Gen AI at CITL

The Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) is hosting generative artificial intelligence (AI) events at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Throughout the AI series at CITL faculty and staff will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops, guest talks, and conversations on how GenAI impacts the future of education and beyond.  Make sure you subscribe to the AI newsletter to stay informed about all things Generative AI.

Amazing Grades for Free: Investigating AI’s Capability to Solve Course Assignments

Apr 3, 2026   1:00 - 2:00 pm  
Armory room 172 and online via Zoom
Join online
Lecture
Sponsor
The Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning
Speaker
Melkior Ornik and Max Fowler
Contact
Przemek Bosak
E-Mail
pbosak2@illinois.edu
Views
20

In an extreme challenge to our educational mission, instructors are concerned — and in some anecdotal cases, already convinced — that students are simply using generative AI to produce all their course deliverables, and that no learning is actually taking place. In this talk, we will report on our effort to test this hypothesis: is it possible to "excel" in a course without absolutely any knowledge? We show that, while there is variability across courses and assignment types, large language models are indeed often able to achieve a strong grade in a course without any meaningful help from human users or course material. This finding naturally brings up questions about our future assessment methods, and even about the value of the material that we are teaching: while obviously yet unresolved, we will describe some possible ways forward at the end of the talk.

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