The Medieval Turn

The medieval turn is Shirky's name for the assessment strategy that educational institutions must adopt when the take-home assignment has been rendered unreliable by AI. If students can produce competent essays, problem sets, and analyses through conversation with a language model, the assessment infrastructure that measured learning through those artifacts no longer measures learning. The response Shirky proposed — in-class assessment, oral examination, blue-book essays, Socratic interrogation — is simultaneously radical and ancient. Radical because it requires dismantling the assessment infrastructure universities spent decades building. Ancient because the replacement predates the printing press. The turn is an ascending response: the lower-level assessment (take-home work) has been rendered unreliable; the higher-level assessment (live demonstration) ascends to a level the technology cannot reach.