University students have taken to artificial intelligence in the same way that an anxious new driver with a crumpled road map might take to satnav — that is to say, hungrily and understandably.
A survey of UK undergraduates by the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank shows 92 per cent of them are using generative AI in some form this year compared with 66 per cent last year, while 88 per cent have used it in assessments, up from 53 per cent last year.
What should universities do? My instinct would be to lean in. Tell your students you will be giving the same essay question to a tool such as ChatGPT. They will be marked on how much better their version is than the machine’s: how much more original, creative, perceptive or accurate. Or give them the AI version and tell them to improve upon it, as well as to identify and correct its hallucinations.