- Essays··9 min read
The Four Boxes Every Assessment Now Needs
Manchester's four-category AI assessment framework—Prohibited through Integrated—does not standardise what universities think about AI in assessment. It standardises the disclosure. What changed in September 2026 was that an implicit and often unspoken assumption buried in every syllabus became a mandatory, published decision visible to every student before they submitted. For a sizeable number of academics, classifying their assessments was the first time they had been asked what those assessments were actually measuring.
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The AI Act enforcement date nobody prepared for
On 2 August 2026, national market surveillance authorities across the EU began enforcing Article 4 of the AI Act, the staff AI literacy obligation that has technically been in force since February 2025. Most European universities have confused talking about AI with ensuring their staff can actually handle it. The first penalty will almost certainly arrive as an aggravating factor when a high-risk system is found deployed without documented staff training, rather than from the literacy clause alone.
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The Cornell Paper Is Not a Cheating Story
The Cornell paper will be read as a cheating story all summer. What it actually contains is the first peer-reviewed admission, in a journal of record, that the most important thing universities sell has lost some of its meaning.
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Sunday Essay · AI Literacy Is a Curriculum Word for an Assessment Problem
AI literacy is being legislated as a curriculum addition when the actual problem lives in the exam hall. Two institutions moved this fortnight, the EU Council and SUNY, and both reached for the cheaper of the two tools the problem requires. The calculator generation did not teach 'calculator literacy.' They re-architected what got tested without the machine.
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