Students are only fake learning because universities are fake teaching 

Artificial Intelligence is improving exponentially. There is a real threat that it could upend employment, security, art and even what it means to be human.  

But to date, the most prolific abuse of generative AI has seemed to be in places and things that were already fake and insincere.  

Facebook has served up generic slop and plagiarised material for years. It is not surprising that AI-generated garbage is as popular on that social media platform as any other kind.  

Customer service workers have been replaced – not because AI is better than a human, but because it is worse in the ways a business would like it to be. Lack of sympathy and circular conversation are features, not bugs.  

The ChatGPT cheating epidemic in universities has the same root cause as inhuman chatbots and AI-generated posts. Thanks to the managerial takeover of Australian universities, higher education is already being “faked” by the institutions as well as their students.  

Universities are cutting courses and teaching time, churning through staff on precarious casual contracts and giving markers so little time to grade papers that they cannot give useful feedback, or even fairly assess the quality of the work. Staff are afraid to speak publicly while university administrators, advised by expensive management consultants, are putting jobs on the line. Australian Vice-Chancellors are paid over a million dollars a year, while the Vice-Chancellors of better-ranked universities in Scandinavia are paid perhaps a quarter as much. 

Universities were putting pressure on markers to pass underperforming students long before ChatGPT, Claude and Grok were on the scene. Australia Institute research from 2001, 24 years ago, warned of “soft marking” where full-fee paying students were marked more leniently, or where everyone was marked more leniently to avoid failing those particular students. One tool used by administrators is to demand laborious paperwork before failing a student – a clear disincentive for already under-paid and vulnerable casual staff.  

The quality of instruction is even lower now. The Australia Institute’s Skye Predavec has shown that the number of academic staff per student has worsened from 1 staff member per 13 students in 1990 to just 1 staff member per 26 students today, even as university fees raced ahead of inflation. The Southern Cross University’s early-childhood education diploma is internally called a “cash cow” as it churns out childcare workers in just 10 months at $25,000 per student.  

When universities put pressure on lecturers and tutors to let poorly performing students pass, they send a clear message: the university is not interested in teaching you, just appearing to do so.  

So why would students be interested in learning, instead of just pretending to? As the old Soviet joke goes, “So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”  

Degrees were once a valued indicator of intellectual achievement and capability. Now, they are an expensive entry ticket for white collar professions who value the university logo in the corner.  

But don’t take my word for it: the University of Adelaide says “Our brand is our greatest asset”, and the University of Melbourne says “Our brand is arguably our greatest asset”.  

Not the teaching staff. Not the research output. Not the faculty culture. Not even the extracurriculars or the physical infrastructure like libraries, quad, colleges and lecture halls.  

Employers will cotton on, and degrees may well become worthless. Would-be students in other countries will also see the quality of students that Australian universities consider adequate, and change their plans accordingly.  

The people running Australian universities hope to be long gone before the other shoe drops.  

This is not to deny the hard work and passion of thousands of lecturers and tutors across the country, who in the face of job cuts and management pressure deliver quality teaching.  

Universities insult and diminish their efforts by treating education like a production line, and by awarding credentials to students who are not across the material.  

The debasement of education has an analogy in money counterfeiting. In economics, “bad money drives out good”. In other words, when fake bills circulate the true ones are squeezed out. People lose confidence in the system, and exchange becomes overwhelmed by fake claims even if they represent a small share of the money supply. 

Most university graduates are dedicated and learned, a credit to their university and to future employers. But when a minority of graduates are clearly undeserving, the deserving majority’s credentials become worthless. The employer cannot trust them by default.  

With universities passing students who are not up to scratch, ChatGPT is a scapegoat. It may lift the quality of work of the worst students, but universities were already giving poor work a passing grade.  

There is hope. The exaggerated success of AI in “fake” places – like customer support, social media and university education – suggests its dehumanising elements are vulnerable to the real and true: universities that teach; social media that connects humans to each other; businesses that support their customers.  

Sincerity, truthfulness and originality are the antidote to Artificial Intelligence, but universities will have to prioritise these virtues in their teaching. That means more jobs for humans and more face-to-face contact for students.  

Bill Browne is the director of the Democracy & Accountability Program at The Australia Institute.