If we’re going to adapt to The Age of AI, we’ll need to chip away at transactional education

My biggest obstacle to adapting to GenAI isn’t the lack of AI literacy. It isn’t the lack of technical knowledge. It isn’t even the rapid-fire development of the technology itself.

It’s the transactional model of education.

Here’s how Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt describe the model in their Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (2023): “In the eyes of students, education often has value only because it can be traded for something else” (20). According to the logic of transactional education, students create products. They trade in those products for good grades and then trade in those grades for a degree or a certification. Then, ostensibly, they trade in those for gainful employment.

In such a system, learning is incidental. The underlying logic goes like this: as students strive for high grades, hopefully they’ll gain certain skills and knowledge along the way. Grades will drive the extrinsically motivated students. Meanwhile, those few intrinsically motivated students will just keep pushing forward anyway.

I see the transactional model pop up a lot in my classroom, particularly at the end of a semester. That’s when I start getting messages like “what can I submit to get my grade up?” or “can you give me enough extra credit points to increase my grade to a _____?” When these questions surface, it’s extremely difficult to reframe the conversation around learning and skill-acquisition. Students want the highest return on investment. They want to trade in their three months for an A, not a B.

I don’t blame students for this, in the slightest. The desire to maximize our ROI is a natural byproduct of this system that habitually connects education with grade-collecting and credential-collecting, rather than learning. And as a general rule, my students have been in that system for 12+ years.

I won’t go into the problematic nature of grades in general. It’s too big a topic to deal with here. But for those interested, I definitely recommend Susan Blum’s Ungrading collection (2020) and Joshua Eyler’s Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Our Students, and What We Can Do About It (2024).

For us, what matters is that traditional grades play a pivotal role in the transactional model of education.

Here, I also want to add two ideas to the conversation.

Idea #1: GenAI plays directly into the logic of transactional education.

In transactional education, the goal is often to get the highest grade as efficiently as possible. (The least amount of time + the highest grade = maximum ROI.) It’s fundamentally product-oriented.

And one thing that GenAI promises: a shortcut to creating educational products without necessarily going through the learning process. If the goal is getting an A and moving on, then Gen seems like a really helpful tool for achieving that goal.

Idea #2: If colleges and faculty are going to adapt to The Age of AI, they’ll need to chip away at the transactional model.

I’m not naive. I don’t think we’ll be able to get rid of the transactional model of education in the near future, or possibly ever.

But I do think that chipping away at the model is essential for building classrooms that prioritize learning and skill-acquisition, especially when virtually every student has access to GenAI products that will “make their lives easier” (or so the marketing suggests).

I also think chipping away at that model is possible, even for individual instructors.

We can do this by using alternative assessment techniques that decenter grades and by implementing process-oriented teaching methods.

Here are some low-friction ideas to get started:

1. Including ungraded assignments that are “for learning only.”

2. Asking students to self-assess, even if we’re doing it so they can compare their assessments to our own.

3. Implementing some edit-to-mastery assignments. Students get a Complete or Incomplete for the assignment. If they get a Complete, it means they hit the objective. If they get an Incomplete, it means they didn’t hit the objective and should try again (with guidance).

Those are relatively small pulls that can be worked into almost any course, regardless of discipline.

They’re steps towards a classroom that focuses more on learning, and less on grades.

Because without chipping away at transactional education, I find it hard to see a path forward.