u/Harveybritish

Marking season. Brew's on. Here's what I actually want to write but professionally cannot.

"Your introduction is four pages of you clearing your throat." Just tell me what you are doing and why. If your first proper sentence is on page five something has gone badly wrong.

"You have 47 references and have actually engaged with three." A long bibliography is not a personality trait. What did you actually think of any of it.

"In today's society is not an opening. It is a cry for help." Delete it. Every time. Without mercy.

"Your methodology reads like you are trying to convince yourself." Pick a method. Defend it briefly. Move on. We are not in the courtroom.

"This conclusion is just your introduction wearing a different coat." A conclusion should make me think. Yours made me check how many pages were left.

"I can tell exactly which paragraph you wrote at 3am." We all can. The vibe shift is not subtle. Your supervisor noticed. Your examiner will too.

Anyway. Back to it. If you are writing one right now you are doing better than you think. Just stop apologising in every paragraph and say what you actually mean.

Always prepare for the biggest opportunity, even if it never comes. Because the preparation alone puts you ahead of most people.

One line. First year. Still the most useful thing I took out of university.

What's yours?

It’s literally muscle memory at this point, but for me, it’s always Insta.

It’s literally muscle memory at this point, but for me, it’s always Insta.

We are witnessing the death of critical thinking in real time and it is terrifying. AI is effectively lobotomizing the next generation by turning students into intellectual zombies who are physically incapable of forming an original thought. When you can generate a dissertation with a single prompt, you aren't learning. You are bypassing the very cognitive struggle that builds a functional brain. We are subsidizing laziness and calling it progress, but all we are really doing is creating a massive population of weak, dependent people who will be paralyzed the moment the Wi-Fi goes down.

This technology is too dangerous to be a free for all. AI should be strictly licensed and restricted to professional business use only. In a business environment, it serves as a tool for efficiency among experts who already know their craft. In schools, it is a poison that ensures nobody actually becomes an expert. If we don't stop the mass use of AI in education right now, we won't have any leaders or innovators left in ten years. We will just have a society of middlemen who know how to copy and paste but don't know how to think.

We are witnessing the death of critical thinking in real time and it is terrifying. AI is effectively lobotomizing the next generation by turning students into intellectual zombies who are physically incapable of forming an original thought. When you can generate a dissertation with a single prompt, you aren't learning. You are bypassing the very cognitive struggle that builds a functional brain. We are subsidizing laziness and calling it progress, but all we are really doing is creating a massive population of weak, dependent people who will be paralyzed the moment the Wi-Fi goes down.

​This technology is too dangerous to be a free for all. AI should be strictly licensed and restricted to professional business use only. In a business environment, it serves as a tool for efficiency among experts who already know their craft. In schools, it is a poison that ensures nobody actually becomes an expert. If we don't stop the mass use of AI in education right now, we won't have any leaders or innovators left in ten years. We will just have a society of middlemen who know how to copy and paste but don't know how to think.

This week a discussion about AI written dissertations getting lower marks reached over 175,000 people on Reddit alone. University staff from Cambridge and other institutions commented publicly about quietly giving AI work a 52 and moving on.

South Africa just withdrew their entire national AI policy because it was written using AI with fake citations. The same thing is happening in UK universities daily.

This is a national story affecting every student employer and institution in the country. The BBC has covered AI in education before but nobody has investigated the scale of what is actually happening inside university marking rooms right now.

This feels like a Panorama episode waiting to happen.

Is this something the BBC should

be investigating?

Think about it. Right now there are students submitting AI written dissertations, passing with a 58, graduating and walking straight into job interviews.

They have a degree certificate. They have a LinkedIn profile. They have a CV that looks identical to the person who actually spent three years learning to think.

The interview goes fine because ChatGPT helped them prep for that too. They get the job.

Then week three happens. The manager asks them to write a report, analyse a problem, think independently under pressure with no time to run it through an AI first.

And suddenly the certificate means nothing. Some industries will feel this more than others. Law. Finance. Consulting. Medicine. Engineering.

The ones where independent thinking under pressure is not optional.

So genuinely which industries or companies do you think are most at risk of hiring a generation of graduates who cannot actually perform without AI assistance?

And more importantly does anyone actually care enough to do something about it before it becomes a real problem?

No sugar coating. No university brochure answers. Just honest experiences from people who

actually lived it.

No sugar coating. No university brochure answers. Just honest experiences from people who

actually lived it.

I will go first.

That a Greggs sausage roll and a 9 am lecture are two things that should never exist at the same time.

What is yours?