As a chief information officer, I have the privilege of interacting with students in many different settings, and conversations about artificial intelligence have become increasingly common.Recently, I read several student reflections explaining why they refuse to use generative AI in their coursework. Some described it as environmentally destructive, pointing to water and energy consumption that disproportionately harms vulnerable communities. Others called it a form of cheating, no different than passing off someone else’s work as your own. Several argued that the entire point of education is the struggle itself, and that outsourcing that struggle to a language model defeats the purpose of being in school.
Sunday, June 07, 2026
Is AI Killing User Experience? - Scott A. Snyder and Mike Welsh, Knowledge at Wharton
A product manager can describe a workflow and get a working prototype. A strategist can turn a client’s rough concept into a clickable experience before the meeting ends. A founder with no technical background can “vibe code” a beta version of their product for an investor pitch. This is not a small shift. It compresses time, lowers barriers, and gives more people the ability to participate in creation. For organizations trying to move faster, it feels like a gift. Yet the customers on the receiving end are not sold. Despite the perceived gains in speed and personalization, only 17% of consumers believe their experiences are getting better, according to a March 2026 Medallia report. A separate February 2026 Pega study found that more than 60% of consumers lack confidence in how businesses use AI to interact with them.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-ai-killing-user-experience/
Saturday, June 06, 2026
Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers - Alejandro Salinas, et al; SSRN
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53% vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreement an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.
How Personalized AI Tutors Can Help Students Learn - Emma Needleman, Knowledge at Wharton
The researchers built an AI tutoring platform that gives all students access to the same gen AI chatbot and course materials, but varies the sequence in which practice problems are assigned. In a five-month Python course across 10 Taipei high schools, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: One received a standard sequence of problems progressing from easy to hard, while the other received a personalized sequence, in which an algorithm adjusted problem difficulty based on each student’s performance and interactions with the AI tutor. Because everything else was held constant, this design isolates the impact of personalized homework.
Friday, June 05, 2026
Agentic AI and job skills. How will agentic AI reshape the workforce? - McKinsey
In this video, McKinsey Senior Partners Kate Smaje and Robert Levin and Special Adviser Eric Lamarre, authors of Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI (Wiley, April 2026), discuss what’s real—and what isn’t—about AI-driven workforce disruption. The authors reflect on how AI is changing the kinds of skills organizations value most and what business leaders need to do now to build teams and capabilities that can keep pace with an AI-enabled enterprise. “The core issue is that we’ve really got to think about how organizations are going to work fundamentally differently,” says Smaje.
White House Aims to Establish Political Oversight of Federal Grants - Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed
The White House is advancing a sweeping rule change that would give administration officials more power over billions of dollars in federal grants. The regulations seek to codify that Trump officials have the right to keep doing what they started last year: canceling thousands of grants that they said didn’t align with the president’s priorities, and shooting down new ones for the same reason. The proposed rules would set up a process for this political review, possibly helping insulate it from legal challenges that stymied the administration in the past. Among many other changes, the rules direct “senior appointees” at federal agencies to take charge of awarding and terminating new and existing research grants and other federal awards—a change that reflects an August executive order.
Thursday, June 04, 2026
2026 EDUCAUSE The Impact of AI on Learning Assessment Report - Jenay Robert, EDUCAUSE
Few areas of higher education have been as passionately debated as learning assessment in the age of AI. Since the debut and rapid adoption of readily available generative AI chatbots, educators have grappled with how learning assessment would be impacted. By only surveying individuals who are currently doing the hands-on work of learning assessment, we can provide you with information about how the learning assessment landscape is changing in practice, not just in theory. Explore the full Impact of AI on Learning Assessment report: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2026/6/2026-educause-the-impact-of-ai-on-learning-assessment-report
AI Will Deliver Wisdom - Peter H. Diamandis, Metatrends
I’ve been thinking a lot about wisdom lately. Not intelligence. Not speed. Not raw compute. Wisdom. The thing we used to reserve for grandparents, philosophers, and tribal elders who’d seen enough life to know which paths lead to ruin. Here’s how I define it: wisdom is probabilistic pattern recognition across a vast number of lived experiences. When you go to the village elders and ask, “Which direction should I take?”, they don’t run equations. They draw on decades of watching people make choices and living with the consequences. They say, “If you go this way, based on everything I’ve seen, it won’t end well. Go this other way, and you have a real chance.” That accumulated experience, compressed into judgment, is what we call wisdom.
Wednesday, June 03, 2026
Generative AI use and misuse call for assessment reform in higher education - Igor Chirikov, Ivan Smirnov, and René F. Kizilcec, Science
The debate about the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on higher education is polarized. Some portray GenAI as normalizing cheating at scale (1), whereas others argue that misconduct patterns have changed little (2). These competing narratives underscore the need for reliable data on where GenAI use is concentrated and where misuse is most likely. Existing studies of GenAI adoption and perceptions in higher education provide useful early signals but often rely on small samples and lack measures designed to capture sensitive behaviors such as cheating across fields (3–5). We addressed this gap with survey data from 95,513 students in a representative sample of 20 major public researchintensive universities in the United States and an indirect method for estimating GenAI-assisted cheating across disciplines. We found substantial heterogeneity in GenAI use and misuse across disciplines and student groups. These patterns call for discipline-specific assessment reform, not blanket bans or universal detection regimes.
The largest study of AI use by undergrads is in, revealing disparities in access — and in cheating - Maya L. Kapoor, Berkeley News
The study, conducted in the spring of 2024, used data collected by Berkeley’s Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, a group of research universities that collaborate on surveying students to improve higher education. About two-thirds of respondents said they used GenAI, and almost 40% used it monthly or even more frequently. What’s more, at least 9% of students who used AI reported using it to cheat. That number varied significantly by academic discipline, with more non-STEM students cheating with AI than STEM students. But the researchers caution that banning GenAI won’t stop cheating and may even harm students when they look for work in industries that expect AI proficiency.
Tuesday, June 02, 2026
How Golden Gate’s big AI bet will energize fundamental changes - Alcino Donadel, University Business
At the height of California’s gold rush, a YMCA night school was founded to train students in gold assaying and assist Chinese immigrants with learning English. It marks the humble beginnings of Golden Gate University—and an enduring tale that inspires President Brent White to capitalize on a new national phenomenon.Golden Gate made three major announcements in April that emphasize the university’s radical embrace of artificial intelligence as a tool and societal force. It founded the School of Psychology to research how AI will transform human behavior. GGU Digital upgrades the university’s distance education platform with personalized, AI-assisted instruction. Lastly, nine new board members were introduced to help expand the university’s global footprint in emerging fields.
College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams - Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune
On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.
Monday, June 01, 2026
Should AI Nudge You or Tell You What to Do? - Stefanos Poulidis, Haosen Ge, Hamsa Bastani, and Osbert Bastani, Knowledge at Wharton
In general, AI guidance can fall into one of two categories: attention signals and action signals. Attention signals flag decisions that are important without offering a recommendation: “This is a critical decision: pay close attention.” Action signals go further and prescribe a specific action: “Here’s what you should do.” But which type of signal actually helps us make better decisions, especially when the AI is reliable and provides highly accurate advice? This question is increasingly relevant, as AI tools become better calibrated and consistently dependable. As this trend continues, we must ask: Are there costs to relying on AI too much, even when its advice is correct? We explored these questions in a study using chess — a setting where AI recommendations are trusted, accuracy is exceptionally high, and decision quality is easy to measure.
Higher education, stop policing AI. Know your students - Robert Mason, Rikard Jalkebro and Ziad Hani, University World News
The solution to AI in higher education is not more software. It is ‘knowing your student’ (KYS). The idea borrows from the banking sector’s ‘Know Your Customer’ regulatory and compliance process used to combat fraud. Banks do not solely rely on a single automated alert to determine suspicious behaviour. They build contextual understanding over time: patterns, histories, habits, inconsistencies and relationships. Universities should do the same. However, Know Your Students should not mean turning universities into compliance departments. It means using sustained teaching, feedback, mentoring and dialogue to understand how students actually learn.
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