Ako Tavershima, Tekedia ; Chegg Officially Wiped Out By AI
"The story of Chegg began in 2006 when they found a loophole in the study pattern of students and profitable business to exploit. Chegg began providing students with answers to their assignment problems and also questions and answers to known exam and quiz solutions...
The story of Chegg is not a one-off situation, it is the bubble effect of the impact of AI on learning and education."
Cory Turner, NPR ; Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out
"Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable.
The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass "legislation" to help the nation's K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.
Should students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Is it schools' job to teach the nation's children what AI is and how to use it? There is no national policy for AI use in schools, meaning states and school districts have had to scramble to craft their own...
Ultimately, their Students First Act passed overwhelmingly, 82-16.
Among the bill's requirements: States should provide AI literacy as soon as students get access to classroom devices; AI use should be banned on all graded tests; and teachers can require an oral defense of any project from a student suspected of using AI inappropriately. (You can read the full bill at the end of this article.)"
Maya Yang, The New York Times ; New York school district halts plan to use humanoid robot amid backlash
"A New York school district has walked back plans to introduce a humanoid robot at its high school after the proposal sparked backlash from educators and community members.
The Salamanca City Central school district announced on 24 July in a social media post that its pilot project with Toronto-based tech company Realbotix had been put on hold “while we work through enhanced student data privacy agreements with the New York State Education Department and continue engaging with our community and stakeholders”."
Douglas Soule, WUSF; What comes after book bans? One school district questions traditional libraries
"After removing hundreds of books, Clay County is debating the purpose of high school libraries. School officials called it modernization. Critics see it as the next phase of the book debate targeting fiction books."
The Economist; Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers
"Ten years ago, as the ai revolution was gathering pace, arts and humanities students were told that, if they wanted to make themselves employable, they should “learn to code”. That may have been bad advice. These days, it is programmers who are nervous about ai taking their jobs."
JULIANNE HILL, ABA Journal; Artificial intelligence can be used for grading law school exams, but should it be?
"Artificial intelligence is being put to the test, literally, as it is being used to grade law students’ exams. But should it be?...
Just as many universities require students to disclose whether they’re using an AI to write a paper, Schwarcz adds, professors have to disclose their use.
“The power dynamic is such that, what is a student supposed to do, right?” Schwarcz says.
Daniel W. Linna Jr., a senior lecturer and the director of law and technology initiatives at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Illinois, disagrees."
Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post; Harvard faculty vote to limit A grades for undergraduates
In a closely watched vote, the faculty took strong action to combat grade inflation
"Harvard faculty voted to cap the number of A grades given to undergraduates at about 20 percent per class, taking assertive action to reverse years of grade inflation at a time of intense scrutiny of higher education.
The vote, reported Wednesday, is the most prominent symbol of a reckoning at some elite schools concerned by the increasing number of A’s — a widespread issue that some faculty members warn is fundamentally damaging the integrity of education."
Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Niko Gallogly, Brian O’Keefe and , The New York Times; The Villain of This Year’s Commencement Speeches: A.I.
College students have interrupted graduation ceremonies to voice their fears about artificial intelligence. They’re not the only ones who are worried.
"Andrew here. If you want to understand the deep fear that artificial intelligence is creating in much of the nation, look no further than the reaction to Eric Schmidt’s commencement address. The former Google C.E.O. spoke the truth about the technology, but it did not go over well with graduates who are anxious about their future. We’ve got more below."
Sara Prieto , Illinois State University News; Building intellectual property awareness across disciplines at Illinois State University
[Kip Currier: It's impressive to see how diverse fields at Illinois State University -- Family and Consumer Sciences, Information Technology, Management, etc. -- are imbuing students with practical knowledge about creating, protecting, and using IP.]
"Understanding how to protect original work is becoming an essential part of the student experience. At Illinois State University, a second faculty cohort expanded the integration of intellectual property (IP) into course work during the 2025-26 academic year...
Across disciplines, students learned to treat their work as something that can be developed, protected, and applied beyond the classroom. The program positions intellectual property as a practical skill, especially as tools like AI make it easier to create and share content while raising new questions about ownership."
Qasim Nauman, The New York Times; Maker of Canvas Learning Platform Strikes Deal for Hackers to Return Data
[Kip Currier: How confident are you that the stolen data and personal information from more than 275 million students and teachers at more than 9,000 colleges and universities around the world has been returned and that copies of that data have been destroyed?]
"The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft."
Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic ; How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition
The school’s famous Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating.
"Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse."
SCOTT K. JOHNSON , Ars Technica; To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain
"Let me explain why students are the ones losing the most in this environment and why instructors like me feel pretty much powerless to fix the problem.
Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.
But that’s no more true than thinking that logging a count of reps is the goal of bodybuilding. The hard work of lifting weights is the point because that yields physical results. A popular analogy is that using an LLM to write your essay is like driving a forklift into the weight room. Weights get lifted, sure, but nothing is accomplished. I’m not hoping you can answer the exam question for me—I don’t need your essay to get me out of a jam. The process of doing the work was what you needed to walk away with something.
In a recent video about how easy Sora has made it for users to generate relatively realistic but deeply problematic videos, Hank Green rubbed his eyes as he shouted in the figurative direction of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “The friction matters, Sam!”...
I’m not alone in feeling exasperated by this predicament. A survey of about 3,000 college faculty showed that 85 percent felt LLMs “make students less likely to develop critical thinking abilities,” and 72 percent reported challenges managing LLM use.
Predictably, the response from higher education administrators―who are busy signing contracts for institutional LLM subscriptions to show how future-first their thought leadership is―has been to tell instructors that their job is to teach students “how to use AI effectively.”...
A few months ago, I overheard some college students talking about their classes. One was complaining about an assignment they needed to do that night, and another incredulously asked why they wouldn’t just have ChatGPT do it. The first replied, “This is my major, I actually need to learn stuff in this class. I use AI for my other classes.”"
Associated Press via The Guardian; Iowa can restrict LGBTQ+ books and topics at schools, appellate court rules
Ruling, vacating lower court’s temporary block, applies to classrooms and libraries up to sixth grade
"Iowa can enforce a law that restricts teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ topics with students in kindergarten through the sixth grade and bans some books in libraries and classrooms, an appellate court said on Monday.
The decision for now vacates a lower court judge’s temporary blocks on the law.
The measure was first approved by Republican majorities in the Iowa house and senate and the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, in 2023, which they said reinforced age-appropriate education in kindergarten through 12th grades. It has been a back-and-forth battle in the courts in the three years since lawsuits were filed by the Iowa State Education Association, major publishing houses and bestselling authors, as well as Iowa Safe Schools, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization."
Atmika Iyer, The Modesto Bee, Calif. via GovTech; Napa Valley Schools Emphasize Honesty, Ethics in AI Policy
"10 principles for AI use in Napa schools
Rana Rastegari , WHYY; Epstein files show Haverford donor Howard Lutnick stayed in touch after claiming he cut ties, sparking calls to rename library
Students are calling for Lutnick Library to be renamed after documents revealed the U.S. commerce secretary maintained contact with Jeffrey Epstein years after his conviction.
"Students at Haverford College are calling on the school to rename its library and sever ties with one of its biggest donors after newly released Epstein files revealed continued contact between U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Lutnick’s contributions to the college amount to $65 million. The largest gift was a $25 million donation in 2014 to renovate the campus library, which now bears his name.
Lutnick, a Haverford alumnus, had claimed to have cut ties with Epstein in 2005. However, documents released Jan. 30 confirm that the pair continued to communicate after 2008, when Epstein was convicted of soliciting sexual acts from a minor. In a U.S. Senate hearing in February, Lutnick testified that he had visited Epstein’s private island in 2012 with his wife and children. In February, a previously redacted image from the files was recovered, which shows Epstein, Lutnick and three other men on the island together."
Alice Speri , The Guardian; ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
"As pushback grows, so does an emphasis on those intrinsically human qualities that differentiate people from machines – the very qualities a humanistic education seeks to nurture.
“There’s kind of defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology and resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path,” said Clune, the Ohio State professor. “That needs to change … We can decide that we want to be human.”
That idea has also been key to Pao’s approach to teaching in the age of AI.
“You plant seeds and you hope,” Pao said, of efforts that at times feel like fighting windmills. “You hope that in the long term you’re helping them become happy human beings, who are able to take a walk, and experience things, and describe things for themselves.”"
Clifford H. Taubes, The Harvard Crimson; The Unpleasant Ethics of Capping Grades
"I am adamantly opposed to the recently proposed faculty rule that mandates a maximum number of A’s in any given course. My opposition is primarily based on three ethical issues."
Jillian Forstadt, WESA 90.5; At one Pittsburgh-area high school, students learn how to debate the ethics of AI
"For their final presentations in the Artificial Intelligence and Ethics course at Avonworth High School last month, students each picked a topic to examine through the lens of AI.
Senior Theo Rose chose to look at AI’s role in the art world. On a slide, she showed several images of AI-generated art...
During the past school year, English teacher Scott Tuffiash launched Avonworth’s AI and Ethics class to get students at his suburban public school talking to one another and thinking critically about the technology around them.
“And that way, it's really like, is this what we want? Is this what we need?” he said.
While Tuffiash said he takes a neutral stance on AI, what students in the class think of this now-ubiquitous technology falls along a spectrum...
Tuffiash also worked with John Slattery, executive director of Duquesne University’s Center for Ethics and Science, Technology and Law, to create an AI-centric essay contest for the region’s high-schoolers.
This school year, students from across Western Pennsylvania were tasked with answering the question: “How do we stay human in the age of Al?”"
Vimal Patel , The New York Times; Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’
Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain.
"College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves."
Dara Kerr, The Guardian; Elon Musk teams with El Salvador to bring Grok chatbot to public schools
"Elon Musk is partnering with the government of El Salvador to bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country, according to a Thursday announcement by xAI. Over the next two years, the plan is to “deploy” the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an “AI-powered education program”."
