AI didn't break college - it exposed a broken system, a professor says

"When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched. In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn't a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis. For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants."

""Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do - and often do it better," Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. "When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn't the students. The problem is the assignment. The death of the take-home essay In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is obsolete because it tests exactly what AI now excels at - research, understanding context, and constructing and developing an argument."

""AI can now do all that," he said. As a result, he said he has moved away from essays done outside class and toward forms of assessment that demonstrate visible learning, including in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions. There should be "no outside of class graded assignments. Assessment will be based exclusively on activities that can be observed in person," he said."

Review of 400 student essays revealed identical sentences, structure, and conclusions, signaling that assignments elicit formulaic outputs rather than original thinking. Mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading have produced an industrialized model of education that dehumanizes learning and overburdens teaching assistants. Machine intelligence now accomplishes research, contextual understanding, and argument construction, rendering take-home essays obsolete. Assessment should shift toward visible, in-person demonstrations of learning: in-class writing, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions. Rote learning and repetitive tasks should be automated so human instructors can prioritize critical thinking, mentorship, and individualized feedback.

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