Higher Marks, Lower Learning? AI's Favourite Magic Trick

Higher Marks, Lower Learning? AI's Favourite Magic Trick

This week, Ray and Dan unpack a bumper collection of AI in education news and research, all pointing to one critical question: Is AI helping students learn…or just helping them score higher?

The episode begins with a striking case from Brown University, where a take-home exam averaged 96%, only for the same cohort to average 48% in a supervised final. From there, Ray and Dan explore what the latest research says about AI-assisted assessment, automated marking, AI tutors, critical thinking, and the growing importance of student agency.

They also discuss:

• New evidence on AI marking compared with human examiners
• Research showing how guided AI tutoring can improve maths learning
• Why critical thinking is the biggest predictor of successful AI use
• The risks of "never-skilling" when students rely too heavily on AI
• AI detectors: what they can (and can't) reliably tell us
• New Australian data on AI's impact on employment
• The latest Digital Education Council survey of university students
• Online safety and the growing challenge of AI-assisted image abuse

As always, the episode is packed with practical insights, research summaries, and plenty of discussion about what all this means for educators, schools and universities.

Links - News

• Voice got an upgrade https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/
• Inside Higher Ed article: Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat
• Digital Education Council AI in Higher Education Global Survey https://www.digitaleducationcouncil.com/resource-library-items/ai-in-higher-education-global-survey-2026
• One in 25 teens affected by AI-assisted online abuse, study finds. Read Lee Barrett's opinion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lee-barrett-a7624923b_boys-major-victims-of-ai-assisted-online-share-7480417534723244033-OjWU/
• AI and employment in Australia - report from Department of Education and Workplace Relations https://www.dewr.gov.au/download/17666/ai-and-employment-australia/43205/ai-and-employment-australia/pdf

Links - Research

• AI in University Assessment: Evaluating the Opportunities and Risks of Automated Marking https://www.emotional-cognition.psychol.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/OpRaise%20Report_DIGITAL.pdf
• LLM Performance on a Real, Double-Marked GCSE Benchmark https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24973
• Teaching with Gemini: Measuring the impact of Guided Learning on student mathematics progress in Sierra Leone https://deepmind.google/blog/measuring-the-impact-of-learning-with-ai-in-sierra-leone-and-beyond/ https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/LearnLM/learnLM_sierraleone_may26.pdf
• Access is Not Enough: Human Support Improves Engagement with AI Tutoring https://nssa.stanford.edu/studies/access-not-enough-human-support-improves-engagement-ai-tutoring
• The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618
• The agency gap: perceived human AI agency, reflection and generative AI learning across UK and China based higher education contexts https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2026.2686986
• How Do Autonomy, Critical Thinking, and Artificial Intelligence Value Perception Affect University Student Self-regulated Learning? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-026-01203-3
• The cognitive impact of ChatGPT in higher education: A systematic review of critical and creative thinking outcomes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X26000330
• AI-induced never-skilling in medical education https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04438-y (Paywalled)
• Who wrote this? Evaluating the reliability of AI detection tools in higher education https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-026-00226-w

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