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