When critical thinking is AI-generated

(Note: Today I am giving way to my friend, Prof. Gerald Abergos, who contributed the following article.)

“…this system creates a culture of suspicion. It is hurtfully unfair to students who have genuinely labored to express themselves well, only to be accused of dishonesty simply because their work sounds too polished.”

The primordial values that students need to learn and experience — discipline, resilience, and the capacity for critical thinking — are increasingly slipping away in formal education, due to the availability of AI tools. 

Yet even before the rise of Artificial Intelligence, our methods of evaluating students had long been limited. Traditional exams and quizzes, such as multiple choice, enumeration, identification, and fill-in-the-blanks, often measure only memory retention. 

To be fair, not all subjects demand extensive critical thinking. Foundational courses in math and the sciences often require strong memorization as a baseline. When these methods dominate assessment across disciplines, students are conditioned to equate education with rote recall rather than genuine understanding.

Critical thinking demands more than remembering. It requires questioning assumptions, evaluating evidence, recognizing bias, and drawing conclusions that can withstand scrutiny. 

Educators now face an added and unwelcome burden: checking and verifying whether the answers presented by their students are truly their own thoughts or were generated by machines. Software designed to detect AI is far from perfect, and the time consumed in running every essay through such tools takes away from the higher duty of teaching itself. 

Worse, this system creates a culture of suspicion. It is hurtfully unfair to students who have genuinely labored to express themselves well, only to be accused of dishonesty simply because their work sounds too polished. In effect, the very students we should be celebrating for their writing skills and clarity of thought may end up being doubted and penalized. The classroom thus becomes not a sanctuary for growth, but a courtroom of constant surveillance.        

This is not how education was meant to function. The academe has always stood as the bastion of standards, rigor, and intellectual honesty. Yet today, it seems the pressure is on teachers and professors to constantly adjust, to accommodate, and to bend academic integrity to “meet the students where they are.” But should the academe really stoop to such a level? Should centuries of educational tradition be diluted simply because new technologies tempt learners to take shortcuts?

This climate of suspicion endangers one of the most sacred bonds in education: the trust between teacher and student. A classroom where every polished essay is suspect, where every articulate answer is scrutinized as too good to be true, erodes the very foundation of learning. Students should feel empowered to grow beyond what is average, not punished for excelling. If we allow distrust to dominate, we risk discouraging the very excellence we claim to seek.

But there is hope. Despite the profile of the current, time-tested methods remain effective. A simple fishbowl discussion with well-crafted topic questions, followed by a three-minute extemporaneous speech, can reveal in an instant what no AI tool can fake. The clarity of thought, the sincerity of conviction, and the ability to connect ideas in real time. 

We must guard against letting the fight against AI misuse turn into a witch hunt against our best students. Critical thinking thrives when excellence is celebrated, not doubted. To surrender this mission to algorithms, or to suspicion, would be to lose the very soul of our schools. 

With our collective vigilance, the classroom will not be diminished by AI. It will be strengthened by it. But if we remain passive, content to let suspicion reign or to let machines think for us, we risk raising a generation untrained in the very skill that defines humanity — critical thinking.

So, is this article original, or AI-generated?

(Prof. Gerald Abergos — University of Makati, College of Business and Financial Sciences, July 2023-Present; St. Scholastica’s College, Manila, part-time, College of Education, July 2017-Present; De La Salle College of Saint Benilde, part-time, School of Multi-Disciplinary Studies, 2005-May 2017)