My take:
- Make “homework” ungraded. Many college classes already do this, and it has been easy to cheat on it way before AI by sharing solutions. Knowledge is better measured in exams and competence in projects. My understanding is that homework is essentially just practice for exams, and it’s only graded so students don’t skip it then fail the exams; but presumably now students cheat on it then fail exams, and for students who don’t need as much practice it’s busywork.
- Make take-home projects complex and creative enough that they can’t be done by AI. Assign one large project with milestones throughout the semester. For example, in a web development class, have students build a website, importantly that is non-trivial and theoretically useful. If students can accomplish this in good quality with AI, then they can build professional websites so it doesn’t matter (the non-AI method is obsolete, like building a website without an IDE or in jQuery). Classes where a beyond-AI-quality project can’t be expected in reasonable time from students (e.g. in an intro course, students probably can’t make anything that AI couldn’t), don’t assign any take-home project.
- If exams (and maybe one large project) aren’t enough, make in-class assignments and projects, and put the lectures online to be watched outside class instead. There should be enough class time, since graded assignments are only to measure knowledge and competence; professors can still assign extra ungraded assignments and projects to help students learn.
In summary: undergraduate college’s purpose is to educate and measure knowledge and competence. Students’ knowledge and competence should be measured via in-class assignments/exams and, in later courses, advanced take-home projects. Students can be educated via ungraded out-of-class assignments/projects, as well as lectures, study sessions, tutoring, etc.
> My understanding is that homework is essentially just practice for exams
There are a LOT of people that don't take exams well. When you combine that with the fact that the real world doesn't work like exams in 90% of cases, it makes a lot of sense for grades to _not_ based on exams (as much as possible). Going the other direction (based on nothing _but_ exams) is going to be very painful to a lot of people; people that do learn the material but don't test well.
I made another comment on this thread about that. Exams should be test important knowledge (not computation or trick questions) so they should be easy for students who learned the material, even those who traditionally have trouble with exams. Most of the grade should be frequent in-class assignments or long take-home projects, which test almost if not the same skills students would use professionally (e.g. debug a simulated server failure in-class; develop a small filesystem with a novel feature at home).
The in-class assignments should also be easier than the take-home projects (although not as easy as the exams). In-class assignments and exams would be more common in earlier classes, and long projects would be more common in later classes.