This article was originally published on May 18, 2026 in Faculty Focus. To read in original format, go here.
Colleges and universities across the country are moving quickly to embrace artificial intelligence. According to an analysis of sixty-five R1 institutions, 63 percent of them actively encourage the use of generative AI, with many publishing detailed guidance for its classroom integration (McDonald et al., 2025). The implicit promise is that AI will sharpen student thinking, personalize learning, and better prepare graduates for a technology-saturated workforce.
But a growing body of research tells a more complicated story—one that faculty, instructional designers, and academic leaders should not ignore.
The Evidence Problem
The assumption driving AI adoption is that it improves learning. Yet the evidence, at best, is inconsistent—and in many cases, points in the opposite direction.
A Swiss study found a negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking: the more students offloaded cognitive work to AI, the weaker their critical thinking became (Gerlich, 2025). Wharton researchers went further. Across multiple experiments, participants accepted AI-generated outputs with little or no scrutiny—a phenomenon they termed “cognitive surrender.” Unlike deliberate cognitive offloading, cognitive surrender involves a wholesale transfer of agency to the machine (Shaw & Nave, 2026). These findings are not isolated: a 2025 meta-analysis of eighteen generative AI studies confirmed that over-reliance on AI tools undermines higher-order thinking skills, including critical analysis and problem-solving (Qu et al., 2025).
The concern extends beyond AI specifically. Since K–12 schools began adopting laptops and tablets en masse in the early 2000s, IQ scores have fallen in ways that have no historical precedent. International assessments—PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS—show declining performance correlated with heavier technology use (Horvath, 2026; Rogelberg, 2026).
Perhaps most striking is a 2025 randomized controlled trial—the gold standard of educational research—in which students who used ChatGPT as a study aid retained significantly less knowledge 45 days after instruction than students who studied without it (Barcaui, 2025). Short-term performance gains masked long-term learning deficits.
Why AI Shortcuts the Learning Process
Building and reinforcing a strong content knowledge base;
Opportunities for deep processing and productive struggle;
Independent and critical thinking; and
Meaningful human interaction.
The following four questions translate these conditions into a practical decision-making framework. Before integrating AI into any lecture, activity, or assignment, faculty should work through each one.
Four Questions for Deciding Whether to Use AI
Question 1: Will this AI tool help students use, recall, and demonstrate understanding of core disciplinary content?
Higher-order thinking is built on a foundation of domain knowledge. Students cannot analyze a lesson plan without understanding what learning objectives and assessments are. They cannot evaluate a scientific argument without knowing the relevant concepts. If an AI tool actively engages students with foundational content—through retrieval practice, targeted feedback, or elaborative questioning—it may be worth integrating. If it simply allows students to bypass that content, it is almost certainly counterproductive.
Question 2: Will this AI tool require students to apply their learning to a new context?
Transfer—applying knowledge to a novel situation—is one of the most reliable indicators of genuine understanding. When a student applies principles of lesson design to a new grade level or subject, they are moving information from temporary working memory into more stable long-term knowledge. If an AI tool scaffolds that transfer while preserving cognitive effort, it can be valuable. If it performs the transfer for the student, learning is short-circuited.
Question 3: Will this AI tool support—not replace—independent, evidence-based reasoning?
Critical thinking requires students to make judgments and defend them. A student writing a lesson plan must decide how to open the lesson, how to group students, and how to assess understanding—and then justify those decisions with pedagogical reasoning. Any AI integration that substitutes the AI’s judgment for the student’s own undermines this process. The test is simple: after completing the task, can the student articulate—in their own words—why they made the decisions they made?
Question 4: Will this AI integration preserve meaningful human interaction?
Peer feedback, collaborative problem-solving, and instructor-to-student (and student-to-student) dialogue do more than support academic learning—they develop the social and intellectual habits that define educated citizens. Human interaction sparks curiosity, broadens perspective, builds trust, and provides the kind of accountability that AI cannot replicate. Before integrating any AI tool, ask whether it complements or competes with these interactions. An AI-enhanced discussion board that replaces peer response with algorithmic feedback may sacrifice more than it gains.
Proceed with Caution
AI is not going away, and blanket resistance is neither realistic nor necessarily wise. There are genuine use cases where AI can support learning without undermining it. But the pace of adoption in higher education is far outrunning the pace of evidence. Faculty are often caught in the middle—pressured to integrate tools their institutions endorse and their students already use, without clear guidance on whether doing so will help or harm the people they are trying to educate.
It is also worth remembering that AI developers have profit motives that have nothing to do with improving student learning. The enthusiasm of technology companies should not be mistaken for evidence of pedagogical effectiveness.
The four questions above will not resolve every instructional dilemma, but they provide a principled starting point. If an AI tool cannot clearly support content knowledge, productive struggle, independent reasoning, and human interaction—the conditions we know produce learning—the default should be to leave it out. The burden of proof belongs to the technology, not to the faculty member who questions it.
References
Barcaui, A. (2025). ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 12, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102287
Gerlich, M. (2025). AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
Horvath, J. C. (in press). The digital delusion: How classroom technology harms our kids' learning—and how to help them thrive again. Penguin Random House.
McDonald, N., Johri, A., Ali, A., & Hingle Collier, A. (2025). Generative artificial intelligence in higher education: Evidence from an analysis of institutional policies and guidelines. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 3, 100121.
Qu, X., Sherwood, J., Liu, P., & Aleisa, N. (2025). Generative AI tools in higher education: A meta-analysis of cognitive impact. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '25), Yokohama, Japan. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3719841
Shaw, S. D., & Nave, G. (2026). Thinking fast, slow, and artificial: How AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender. Working paper, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6097646
I can’t believe I never thought of random grading! I’d love to know if there are students who resent not getting graded after putting in the work. Thanks for these great ideas.
Sometimes, there’s a little resistance from students who think that their work is incredibly precious; however, peer pressure seems to make that go away when students realize they get full points as a reward. In my class, I emphasize that great it or not, they are responsible for that material on the exam ( and given that students get very little feedback in many of their classes, getting some feedback is better than no feedback, for better or worse)
Thanks Tim for your explanation! I agree that social pressure will make the issue go away. I do wonder, when it comes time for student course evaluations, if they say something about it. Then again, this is probably a precious few.
I go along with this one with large online classes: “we randomly cut our allocated grading time in half by giving students full points simply for submitting work that appears “complete.”
I look for a few key points in each entry, then I give it a grade based on how thorough it appears. On the first few I graded, I gave comments as well, then after a few, I told the entire class if they see high scores without comments, it means they are doing very well in that area.
I know it sounds weird to say (or admit)–giving full credit if an assignment appears complete–but what Dr. Slater says is honest. And I agree. Especially for large classes.
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The average faculty work 61 hours per week—more than 50 percent over the traditional 40-hour work week, according to a Boise State University study. A lot of that time is spent alone.
When you have to grade papers, plan lectures, teach, research, meet with students and colleagues, perform administrative tasks, do consulting work, and lead teams, the overwhelm can creep up really fast.
So I called The Busy Professor.
Dr. Tim Slater, AKA, The Busy Professor
Dr. Tim Slater is a science education professor at the University of Wyoming, where he holds the University of Wyoming Excellence in Higher Education Endowed Chair of Science Education. After holding hundreds of workshops for thousands of struggling science professors, he realized that time management was a learned skill that few professors have ever had the chance to master. As a result, he started his blog, The Busy Professor, and is frequently an invited speaker to college and university new faculty orientations to help early career professors keep from getting overwhelmed at their first academic post.
I asked Dr. Slater questions related to grading, preventing overwhelm, and advice for new professors. His answers are straight up, short, concrete, and practical—just the way we want it.
How do you prevent overload and frustration?
Professors have a tremendous number of questions coming at them from all sides at all hours: students have questions about coursework; mentoring professors have questions about scholarly productivity; grant agencies have questions about budgets; committee members have questions about policy changes, and administrators have questions about whatever it is that administrators constantly seem to have questions about.
The requests for information is seemingly endless, and that causes tremendous overload. The only time management strategy that works is to set specific times to respond to emails and requests for information and only respond to such emails during this time.
The worst thing professors can do is have their email program on and constantly updating, because most incoming emails are distracting from their number one job priority. I recommend 90 minutes each day to disconnect.
What is the number one advice you have for new teachers?
The number one advice I have is to set several times every week where you are not in your office or available by email. If you need to catch up on the literature, a standing and unmovable weekly date in the library is essential. If you need to write more, a weekly (or daily) and immutable writing session at a coffee shop or a restaurant is critical. For whatever reason, no one really gets any work done sitting at their office desk. The best advice I can offer is to hard schedule time to get out!
What practical suggestion would you give for instructors whose students demand a lot of attention?
The best strategy is to be clear and consistent about when and where you will deal with them. An open-door policy is a death-sentence for professors. As it turns out, students will be surprisingly patient if they know precisely when you are going to get back to them, and that you will be undistracted when with them.
I recommend end-of-the-day as the best time to schedule work with students because the most prolific authors consistently find that writing earlier in the day when you are freshest is most productive.
How do you balance competing opportunities? (e.g., grant-writing, journal articles, speaking gig, teaching)
Every day, people make decisions about how they are going to spend their scarce minutes. Unfortunately, most people don’t think about time as currency, and let it slip away unknowingly.
When there are competing demands, I recommend you prioritize things that show up on your CV or end of year performance review. No one gets credits for going to lots of meetings or, even, really, chairing committees. Priority number one is what makes you most marketable should you decide to go out on the job market.
My most senior mentors tell me they wish they’d spent more time writing and less time traveling, because writing is permanent. Traveling takes time away from writing and from family.
How do you approach grading with large classes?
You can’t grade large classes in the same way you grade smaller classes. It isn’t that more students means more grading. It’s just that grading is more exhausting. It takes away from your ability to enhance your CV and end-of-year performance evaluations. If administrators insist on larger classes, then leveraging the advantages of online, self-grading systems is the best way to go.
Wait, online self-grading systems?
Most textbook companies supporting natural and social science disciplines have an option where students can subscribe to an automatically graded homework system. Some of these even work like smart tutors and give students feedback when they submit an incorrect answer. These systems are available from many textbook publishers, and the cost is passed on to the student. There might be similar computer-based homework auto-graded systems available for history and English courses too.
Anyway, for large classes, you don’t have to grade everything students submit. I’ve had great success with rolling six-sided number-cubes/dice with some dramatic flair on homework submission day to the cheers and jeers of students about whether the homework they just submitted will be graded. The scheme I use is even-numbered rolls are days in which the homework is graded, and odd-numbered rolls are submitted, but ungraded.
Tell me more.
To do this right, we require our students to always turn in homework. On days where the number cube, or die, rolls as “GRADED,” we grade the submitted homework typically. On days where the die randomly rolls as “UNGRADED” we simply give students full points if they submitted anything that appears meaningful on a glance. In other words, we randomly cut our allocated grading time in half by giving students full points simply for submitting work that appears “complete.” We always post an ideal solution so students can self grade, if they wish.
What if the course involves lots of writing?
In large classes, experienced teachers know to devote significant time to ONE portion of a five-paragraph essay at a time. For example, only meaningfully grade the introduction during the first few weeks of school, and help students get that part right (so the introduction doesn’t have to be meaningfully graded later in the term). During the middle of the term only grade the body of the essay and largely ignore the conclusion. Finally, during the last one-third of the semester, focus on the conclusion (and be sure it matches the introduction). This is perhaps the best way to survive.
Love this system of random grading, Tim. So I’m curious about your daily routine. I’m always interested in being more productive.
Most highly productive professors have a rigorous and inflexible morning schedule, knowing they can’t control the natural whirlwind of chaos after lunch. I get up early each morning and meet my writing goal of 1,000 words before I ever check my email. The moment you check your email, you are then adding things to your “to do list” that will interfere with your morning routine.
In other words, if you want to enjoy flexibility in the afternoons and spend evenings with family and friends rather than your laptop, then your mornings need to have a very strict and unchanging routine. For me, I don’t accept any morning meeting appointments unless I absolutely cannot avoid it. And, I try hard not have an open door to my office until after lunch. Remember the rule: Anyone who enters your office before lunch without a check for grant money is bringing some unnecessary distraction that interferes with your ability to build a winning CV.
I also have an immovable writing routine based on hours – from 6 to 8AM every day.
Thanks Tim, for helping our tribe of instructors become more efficient and productive.
Readers, have you tried anything similar? If so, how’d it work out? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Read Tim Slater’s blog, The Busy Professor. If you teach science, check out his other blog, SCST.org/blog. You can also follow him on Twitter @caperteam.
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Anyway, for large classes, you don’t have to grade everything students submit. I’ve had great success with rolling six-sided number-cubes/dice with some dramatic flair on homework submission day to the cheers and jeers of students about whether the homework they just submitted will be graded. The scheme I use is even-numbered rolls are days in which the homework is graded, and odd-numbered rolls are submitted, but ungraded.
Readers, have you tried anything similar? If so, how’d it work out? Would love to hear your thoughts.
I can’t believe I never thought of random grading! I’d love to know if there are students who resent not getting graded after putting in the work. Thanks for these great ideas.
Sometimes, there’s a little resistance from students who think that their work is incredibly precious; however, peer pressure seems to make that go away when students realize they get full points as a reward. In my class, I emphasize that great it or not, they are responsible for that material on the exam ( and given that students get very little feedback in many of their classes, getting some feedback is better than no feedback, for better or worse)
Thanks Tim for your explanation! I agree that social pressure will make the issue go away. I do wonder, when it comes time for student course evaluations, if they say something about it. Then again, this is probably a precious few.
I go along with this one with large online classes:
“we randomly cut our allocated grading time in half by giving students full points simply for submitting work that appears “complete.”
I look for a few key points in each entry, then I give it a grade based on how thorough it appears. On the first few I graded, I gave comments as well, then after a few, I told the entire class if they see high scores without comments, it means they are doing very well in that area.
I know it sounds weird to say (or admit)–giving full credit if an assignment appears complete–but what Dr. Slater says is honest. And I agree. Especially for large classes.