HEC’s new rules on student AI use won't work

Pakistan's Higher Education Commission has mandated a three-credit AI course for every degree starting this fall and drafted rules banning students from submitting AI-generated work without disclosing their tools. But Dr. Shafiullah Qureshi, writing in Dawn, says these rules won't work: teachers can't verify compliance, and the HEC itself admits AI detection alone shouldn't justify punishment. His solution is structural rather than punitive: separate learning from grading. Take-home assignments use AI freely as practice; graded work happens in class through exams and oral defenses of submitted projects. A student who engaged with the material will answer questions about it; one who outsourced the thinking won't. Qureshi points to a Stanford study finding that AI detectors wrongly flagged human essays as machine-generated more than sixty percent of the time, particularly among non-native English speakers.

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