When Stephen Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something eerie. The sentences were the same. The structure was also the same. Even the conclusions were the same.
Mintz said in a LinkedIn post that this is not a cheating crisis, but a pedagogy crisis.
For years, he said, universities have been run like factories, with mass lectures, standardized prompts and rubric-driven grading carried out by what he describes as overworked teaching assistants.
Professors call this mentorship, but it’s actually “industrialized education,” he wrote in a more detailed Substack post on the subject. And he believes AI has only revealed how hollow that model has become.
“Machines can already do most of the things we ask students to do, and often do it better,” Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. “If 400 students can create the same essay in 30 seconds, the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the assignment.”
Stephen Mintz, a professor at the University of Texas, says AI hasn’t ruined universities, but has revealed a system that deemphasizes actual learning. Courtesy of Stephen Mintz
death of take home essay
In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is outdated. Because it will test exactly what AI is currently good at: research, understanding context, and constructing and developing arguments.
“AI can now do all of that,” he says.
As a result, he said, there has been a shift from out-of-class essays to assessment formats that demonstrate tangible learning, such as in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions.
“There should be no assignments that are graded outside of class. Assessments will be based only on activities that can be directly observed,” he said.
Mintz envisions a system where AI will take care of what he calls “mastery learning” (basic facts, timelines, conceptual frameworks) and allow students to focus on what he calls “inquiry learning”: asking questions and constructing complex arguments.
He believes schools need to double down on timeless literacy skills – research, writing, numeracy and critical reading – but in ways that require creativity and independent thinking.
“We must ensure that students graduate with the ability to conduct research, write and speak clearly and analytically, read closely and critically, be numeracy-literate, culturally literate, and well-prepared for their future careers,” he said.
He said public confidence in higher education and the value of degrees would “wither” if universities continued “business as usual”.
The final reckoning for higher education
For Mintz, AI holds a mirror up to how deeply universities have relied on machine learning and how far they have strayed from their educational origins.
“AI does not threaten the dehumanization of higher education,” he wrote on Substack. “It reveals how thoroughly we have already dehumanized humanity and offers us one last chance to regain what we have lost.”
Looking ahead, he told Business Insider that the next five years should be a period of reinvention.
“We have to reinvent assessment,” he said, noting the need to offer courses that focus on “slow reading, deep questioning, ethical dilemmas, historical reasoning, data fluency, and creative problem solving.”
“We have to invest in seminars, instructional models, undergraduate research and experiential learning,” he says.
Universities now have to choose between doubling down on oversight and standardization, or rebuilding around what machines can’t reproduce.
“Now is the time to redesign the future of learning, not protect it,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
