Arizona State and the AI for the Public Good summit reengineer education by eliminating tests that can be solved automatically

The session "First Generation of AI: Are We Learning the Right Way?" presented as part of the 2026 "AI for the Public Good" summit, chaired by the executive deputy editor of The Economist, Kenneth Coker, marked a radical shift in institutional education philosophy through a direct confrontation between academic practice and tech-empowerment models. Michael Kro, president of Arizona State University, together with musician and AI-startup founder "WAI AM", offered a shared vision that the benchmark for educational institutions’ competence no longer rests on exclusion rates and applicant rejections, but on their ability to empower learners and rebuild the academic environment around AI tools.

Kro, who has led Arizona State University for twenty-four years based on an inclusion principle and dismantling structural resistance to innovation, explained that the university now runs roughly 8,000 AI-related initiatives. He affirmed that the core role of technology in education is to enhance teaching and learning and to turn teachers into "knowledge navigators" rather than "knowledge dumpers," citing the virtual-reality platform Dreamscape Learn, which transports biology students into interactive environments inside living organisms. Regarding concerns about academic cheating, Kro stressed that the student who cheats will fall behind in the end, arguing that any evaluative test that can be bypassed with AI is fundamentally a "wrong test" and should be replaced with methods that focus on the quality of the questions the student poses rather than on retrieved answers.

The bet does not rest on memorizing ready-made answers but on building independent tools that reflect the human experience; software models lack lived expertise.In this context, WAI AM outlined his experience teaching the "Self-Agent" track at Arizona University, a program that requires students to build AI agents that express their personal interests and experiences. He noted that his entry into the music world and the improvement of his family’s material situation came through software and early exposure to school computer labs, calling for recognition of production that combines human-machine collaboration alongside individual human mastery, just as live musical performance coexists with modern digital production.

Regarding the growing debate over banning digital devices and reverting to isolated education, Kro rejected turning this stance into a single standard that binds educational systems, describing the portrayal as a trivial clash between two methods. He affirmed that the human brain, as the most complex entity, needs empowerment rather than protection from innovation, pointing out that accelerating language teaching and lowering its costs provides a practical model for enhancing human capabilities without succumbing to cognitive backsliding, while WAI AM emphasized that what sets the human element apart from machines’ logical superiority is empathy, emotion and the ability to work collectively on complex problems.

This shift obliges academic leaders and education-training officials in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant to immediately reassess assessment standards and teaching methods. Continuing reliance on traditional exams and theoretical assignments that generative models solve in seconds represents a waste of resources and produces graduates ill-suited for the new labour market. The regional landscape calls for moving from individual-experiment initiatives to launching large-scale institutional tracks that embed smart agents into curricula, updating teacher-training programmes so they become knowledge mentors, alongside redesigning university admission and assessment tests to measure the skill of posing complex questions and building models rather than making hasty decisions to ban technologies in educational settings.