Students take gap semesters during college to work on all sorts of different things and every person I’ve talked to has grown immensely through and loved their experience.
I hope we stop throwing away our hours of grinding and that we recognize schoolwork can serve student development and our community at the same time.
If classes continue to fail to provide the value students hope to derive from college, it won’t matter if AI is banned or not. Students will always find a way to cheat.
After chatting with Duke administrators and professors striving for tenure, I learned that the expectation of “good teaching” is barely — if at all — considered compared to research output.
We see careers as linear — where each job must lead perfectly to the next. So, understandably, we think what we pick for our first role in the professional world is crucial, forever closing and opening doors.
If Duke, and our peer institutions, decided that the main basis for undergraduate admissions was students’ ability to play ping pong, suddenly every ambitious high schooler in the country would be practicing their serve.
