This year’s US Open golf tournament is at Oakmont, a golf course near Pittsburgh. It’s famously hard. Now it’s punishingly hard.

I’m not a golf fan but my interest was piqued learning about the course’s history, how they removed 15,000 trees to return it to the designer’s vision, and the “carnage” wrought on pro golfers.

Can educators learn something?

Maybe golf score deflation has followed grade inflation. What’s the point of a golf tournament when the winner is 25 under par, as Scottie Sheffler did at the “Hero World Challenge.” Par is supposed to be what a pro would should. 25 strokes below that number seems just wrong.

Only 4 golfers are under par heading into the final day of this year’s US Open. The leader is at -4. The rough is 5.5 inches high and thick.

It’s the “hardest golf course in the world” and it’s giving the pros fits. Rigor has increased. No one is shooting 25 under par.

Maybe education should follow suit in the era of AI. Why assign a simplistic analysis of a novel, which AI can knock out of the park (well, against US high school or undergrad standards)? Why not make the work harder, requiring AI to complete successfully. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” AI is that fulcrum and, yes, it has many issues including fake citations, hallucinations etc. Make students responsible for the result of their work. Doing so would require they read and understand the work they create with AI – be responsible for it. Like a knowledge worker.

Yes, issues of equity and assessment (how would the student’s teacher efficiently evaluate this work?). But educators are resisting, stapling AI “literacy” onto existing curricula and avoiding the step function that will have 10x or 100x the impact of the automobile in 10x less time.