Writing in The Guardian on 16 March 2026, Dr. Nafisa Baba-Ahmed, an academic writing specialist, argues that AI tools like ChatGPT have not created a new crisis in university academic integrity — they have merely industrialised and made visible a problem that existed long before large language models arrived. In a letter responding to an earlier Guardian piece in which professors expressed alarm about AI's effect on student critical thinking, Dr. Baba-Ahmed draws on her direct experience working with students to make a structural point: essay mills, shared past papers, model essays circulated between cohorts, and heavy reliance on tutors to shape assignments were already well-established shortcuts. "Artificial intelligence did not invent this behaviour," she writes. "It has simply industrialised a shortcut that already existed."
The core of her argument is that the traditional take-home coursework essay was always a fragile proxy for genuine intellectual engagement. If a polished piece of writing can be produced convincingly without the authentic thinking behind it — whether via an essay mill, a generous tutor, or a large language model — the problem lies in the assessment design itself, not in whichever technology a student exploited. AI has lowered the cost and raised the scale of this outsourcing, forcing a reckoning that universities could previously afford to delay.
Rather than mourning a pre-AI golden age of academic integrity that, she argues, never truly existed, universities should treat this moment as pressure to redesign assessment around evidence of reflection, interpretation, and intellectual struggle. The emphasis belongs on processes that are iterative and personal — the kind that leave a visible trail of thinking — rather than on refined final products that can be generated without any thinking at all. The logical end point of her argument is a shift toward assessments that cannot simply be outsourced: oral examinations, annotated drafts, <a href="/news/2026-03-14-blue-books-make-an-out-of-step-campus-comeback-in-the-ai-era">in-class work</a> that shows the process rather than just the output. If a student can submit polished work without ever engaging with the material, the assessment was already broken before ChatGPT existed.