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The Higher Education Commission has taken two big steps on artificial intelligence. It has notified a compulsory three-credit-hour AI course for every undergraduate and postgraduate degree in the country, starting from Fall 2026. It has also circulated a draft policy on the use of generative AI in our universities. Both steps are welcome.
But the rules the draft sets for students rest on two ideas that will not hold. It bans students from submitting AI-generated work as their own, and it asks them to declare which tools they used and why. These are honest instincts. They are also unenforceable. No teacher can verify either one, and the draft admits as much when it rules, correctly, that no student may be punished on the basis of an AI detection report alone.
The problem is not that these rules are wrong. It is that they aim at something we cannot see. We keep arguing about what a student may do at home, when the question we can actually answer is what we choose to grade. Start with one claim, because everything else follows from it. AI multiplies existing ability. It helps whoever already has some, and it does not create ability where none exists.
