What does it mean to be educated? In contemporary Australia this might seem a fairly straightforward question with an equally straightforward answer. After all, a myriad of accredited training institutions certify and qualify individuals in any number of fields from high school certificates to first aid qualifications and forklift licenses.
Moreover, Australians are used to registering their ‘education level’ at least once every five years for the Census, information which can be used to generate all kinds of pretty maps and graphs where the education of Australians is mapped, trended, compared and contrasted.
But in spite of all the paper and ink devoted to the certificates, degrees, and qualifications of Australians, I hope that my readers can understand that what is being measured is not really education at all, but rather the formal recognition of the completion of some course, degree, or qualification.
I am not attempting to split hairs. In a perfect world the completion of courses, degrees or qualifications, would demonstrate that the student has, in fact, been educated in the skill, knowledge, or understanding purporting to be taught. However, whether it is actually the case in the landscape of contemporary education is, I will argue, very much an open question.
Take, for instance, the phenomenon of cheating. If the goal of the student is to truly be educated, to genuinely acquire new skills, knowledge or understanding, cheating makes no sense. The cheat, in other words, cheats themselves. They might obtain a piece of paper, but they will not obtain an education.
Cheating only makes sense therefore when what is sought is not education but rather a qualification. And this, of course, only makes sense where a qualification is accorded some social or economic value independent of the skills, knowledge, or understanding that a person might actually possess.
The existence of wide-spread cheating within an education system then is a clear sign both that a society places a significant (perhaps even an inordinate) value on qualifications and that the education itself (that the qualification is supposed to signify) is not actually needed to benefit from the job or social standing obtained through a fraudulent qualification.
It seems that wide-spread cheating is a feature of the education system. Certainly the emergence of A.I. has led to concerns that mass cheating has become a norm in tertiary education. Anecdotally moreover, professors, lecturers, and teachers are struggling more and more with students who are willing (and increasingly able) to cheat their way into the qualifications needed for their chosen career.
The temptation in the face of these new possibilities for cheating will be to seek a technical remedy. Software that purports to detect A.I. is already available and in use at universities across the country (though whether it is accurately able to detect A.I. is an open question).
Yet I would suggest that these technical solutions ignore the bigger (and more interesting) question. Namely, how it is possible that qualifications might be fraudulently gained without it becoming obvious that the person lacks the education the qualification is supposed to signify.
I will suggest two possible answers to this question. Firstly, it is possible that many of the jobs that require qualifications on paper do not in fact require the purported skills, knowledge or understanding of these qualifications in practice. But the second possible answer is that the education that is being delivered in schools, universities, and institutions across the country is so hopelessly self-referential, arbitrary, or irrelevant that it does not really matter whether the holder of a qualification from these institutions has internalised what was taught to them or has successfully prompted A.I. generators to complete the qualification on their behalf.
In any case, it seems to me that the challenge of A.I. is not answered by successfully detecting when it has been deployed, but by an understanding of what education is. Or, in other words, it ought to be clear to us in conversation, in the workplace, or in the practice of leisure whether a person is truly educated or whether they have simply learnt to prompt an ‘A.I. assistant’. And if this is not clear, then I will suggest that our education system (and indeed all of our society) face a far more fundamental challenge than the drivel of a chatbot cheating its way through a degree.
