Tuna Fish and Hot Fudge

My mom used to say that mismatched ideas went together “like tuna fish and hot fudge”—each is fine on its own, but the combination is nasty.

I was reminded of that in reading the Washington Post article about students completing four-year degrees in a couple of months. Students can combine competency-based education—that is, a structure that focuses on tasks rather than seat time—with AI. When a “class” doesn’t have any sort of interaction other than submitting papers, and we have what amounts to paper-o-matic technology, then blasting through a series of classes quickly becomes comically easy. The only thing missing is actual learning.

Competency-based education has a lot to be said for it. It allows students who have picked up skills elsewhere—whether through work, personal interest or informal study—to move quickly through a sequence, rather than spending time and money reviewing what they already know. It’s a way to get around Baumol’s cost disease without watering down the educational experience. Colleges have long used bits of this at the margins through allowing students to test out of certain courses; a fully CBE program allows students that option throughout.

Ideally, CBE isn’t just a series of tests. Done well, it focuses instruction on the areas that students need while sparing them gratuitous redundancy. As Paul LeBlanc likes to note, we use a version of CBE for most forms of licensing. If you pass the driver’s license test, nobody asks what your score was. You either passed or you didn’t. How you picked up the skill is irrelevant.

In this metaphor, CBE is the tuna fish. It may or may not be to your taste, but it’s legitimate food.

That makes AI the hot fudge, which seems about right: It has a lot of people drooling, even if it appears at this point to be empty calories. In the right setting, the appeal is undeniable. (As far as I’m concerned, whoever came up with the idea of mixing hot fudge with peanut butter was an evil genius.) AI can make quick work of certain things, even if its accuracy is hit-or-miss.

But pouring the hot fudge on the tuna fish creates an abomination.

CBE programs rely on knowing that it’s the student who is demonstrating competency. In a setting with no personal interaction and assessments that the machine can produce in minutes, even a well-intended program can quickly become a diploma mill. Anyone with access to generative AI could skate through a program with trivial effort. And now that there’s agentic AI, it’s easy to build bots that can skate through even more structured online programs, posting to discussion boards and taking pop quizzes autonomously while the human student is doing other things. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a bot.

Whether the specific students in the article used AI, I don’t know. But I’d be shocked if nobody did. Leave big bags of money unguarded in dark rooms and, sooner or later, the inevitable will happen. The temptation would be too great.

This is worse than garden-variety plagiarism: This is a fraud machine at scale. It creates a couple of immediate issues. First, it floods the market with “graduates,” thereby watering down the market value of a degree. Then, to add insult to injury, it certifies “graduates” whose only actual demonstrated competency is cheating. That hurts employers, who make bad hires, and it hurts other graduates, whose degrees are suddenly suspect. Over time, it hurts higher education generally, as nobody is sure that degrees signify anything at all. At that point, why bother with college in the first place?

The article mentions that the New England Commission of Higher Education will look into it. I certainly hope so. But my guess is that this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. If hot fudge is going to become mandatory, which seems to be the direction we’re moving, then we may have to think long and hard about continuing to serve tuna fish.