We must embrace new technology that challenges assumptions about higher education

Recently launched Open AI chatbot ChatGPT can rapidly assimilate materials from across the internet and produce written pieces that, according to various academics, “would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate”.

We believe that this is excellent news for the future of higher education and not, as many have suggested, an indication that professors could all be out of a job in just a few years.

As society has come to understand knowledge as a product and a qualification as a commodity to be bought and sold, so higher education has increasingly situated itself as a market which offers training and credentials. The value proposition is entirely in the certificate rather than in the process of learning.

Increasingly, this status quo has had to be shored up with surveillance technology to protect the legitimacy of the product. Students are monitored by machinery as they write their exams and software programs check that their words are their own.

The successful student is the one who “cracks the code” and can produce evidence of engagement with the material in the language and format deemed valuable in the academy. The student who masters this skill is then deemed to be educated.  

But now a computer can do all of this in a matter of seconds. This should stop us in our tracks.

We must ask two questions — what is higher education actually for? And how might we meaningfully assess its attainment?  

There are multiple understandings of what a university education is. Institutions can offer workplace training, though quite frankly workplaces are far better positioned to undertake such activities. We can also teach young people to draw on multiple texts in response to assessment tasks, though it increasingly seems that machines can do this just as well.