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On Jan. 1, Indiana University gave every student free access to ChatGPT Edu. The rollout covered about 120,000 students, faculty and staff. In IU’s announcement, President Pamela Whitten said it would help Hoosiers “lead as AI transforms every sector of the economy.”
It sounded like a turning point for IU.
But when spring semester started, we were back to the same reading quizzes: the short homework checks on the week’s reading that ChatGPT can finish before you’ve found your seat in Hodge Hall.
That’s a strange position to put students in. IU gives us a tool that can do the homework, then, through our syllabi and class instructions, expects us to keep doing that homework manually, as if ChatGPT wasn’t there. The assignments themselves have not changed, and many of them were already too easy before ChatGPT existed.
However, students are taking advantage of the resources they were given. A 2026 Lumina Foundation-Gallup survey of nearly 4,000 U.S. college students found that 57% use AI daily or weekly for schoolwork. I’d bet those numbers include many students filling the tables of Wells Library at midnight.
Professors know this, and plenty have tried to fight it. Unfortunately, detecting AI is near impossible. Turnitin is a software colleges use to check papers for plagiarism; its AI detector tries to flag essays and papers written by AI. In 2023, Vanderbilt University turned off Turnitin’s AI detector after looking at its error rate. Even at the 1% error rate Turnitin claimed, the tool could have falsely flagged about 750 of the 75,000 papers Vanderbilt ran through it the year before. Plus, students writing in a secondary language were more likely to be wrongly accused.
So, maybe universities are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how to stop students from using AI, IU should ask why so many of its assignments are this easy for a machine. If a chatbot can finish homework in 10 seconds, the problem isn’t the student. It’s the homework.
So what should replace those quizzes? Work that makes us show up.
Let me interview someone who has the job I think I want, record the conversation and tell you what surprised me. Make me email someone I admire and try to earn a reply. Send my project group to a business in Bloomington, Indianapolis or any small town in between, and ask us to help with a problem the owner is dealing with right now.
Some programs at IU already teach this way. Media students spend their courses out shooting, interviewing and putting together real stories. That model does not have to stay in one school. That kind of hands-on work matters more because the job market isn’t exactly waiting for us with open arms.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that recent college graduates had a 5.6% unemployment rate in the second quarter of this year, and about 42% of them were working jobs that don’t require a degree. A Stanford University study found that after generative AI took off, employment for 22 to 25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs fell 13% compared with their peers. Older workers in those same jobs remained in their positions.
I’m two years from graduating, and reading that is unsettling. The first rung of the ladder, the entry-level job, is the one disappearing.
The good news is that employers have made it clear what they want. In a 2026 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, recruiters said internship experience in their industry was one of the two largest deciding factors when choosing between equally qualified candidates. They want proof you’ve done something real, with tangible results. A perfect record on Sunday-night quizzes isn’t that.
So here’s what I’m asking of a school I really do love: replace assignments a chatbot can complete with work that sends us into the real world. A world where we can be impactful. A world where we can make a difference. Let us meet people, try to solve something they care about and come back able to explain what we accomplished.
Tonight, someone on this campus will open a reading quiz a few minutes before midnight, paste the questions into ChatGPT and submit the answers. They’ll get the points. They may go to bed without knowing any more than they did when they opened it.
We deserve better than another quiz.
Rishabh Karnawat is a sophomore studying finance at the Kelley School of Business.
