Forget AI bans: classes préparatoires-style oral exams, scaled by AI

The commentary ties the AI disruption to a financial crisis already underway. College enrollments are down and tuition revenue has dropped, plunging many universities into the red despite raising prices. Students bear the cost as meal plans, library hours and academic advising are squeezed.

Underneath sits a weaker academic baseline. The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment found 15-year-olds in OECD countries at the lowest average levels ever observed in science, reading and mathematics. Those students now arrive using Generative AI, which the commentary says is already disturbing foundational elements of education, from student confidence to how progress is assessed.

The proposed fix borrows from tradition. In the UK, Cambridge and Oxford humanities undergraduates write a weekly essay and discuss it with a tutor whose main job is to ask why. In France, students in classes préparatoires sit weekly colles, intensive oral sessions designed to test quick problem-solving and reveal knowledge depth. The commentary argues these methods are too slow and expensive to scale as they are, but an AI could hold a ten-minute reasoning conversation with every student each week and flag the ones a human should talk to.