the future. He has also asked his instructional design students to record interviews with professionals, listen to each other’s recordings and reflect on those conversations.
Oral assessments—either stand-alone or accompanying an essay—are also becoming more popular. The ancient assessment asks students to sit before their professor and talk about what they’ve learned, answer questions in-person or explain their writing process. Students are evaluated in real-time, making it difficult, if not currently impossible, to use artificial intelligence to cheat.
… One type of assessment remains largely AI-resistant: hands-on projects, said Leon Furze, a Ph.D. candidate studying generative AI at Deakin University in Australia and author of the book Practical AI Strategies. Artificial intelligence has yet to be very helpful in the physical world.
… Carlo Rotella, a professor of American studies, English and journalism at Boston College and author of the book What Can I Get Out of This? purposefully does not ban students from using AI. It’s not a policy he could fairly enforce, he said, because he recognizes that some students may be submitting AI-completed assignments undetected. “I explain to my students why it’s a waste of their time and mine. I explain that they’re paying $5 a minute for classes at Boston College, and to spend that time practicing to be replaceable by AI is a complete waste of their money and time, and my time.”
Rotella is especially focused on what happens in the classroom.
“The 2,000 minutes we spend together in class is the main event,” Rotella said. “If you’re going to make that the main event, then you build the structure of the class around that. That means, in my case … I expect everyone to speak up at every class meeting.”
He does not allow devices in class; students must bring hard copies of the reading. Much of the content students are tested on comes from in-class discussions, something an AI assistant who wasn’t present wouldn’t know anything about. He’ll occasionally give a quiz—an idea he learned from University of California, Berkeley, English professor Scott Saul—that asks students to recall small, memorable details that an AI-generated summary of a book would not include.
… “The entire point of this class is the labor, so a labor-saving device would be beside the point,” Rotella said. “It’s like joining the track team and doing your laps on an electric scooter. You went around the track. Congratulations.”