Economics Pedagogy seminar - Petar Stankov (Royal Holloway)

Petar Stankov is coming to the University of Exeter on Wednesday 4 November, presenting his paper AI and the Measurement of Human Capital as part of the Economics Pedagogy seminar series. He's visiting from Royal Holloway, and the session is hosted by the Business School's Economics group.

The talk gets straight into a question that's becoming harder to ignore: what happens to our idea of human capital when AI starts doing the heavy lifting? Stankov looks at knowledge-intensive tasks—learning being a prime example—and argues that using AI creates a mismatch between what someone actually knows and how they perform. If the AI is doing the work, the resulting performance measure becomes a bit of a blur, introducing measurement error into the very things we use to gauge skill and knowledge.

He doesn't just leave it as a theoretical problem, though. The paper proposes a framework to identify when effort is being substituted by AI, and he's already run a proof-of-concept of that framework in a small higher education setting. It's a concrete look at how a tool that's supposed to help us learn might actually make it harder to see what's been learned.

If you're interested in where AI is heading in education and how we measure what people actually know, it's a good one to have on your radar. The seminar starts at 13:30 in Conference Room 2 XFi at the University of Exeter.