Professors fear students are outsourcing critical thinking to AI. Here are 5 ways they can fight back, a researcher says. (www.businessinsider.com)

South African education researcher Anitia Lubbe warns that the bigger threat of generative AI on campus isn’t just cheating but a misaligned education system: universities keep testing memorization and rote tasks—exactly what tools like ChatGPT do best—while neglecting the critical-thinking skills AI cannot replicate. In an essay for The Conversation she outlines five concrete educator strategies: teach students to evaluate AI output (spotting inaccuracies, bias, or shallow reasoning); scaffold assignments to progress from comprehension to analysis and original creation; require ethical, transparent disclosure of AI use; use peer review of AI-assisted drafts to restore dialogue; and grade reflection and documented process, not only final results. The recommendations matter because they shift the response from policing to pedagogy: instead of banning AI, programs should build competencies in critique, judgment, and ethical reasoning so graduates can both use and scrutinize AI. Lubbe’s prescription echoes wider academic alarm that unfettered AI use risks hollowing out cognitive development and creating workers who mimic machine behavior rather than complement it. Practically, this implies redesigning assessments, incorporating AI-literacy tasks, and changing grading rubrics to reward comparison with—and critique of—machine-generated reasoning.