August brought academia face-to-face with reality. The summer buffer was gone. Universities and schools reopening meant one thing: ChatGPT was now sitting in classrooms, dorm rooms, and exam halls—whether institutions liked it or not.
Attempts at outright bans looked increasingly performative. Detection tools overpromised and underdelivered. The more serious conversations turned toward redesigning assessments, emphasizing oral exams, process-based grading, and conceptual understanding over rote output.
This was the month when education stopped asking whether AI belonged, and started grappling—uneasily—with how learning itself might need to change.