Note to Schools: Let AI Do the Assignment

What if a student uses AI to complete an assignment and does it better than they could have done manually?

The instinct may be to say the student didn’t do the work. But the workplace may reward the student for doing exactly what the classroom penalized.

That creates a different question for higher education: not whether students need to learn the fundamentals. They absolutely do. The question is what we should test once they know them.

Students Still Need the Playbook
I’m a football fan, so I think of it this way: Before players can perform on the field, they have to master the playbook. They need to understand their roles, know how each play is designed to unfold and recognize how their responsibilities fit into the larger strategy. But memorizing the playbook doesn’t make someone a great player. The real test comes after the ball is snapped.

Education works much the same way. Students need foundational knowledge. But knowing the fundamentals and manually executing every task are no longer necessarily the same thing.

But the Workplace Has Changed the Assignment
Imagine a finance professor asks students to build a financial forecast for a fictional company. One student does the calculations, builds the spreadsheet and writes the analysis manually.

Another builds an AI-enabled workflow that does much of that work, updates the forecast when assumptions change and produces the analysis in a fraction of the time.

Did the second student do the assignment?

In a traditional classroom, we might say no. In the workplace, we’d hire them.

Knowing the Playbook Isn’t Enough
A quarterback isn’t judged solely on whether he can execute a play exactly as it was drawn. He has to read the defense, recognize when something isn’t right and adjust.

What if we applied the same standard to students using AI?

Don’t just ask whether they produced the forecast. Ask them to challenge the assumptions. Find the errors. Explain what the AI got wrong. Identify where the model could fail. Improve it. Defend the final recommendation.

Suddenly, AI hasn’t lowered the academic bar. It may have raised it.

I’ve Watched the Gap Between School and Work Grow
Over years of working directly with colleges and universities, I’ve watched faculty wrestle with how to keep learning connected to a changing workplace. They’ve looked for ways to introduce emerging technologies, practical skills and new professional expectations into the student experience.

The challenge was rarely recognizing that work was changing. It was figuring out how to change the learning experience with it.

AI makes that challenge more urgent. Work that once required hours of manual effort can increasingly be automated. Graduates may enter organizations where using these tools isn’t a shortcut. It’s simply how the work gets done.

So Maybe It’s Time to Change the Assignment, Not the Standard
Let AI do the assignment. Then ask the student to prove they understand what it did.

Can they direct it? Interrogate it? Catch its mistakes? Improve its output? Defend the result?

Those may be harder questions than asking students to reproduce the work themselves. They may also be better prepared for what comes next.

Students still must learn the playbook. But once the ball is snapped and the play breaks down, that’s when the real test begins.

By Tyler Skelton, Business Development Manager, ISACA Academic Partnerships; Lifelong Football Fan.

About ISACA
ISACA helps colleges and universities embed globally recognized IT credential content into IS, IT, and non-IT degree programs. With credential-ready curriculum, built-in support, and global credibility, ISACA’s Academic Partnerships help institutions prepare students for careers, not just graduation. Learn more at ISACA Academic Partnerships.