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Academia Is Enshittifying. AI Made It Faster.
Sam Illingworth, Slow AI, 2026/05/18

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Discussion of the recent paper that was retracted, by a member of the editorial board of the journal that carried the paper. "The question 'why was this paper retracted' has an answer. The question 'why does the system keep producing papers like this' does not, because answering it would require redesigning the system. It's easier to just retract the paper."

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College credit for this?
Hollis Robbins, Anecdotal Value, 2026/05/18

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I'm going to ignore the left-right dichotomy Hollis Robbins assumes in this critique of social scinces, bcause it's not that. But there is a valid criticism at the heart of this. "An entire field of study is broken even as credentials in it keep getting granted. (D)efenders of a wronged student seem not to want to touch the possibility that the credential she was working toward wasn't substantial. (Others) wants to assume the discipline has real standards and that the instructor was upholding them." The main point is that a study of 84 stiudents in a single school shouldn't be taken as evidence of anything, much less form the basis of an assignment in a psychology classroom.  (p.s. there's something a bit wrong about referring to your colleague's paywalled post as 'viral'. Trust me, it's not).

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Grade Inflation Is Not the Problem
Alfie Kohn, Alfie Kohn, 2026/05/18

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I've always wondered about complaints about grade inflation. What if everyone does well? Isn't that the objective? Alfie Kohn writes: "Four troubling assumptions inform their outrage: that higher grades imply lower standards; that a teacher's job is to sort students (rather than to help everyone succeed); that stringent grading motivates students (which conflates extrinsic with intrinsic motivation and is unsupported by data); and that students should be pitted against each other in a race for artificially scarce high grades (so that no matter how well everyone does, there must always be losers)."

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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