Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Education, newest first.
Failing grades jumped sharply in several UC Berkeley computer-science courses this spring — 35 percent of students failed the introductory CS 10 class, up from under 10 percent in prior years — and teaching professors point to over-reliance on chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as the primary driver. Faculty say students lean on the tools for take-home work, then arrive at in-person exams unprepared, and that incoming students increasingly lack linear-algebra and proof skills. More than 1,300 UC faculty are now petitioning to reinstate standardized-test requirements for STEM admissions.
Malta and OpenAI announced a partnership making the island nation the first country to offer free ChatGPT Plus to every citizen and registered resident. Eligibility requires completing AI for All, an online AI-literacy course developed by the University of Malta, with the Malta Digital Innovation Authority managing distribution. Subscriptions run for one year starting in May 2026; the deal is the first under OpenAI's OpenAI for Countries initiative, which aims to anchor national AI adoption around ChatGPT.
Anthropic announced a four-year, $200 million commitment to the Gates Foundation, structured as a mix of cash grants, Claude usage credits, and technical support from its Beneficial Deployments team. Focus areas span global health (polio, HPV, and preeclampsia and eclampsia among named disease targets), life sciences, education, and economic mobility, with regional emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa, India, and other low- and middle-income countries. Launch partners include the Institute for Disease Modeling and the Global AI for Learning Alliance. It is the largest single philanthropic commitment from a frontier lab to date and a meaningful structural signal that Anthropic intends to be measured by social-impact deployments alongside its commercial book.
Princeton faculty voted — with a single dissenting vote — to mandate proctoring for all in-person exams starting July 1, 2026, ending a 133-year tradition of unproctored testing under the student honor code. The proposal cites "AI and personal electronic devices as major catalysts," noting that AI tools on small devices make cheating harder for peers to observe, which has hollowed out the peer-reporting model the honor system relied on. The Daily Princetonian's 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 graduating seniors found 29.9% admitted cheating on an assignment or exam, 44.6% said they knew of violations they did not report, and only 0.4% said they had reported a peer. Instructors will now serve as exam witnesses but will not actively monitor.
The Walton Family Foundation's sixth Gen Z AI poll, fielded with Gallup across 1,572 respondents aged 14 to 29, finds weekly AI use stuck at 51% — growing only four points year-over-year — while anger toward AI jumped to 31% from 22%. Eighty percent now say relying on AI to finish tasks faster will make learning harder, and fewer than 20% would choose AI for tutoring, financial advice, or customer service. Schools tightened in parallel: 74% of Gen Z students report a school AI policy, up 23 points from the prior year.
In a new paper on arXiv, researcher Valerio Capraro coins *LLMorphism* — the biased belief that human cognition operates the way a large language model does. He argues the framing flows from two channels: analogical transfer (projecting LLM features onto humans) and metaphorical availability (LLM vocabulary becoming the dominant way to talk about thought). Capraro: "the issue is not only whether we are attributing too much mind to machines, but also whether we are beginning to attribute too little mind to humans." The paper traces implications across work, education, healthcare, and human dignity.