Maybe this is how to test the intelligence of AI, after all.
You have responded to a marketing proposal as a trainee in an integrated marketing communication firm in the 90s. You wrote the proposal in longhand. The computer was limited, and your borrowed ‘ThinkPad’ laptop had returned to its owner. What is not yours belongs to another person. As the wise man said, a little wood would heat your little oven; why then should you murmur because the woods are not yours? In your little empire, writing paper was a king. You used eight pages of paper to interpret the marketing request and submitted it to your supervisor.
She read it. Smiled. She gave the pages to the client service head. In minutes, you were standing like a criminal before a ‘panel of enquiry.’ Did you write it? Yes. Did you copy it? No. The panel asked you to ‘‘defend’’ and show ‘’understanding’’ of the ideas in the pages. You did. The panel were happy. But you were sad. You wrote another 8-page ‘epistle.’ You detailed your creative writing journey to express your sadness. One of the partners apologised. Later, he co-opted you into his ‘hustle’. He compensated you. Unfortunately, you streamed along. You lost contact. It was the pre-social media era.
On the one hand
Had artificial intelligence existed then, it did in the western world, but it was not this ubiquitous; your little ‘story’ would be said to be AI-generated. The absence of AI worked in favour of the story shared above.
On the other hand
A report in Vnexpres.net said the rise of AI in the classroom has pushed professors back to the old-style oral exams. According to the news report, many professors in the U.S. and Canada are returning to old-fashioned oral examinations to assess whether students truly understand the material, as the misuse of AI becomes increasingly widespread.
In the long term
Panos Ipeirotis, a data science professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said he grew concerned that student assignments sounded polished but showed little real understanding. When asked to explain their work in class, many students struggled. This led Ipeirotis to conclude that written submissions no longer accurately measure learning. He wrote in a blog published earlier this month and cited by Business Insider.
To address this, Ipeirotis revived oral exams and used an AI agent to conduct them at scale, in an attempt to “fight fire with fire.” He wrote in his blog that he needs assessments that evolve toward formats that reward understanding, decision-making, and real-time reasoning. “Oral exams used to be standard until they could not scale. Now, AI is making oral exams scalable again.”
To put AI to the test, he used ElevenLabs’ conversational technology. Set up an AI examiner that questions students about their capstone projects. Tested the students’ ability to analyse course cases in real time. Over nine days, the system examined 36 students at a lower cost. He used AI for grading. He deployed three large language models to evaluate transcripts and then synthesised a final grade. He said the AI grading was more consistent, stricter, and fairer than human grading.
This is how to sweat the AI. When you apply AI the way Ipeirotis did, the result would be different. It would be a win-win scenario and not one-sided, where the students cheated their way to a higher grade. The Washington Post reported that at the University of Wyoming, students in Professor Catherine Hartmann’s Religion course no longer write essays or take computer-based multiple-choice tests. They complete a 30-minute face-to-face dialogue.
Many students did not like this approach. They found the exams stressful despite acknowledging their effectiveness. Ipeirotis said the experiment demonstrated how learning should work. He warned against students relying too heavily on AI instead of using it to enhance their thinking.
In the short term
I agreed that the most central thing is preparing students to be capable and happy participants in the new world. But your ability to engage with AI and utilise AI agents is going to be essential.
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