There’s a particular kind of frustration that shows up when assessment turns into something else entirely. What’s the point of building formative assessments into a course if they’re just handed off to an LLM? Suddenly, it’s a waste of time for both the student and the instructor.
Small quizzes used to be a pretty solid study tool—helping students check their own understanding, not just chase grades. But now, you can point an “agentic” LLM browser at an entire course’s worth of quizzes and get them completed with a single, frictionless prompt. It’s hard to explain that away with “students should just try harder,” because the system doesn’t need effort anymore.
The immediate question hanging over classrooms—online and offline—is blunt: should instructors preserve these assignments for students who want the learning benefits, even if it means accepting cheating? Or should they remove the opportunity altogether, just to prevent misuse? Those two choices sound like they’re about fairness, but they’re also about whether pedagogy is allowed to exist when technology makes compliance optional.
Misryoum newsroom reported that many instructors are trying to adapt to this crisis by leaning on evaluation tools that are comparatively LLM-proof. Think oral exams, or handwritten work created under supervision in the classroom. None of these options are straightforward for asynchronous online classes, though. And that matters, because those classes serve students who need them—people with physical disabilities, students in rural areas far from a campus, students juggling full-time jobs or caring for dependents. If online classes get squeezed out because assessments become too risky, those students are the casualties, not the cheaters.
Even for in-person courses, the “fixes” often come with tradeoffs that reduce pedagogical quality. Labor-intensive oral exams didn’t exactly become endangered species just because class sizes are getting larger. Meanwhile, pen-and-paper exams—done under supervision, on keyboard and mouse too—make it easier to keep each student’s experience consistent and to reduce some scoring bias. That’s helpful, sure. But you can feel what gets lost in the shift: less flexibility, less opportunity for ongoing feedback, and sometimes a narrower view of what counts as learning.
Writing assignments, especially, have been pushed onto the chopping block first. I remember a natural disasters class where students were asked to write a plot for a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie—using both accurate and implausible physical processes. It was good practice for writing, they said it was enjoyable, and it forced them to apply what they’d learned in a way that wasn’t just regurgitation. Somewhere along the way, though, that kind of creativity stopped being “safely assessable.” And then the only things left that seem reliably robust are the ones that can be performed under watch, with less room for the messy, human kind of thinking.
In the classroom, there’s always been a tension between assessment and learning. Right now it’s just… louder. Someone in a lab last semester kept tapping a pen against the desk—tap, tap—right as the instructions came up on their screen, like a small countdown to something they couldn’t fully control. That’s what it feels like now: teaching in a time when the shortcut is faster than understanding, and the safeguards are never free. Misryoum editorial desk notes the pain isn’t just about cheating itself; it’s about what educators are forced to give up while trying to protect the idea that assignments are supposed to teach.
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