Every student at Notre Dame, regardless of their intellectual pursuits or career intent, will complete the Core Curriculum – a range of courses rooted in the University’s Catholic liberal arts education. Curricula at Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross College require students to take a similarly broad array of classes for the same purpose. But in the age of generative artificial intelligence tools, this approach is in serious jeopardy, unless the University acts now to protect it.
As AI models become increasingly complex and able to imitate human writing, the temptation to use the tool to circumvent the learning process becomes greater. By asking widely available software to write an essay, generate reading summaries or answer a technical question instead of exploring the concepts themselves, students are unfortunately often able to do passable work.
Entry-level liberal arts courses are particularly susceptible to this kind of encroachment. These classes often have less demanding assignments and have students who are less comfortable writing essays or reading long passages. Why would these students read 80 pages of Socratic dialogues for a discussion group when a few-hundred-word summary from Gemini will do?
As of now, the responsibility to forgo AI lies with individual students, but to expect students to always restrain themselves from doing so is naive. Often, what occurs is that some dedicated students actually do the difficult work asked of them, while others float by with the help of AI. Students who rightly choose to complete their work in line with their professors’ AI policies should not be penalized for their academic honesty.
AI should not only be prohibited in the lower-level courses students most often take to fulfill their core requirements. These classes should also be restructured to make AI use functionally impossible. Assignments should be formulated in such a way that students cannot use artificial intelligence tools in substantive ways.
Professors should employ in-class essays, oral exams and rigorous discussions – assessment options that are far more difficult to use AI tools to complete. Assignments that force a close reading of the text should constitute the bulk of grading in any introductory humanities class.
These entry-level humanities courses, which an overwhelming majority of students use to fulfill their Core Curriculum requirements, should have a no-tolerance AI policy. When teachers try to incorporate AI into these classes, such as by having students create AI outlines of chapters, the result is often that discussion centers on only the basic elements of the text, instead of diving deeply into the fine details. These courses should be about teaching students how to read and write well – a task which AI can only detract from.
Admittedly, some aspects of AI can – and arguably should – be explored in college courses. In science and math classes, AI can help students code or solve problems more efficiently so they can build more important technical skills.
Ultimately, however, the Core Curriculum is not about efficiency or crossing classes off a checklist. Rather, it is an essential aspect of a Catholic education. It articulates a worldview that education is not merely a matter of acquiring technical skills, but rather becoming a virtuous person and a responsible citizen. If a Notre Dame education has not instilled these qualities in its students, then it has fundamentally failed.