What if we have been getting it all wrong when it comes to how we judge and evaluate student learning?
From October 23-24, 2026, UBC will host a workshop and symposium called Lessons in Trust: Alternative Grading in the Age of AI. Ahead of the event, Jon Beasley-Murray, Associate Professor of Spanish, reflects on how our fears about AI and desire for certainty might shape the ways we approach grading—and what we might gain by embracing uncertainty instead.
What does this image show?
At first sight, we might think it to be a product of Artificial Intelligence. Something in it seems a little awry, and we are alert to anything that seems out of order or odd—or, alternatively, anything that uncannily seems too perfectly to fit our expectations—as potential evidence of AI at work.
Often that suspicion is warranted. But it can lead us to be too quick to distrust. And as we find ourselves caught out—either when we find ourselves too trusting, or when we discover we have been suspicious without cause—we no longer trust even our own capacities of discernment and judgment, of knowing when to trust and when not to do so.
In fact, what we have here is a reproduction of an oil painting by the nineteenth-century Austrian artist, August Heinrich Mansfeld. This particular painting, “Aufruhr in der Mädchenklasse” or “Uproar in the Girls’ Class,” can be found in the public domain repository, Wikimedia Commons. It is, in other words, “real.”
At the same time, the picture is also a somewhat demented fantasy. It depicts a classroom in which, as the title has it, some kind of uproar or even riot, rebellion, or uprising has broken out. But it may equally indicate a derangement of the imagination, rather than a real threat to pedagogical authority. As well as connoting “a crowd acting against authority or social order,” the German word Aufruhr can also refer to mental disturbance—“strong mental or emotional turmoil.”
Either way, we can assume that, for the painter, the situation portrayed is nightmarish: the collective Id has taken over what should be a calm space of instruction and discipline. Two girls in the foreground are dancing a polka or waltz. Another, on the left, is playing a set square or other geometrical tool as though it were a violin. Worst of all, a couple of boys seem to have invaded this feminine space. Hierarchies have been inverted and boundaries have been breached: between study and play; between order and chaos; between reason and madness; between what happens inside the classroom, and what happens outside it.
Meanwhile, it is not clear whether the would-be figure of authority is distracted, simply absent, or (most disturbingly) caught up in the mayhem. Perhaps the teacher is the woman at the far right, who with a frenzied look in her eyes is cleaning the blackboard; behind her is the image of an ape whose raised left arm mirrors her posture as she frantically wipes the board. Or perhaps the teacher is absent, and these mutinous figures have sprung up to take his or her place.
No wonder this picture is unsettling. It is surely intended to portray a teacher’s worst fears about what the young would get up to if they could, expressing the pandemonium and disorder that is their true desire.
Is this not at least some of the fear that gives us pause when faced with the prospect of ungrading or alternative grading?
Is not the grade, consciously or otherwise, a mechanism ultimately intended to keep students in line and the classroom in order? All the more so today that students enter university (quite understandably) anxious that a poor grade leaves them few prospects in the job market and life that awaits after graduation? Is this painting the image of the disorder that results when students no longer care about their grade, no longer trust in the value of a university credential or the teacher’s expertise?
Alternatively, we might imagine that what we have here is the literalized image of the hidden disorder that may arise from the increasing encroachment of AI into the university. Do we not sometimes have the impression that our students may be making a mockery of all we do, hitting up ChatGPT or Claude then metaphorically dancing or otherwise misbehaving (most likely scrolling through social media on their laptop screens) while we frenziedly try to attract their attention at the blackboard, or with our PowerPoint slides? No wonder so many instructors report that they are leaving the classroom, that teaching has become an ever more “impossible profession”?
There is, however, another interpretation: that what this painting presents is in fact an image of student creativity and agency.
Are not the students here also learning in their own way, whether they are practicing their dance skills or putting old tools to new uses? Could this not be a picture of student creativity and play, by which these girls have broken free from the Gradgrind rigidity of nineteenth-century rote memorization and gender segregation? They are, after all, not abandoning the classroom, but putting it to new, more diverse uses.
From our perspective, the valence of this scene is unclear. Perhaps this, too, is what makes it unsettling or uncanny.
And it is this uncertainty that prompts our forthcoming workshop, “Lessons in Trust”, that motivates us to rethink the grade: an uncertainty (even a crisis) about the forms of judgment and evaluation to which we are habituated. What if we have been getting it all wrong, for instance, by dividing our student body into A students, B students, C students, and so on? Or by praising plausible, well-presented essays or other assessment results now that we see that AI can, at a mouse click, produce much the same conclusions and arguments?
Perhaps we should reassess the disorder and messiness that is at first sight anarchic and sloppy. We could instead recreate the classroom as a space to play—with ideas, with methods, with concepts and approaches—that is no longer constrained by the achievement of aims and objectives, learning outcomes and quantifiable results.
We need to learn to trust without certainty. Indeed, trust depends upon doubt, upon the possibility of failure; when you are certain, there is only knowledge, not trust. And where there is certainty, there is no longer exploration, research, or investigation.
Certainty is the death of the university, its conversion into a temple of hollow platitudes, of banal truths. Only doubt, uncertainty, risk, disagreement, and discord—all of which require trust, however precarious or provisional—animate both the pursuit and the critique of knowledge that are the essence of the university. And so in the struggle to hold on to and encourage disagreement, ambivalence, and uncertainty, process rather than product, what is at stake is our trust in the university itself.
Come join us in Lessons in Trust.
