It's not great for the teacher though. They're the ones who will truly suffer from the proliferation of AI - increased complexity of work around spotting cheating 'solved' by a huge increase in time pressure. Faced with that teachers will have three options: accept AI detection as gospel without appeals and be accused of unfairness or being bad at the job by parents, spend time on appeals to the detriment of other duties leading to more accusations of being bad at the job, or leave teaching and get an easier (and probably less stressful and higher paid) job. Given those choices I'd pick the third option.

4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand.

Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.

You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something

I really believe this is the way forward, but how do you make sure the AI is speaking to the student rather than to another AI impersonating the student? You could make it in person but that's a bit sad.

You make it about the student and the material in all ways. There are teaching frameworks and methedologies that help.

> 4. Use AI to talk to the student to find out if they understand

Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"

Technology doesn't solve the problems created by technology on it's own.

People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.

> People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them

How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.

> Tests were created to save money

I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.

Both can be true at the same time. You outlined the objective, the money is an extra constraint (and let's be honest, when isn't money an extra constraint?)

Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.

> Tests are a way of largely seeing if a response to a question was memorized.

Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.

These are different levels of learning.

There are learning frameworks that explain it all well enough.

Learning what something is, vs applying what you learned has different terminology in the learning world, but not everyone might use that.

You were also asked to write an essay because to learn to write you have to ... write.

Or option 4 (a lot more likely in my opinion), pretend nothing is happening.

option 4b: resolve the teacher from being the gatekeeper who has to "prove" knowledge has been imparted, accepted and consolidated? It's your idea, but with explicit candor and not a sly wink :)