Is School Getting Easier?

(Illustration by Kimberly Johansen)

As a graduating senior, there is one question haunting me as my final days on campus approach: are future students going to suffer as much as I did? 

All jokes aside, literacy rates in our country are falling, and artificial intelligence is becoming more common on Santa Clara University’s campus, as well as all over the nation. It’s common to see students plugging an assignment prompt into Claude, Anthropic’s language model, and sitting back while their paper is generated. 

Additionally, with the rise of alternative grading methods—such as the labor-based grading lamented by my colleague Saul Johnson—I find myself concerned for future classes. But are these concerns truly warranted?

I first became concerned about this conundrum when I went to visit an old teacher at my high school. She told me, to her dismay, that the school administration was moving away from novels as part of curriculum, opting instead for textbooks full of literary passages. She said this was the outcome of students no longer wanting to, or perhaps being able to, read whole novels. 

And it’s not just my alma mater. A recent article from The New York Times noted the reduction of novel reading in high schools across the country. 

Author Dana Goldstein compared two outside surveys, one from 2010 and one from 2024, the results of the latter to be published later this year. According to these surveys, the number of books assigned by English teachers changed rather significantly in this time, with an average of four books read during the school year in the first survey, and only 2.7 in the second. 

In my time at Santa Clara University, I’ve seen the effort students put into their work, and the amount of work they actually do, diminish rapidly. More and more students are shirking their work by using AI, and still getting rewarded in grades. 

Using AI in some ways, and learning to do so well, is important to students’ intellectual and professional development in our changing world. But becoming complicit and taking shortcuts could make the coming workforce less driven, less creative and more replaceable. Is Santa Clara University responding to these problems, or becoming complicit in them?

It turns out the University’s administration has no plans to make learning easier, but rather more accessible and straightforward for all students, according to Associate Provost for Faculty Development Amy Lueck.

Lueck described a push towards evidence-based teaching practices that are going to make learning more accessible and effective. “Getting those kinds of practices that we know from research are more inclusive, more equitable, particularly serve first-generation, lower-income students who are marginalized, but serve everyone—they help everyone,” Lueck said. 

What do these practices include? “One thing that I think is so transformative, and fairly new still, is the transparent assignment design. It’s the idea that you don’t just give a prompt that says ‘write a paper on this topic,’” Lueck said. 

Rather, she says, transparent assignment design asks certain key questions. “Why am I doing it? What is the purpose in relation to our learning objectives and in relation to what I might do outside of the class later with these skills? What are the steps for doing it? What are the criteria by which I will know I have succeeded?,” she said. 

Hopefully, this kind of assignment design is starting to become commonplace in some classrooms, but “that’s not how any of your faculty were taught,” she said.

“You need some dissonance and struggle to learn. Learning is the resolution of dissonance. But it shouldn’t be confusing,” Lueck said. “There was a real sink-or-swim ethos, especially in higher ed, for centuries.”

“Hopefully you experience dissonance around concepts, not around processes,” Lueck said. This means that ideally a student will wrestle with ideas central to the course, but without wondering what professors are actually expecting of them.

These intentional and evidence-based practices are also helping faculty grapple with the surge of AI in classrooms. Lueck explains a push towards reflective practices, especially in this age. About faculty, she says many are struggling through questions like, “How do I make authentic assessments? How do I conceptualize what I mean by student learning, and how do I know it when I see it?” Lueck finds this an exciting development. 

The future of teaching and learning in the age of AI is likely to look different than what we have experienced in the past. “I think it’s already starting to move towards a kind of deeper engagement with process, and thinking about what the process is in all kinds of learning instances,” Lueck said about the next few years in the world of education at the University. She suggests faculty will be more focused on what the process of learning is, not just end products. 

 Lueck also says faculty are asking questions such as “What are the things that are uniquely human?” These things are likely to become much more valuable, according to Lueck. “I think they’ll have to,” she says. But, how progress will be measured and assessed is still largely up for debate. 

To Lueck, now is the perfect time to have conversations around all aspects of teaching and learning. She takes a cue from previous Associate Provost for Faculty Development Eileen Razzari Elrod, who took the opportunity of moving learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic to also investigate all aspects of teaching and course design. Lueck is doing the same with the current AI zeitgeist. 

“A priority for me in thinking about this moment is taking this moment when we have people’s attention, and saying, since you’re thinking about redesigning this anyway, let’s talk about transparent assignment design, backwards planning these strategies and skills.” 

She affirms that none of the faculty she knows are interested in lowering standards for students today. Instead, if students are struggling, the question for Santa Clara University faculty is always how to help them reach the standard.

Despite all the changes in learning today, we can rest assured knowing that our administration is working to streamline learning in a way that will make all students more skilled and able to respond to our changing world, and to do so in their full humanity.