You can borrow an answer.
You can’t borrow the ability to find the next one.

Students have always found ways to get hold of answers. What’s new is how good the answers have become, how fast they arrive, and how little they now reveal about the person who turned them in.

This issue of Reflections is about the gap that opens up when the two come apart...and about what it takes to teach the ability rather than assume it.

In this issue: (The links below only work when viewing the newsletter in a browser. Click "View online" at the top right to do that.)

You’ve probably experienced this by now, and probably more than once.

An assignment comes back and it’s fine. The grammar is clean, the structure is sound, the content is (as far as you can tell) correct. And something about it rings hollow in a way you can feel but can’t quite put your finger on. You read it again, looking for the error—for something—that would give you cause to make a useful note in the margin. But the hook isn’t there. There is nothing to respond to. There is nothing there.

You reflexively wonder if the student wrote it. And while that’s an understandable reaction and question, it’s also a dead end. You can’t answer it reliably, with certainty.

And here’s the thing: even if you had that answer, it wouldn’t tell you the thing you actually want to know.

The better question is the one in the title. If a machine can produce a passing response to your assignment in nine seconds, what was that assignment measuring in the first place?...

It’s August, your syllabus is mostly set, and you’ve just spotted the unit where students always come unstuck. Adopting a book for 3 activities isn’t worth it—and the bookstore deadline has probably passed anyway.

So don’t adopt one. Choose 10 activities from any one of our chemistry or biochemistry titles and we’ll make your activity pack available under your name at pcrest.com/10for15, where your students can purchase and download all 10 for $15. Your own copy is free, and it comes with access to the answer keys — plus additional instructor resources for some activities.

Choose your 10 from Foundations of Biochemistry, Foundations of Chemistry, Foundations of Organic Chemistry (Vol. 1 or 2), or Solving Real Problems with Chemistry.

One we have your choice of activities, just point your students to pcrest.com/10for15 and tell them to look for your name.

A response to The Atlantic

If you teach, especially in the liberal arts, someone has probably already sent it to you. Rose Horowitch’s cover story in The Atlantic argues that America is not becoming illiterate but postliterate—that people still decode words perfectly well while losing the higher-order capabilities of comprehension and synthesis.

We strongly recommend the article. It’s the most useful thing published on this subject in some time, and the numbers in it are worse than you’re expecting.

• The End of Reading Is Here — Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic, August 2026
• Follow-up Are we living through the end of reading? — Horowitch interviewed on NPR, 7 minutes, no paywall, transcript available.

We think her diagnosis is right.
We disagree about what follows from it.

The part that isn’t about reading

The study of English majors attempting the opening of Bleak House is the detail worth sitting with. Not because those students couldn’t read—every one of them could decode every word on the page. What failed was inference, contextual reasoning, and the willingness (attention? interest?) to notice their own confusion and do something about it.

That’s not a story about literacy. It is a story about a set of skills nobody taught them, being required of them anyway.

An administrator quoted in the piece describes students who now regard assigned reading as an inefficient way to receive information—as though a professor requiring a book is deliberately making things harder than they need to be. That belief is perfectly rational if reading has only ever been a delivery mechanism to you. After all, why not a picture or short-form video? Aren’t they worth thousands of words? And entertaining?

That idea becomes absurd the moment reading is something you know how to do...

We usually keep policy news to Topics and Trends but this one can't wait for the October issue.

On July 16 the Department of Homeland Security published a final rule ending "duration of status" for F, J and I visa holders, effective September 15, 2026. Students will be admitted for a fixed period rather than for the length of their program. The post-completion grace period drops from 60 days to 30. Transfers and program changes face new restrictions during the first year. And extensions now go to USCIS with biometric vetting rather than being handled on campus.

That lands roughly three weeks into most fall terms, and it arrives on top of a year in which new international enrollment was already down sharply.

If you advise international students, or teach programs that depend on them, the useful move is to get your students to your DSO in August rather than discovering the problem in October.

Consider the New Year’s resolution.

As we all know, it's something you make with real conviction, at a genuine turning point, when you honestly intend to change. You run hot for two weeks, limp through a third, and by the middle of February, you haven't so much abandoned your resolution as quietly stopped mentioning it and eventually (if you're lucky) thinking about it. By the following January, you do the same again, perhaps with more conviction and even stronger intentions... along with the feeling that what you're actually doing is compiling evidence that you're the kind of person who doesn't follow through.

What a horrible cycle.

We could call this pattern spurt and die. And if you're an educator, you're about to watch 300 or so people do it at once.

The start of a term is the most powerful fresh-start moment in the academic year. New notebooks, new intentions, new versions of ourselves. Students (and faculty) arrive determined to be organized this time. By week five, a recognizable number of those intentions are gone, and the people who made them are a little more convinced that their recurring failure to be better is simply who they are.

But here's what is actually happening...and it's not a failure of motivation...

Over the past several months we have been exploring what happens when AI is trained not just on information, but on the principles of Process Education. Rather than building a chatbot that gives answers, we’re working on learning guides that ask better questions, encourage reflection, and help students think through challenges instead of around them.

That distinction turns out to be harder to build than to describe, and it starts with getting the measure of success right.

The wrong measure

Ask most people what makes an AI tutor good and they’ll describe the quality of its answers: accurate, clear, patient, available at three in the morning. All of that is real…and none of it is the point.

A learning guide’s success is not measured by the quality of the immediate answer. It is measured by whether the learner becomes more able to govern their own learning without requiring the same level of support.

That single shift changes everything downstream. A tool optimized for answer quality will always drift toward doing more of the work, because doing more of the work produces better answers. A tool built to develop capability has to do something considerably harder: work out what this particular learner needs to perform right now, and then decline to do that part, no matter how easily it could.

Effort isn’t the goal either

The obvious overcorrection is to make the learner struggle more. Withhold things. Answer every question with another question. Make them earn it.

But that’s wrong too, and we need to be precise about why. Learner effort alone is not the goal. If it were, then tears and sweat would be enough to merit graduation. The goal is learner performance that develops capability. Confusing the two produces a tool that wastes people’s time on principle...

The summit opened on an uncomfortable question:

After years of growth experiences that demonstrably work, how would we know whether we're producing people who grow inside our programs, or people who have become SELF self-growers?

From within a cohort the two look nearly identical. They diverge completely once the coaching, the structure, and the scheduled reflection go away.

Three days went into making that distinction measurable...

Pacific Crest is a longstanding supporter of the International Academy of Process Educators, and we’re glad to share the Academy’s own words about this year’s conference...

Click the button to view, download, & see more suggestions about using this FREE Learning Contract.

Running the Learning Contract in Week One

Don’t hand this out with the syllabus. It will be read as one more policy document and filed accordingly. Give it its own twenty minutes in the first or second class meeting.

The blanks (16 through 19) are the point. A student who signs 15 of someone else’s requirements has filled in a form; a student who adds four of their own has made a commitment...

Prioritizing — consistently putting the most important things first

A note before we start. Almost everyone who says they have a time management problem has a prioritizing problem. Time management is deciding when; prioritizing is deciding what matters, and you cannot do the first honestly until you have done the second. A student (*cough*) who reorganizes their calendar without ranking anything has built a prettier container for the same chaos. So this issue, we’re going after the skill underneath.

What follows is just a single tip for each context. Click the button to read the full (and very rich!) set.