Abstract

There’s a lot of discussion at present about how we university educators need to embrace and harness the potential of AI for enhancing student learning. To hold onto old ways of teaching and assessing in the era of AI would be a disservice to our students. One common piece of advice, offered widely, including on the Monash AI learning circle website, is that AI might be useful for students to help them summarise readings and compose first drafts of essays. If students don’t need to waste their time on this initial grunt work, then they will be freed to spend more time on the higher-order critical thinking skills which are the true value of a university education. Sounds great, right? Let’s see what happened when I tried to put this into practice. Spoiler alert: it didn’t turn out well.