Segal describes the paradigmatic case in You On AI: a teacher who stopped grading her students' essays and started grading their questions. She gave the class a topic and an AI tool. The assignment was not to produce an essay but to produce the five questions one would need to ask before writing an essay worth reading. The students who produced the best questions demonstrated the deepest engagement with the material.
A good question cannot be generated by prompting an AI tool, because generating a good question requires the specific evaluative capacity that prompting produces the appearance of without the substance. The question-based pedagogy develops the capacity that AI cannot substitute for: the evaluative judgment to assess whether an output is substantively correct, appropriately contextualized, and responsive to the actual complexity of the problem it addresses.
The approach inherits from the Socratic method, the Oxford tutorial, and the ars interrogandi of Renaissance humanism. These pedagogies share the conviction that the quality of inquiry is more diagnostic of understanding than the quality of production — a conviction that centuries of answer-focused industrial education obscured but that AI has made unavoidable.
The institutional adoption will be slow. Grading rubrics have not been redesigned for question evaluation; standardized assessments measure output quality. The teacher who adopts the pedagogy works against the grain of her institution. But her innovation serves as a prototype — the armorer working at the bench while the factory is being designed.
The pedagogical move is ancient, inherited from Socratic dialogue and monastic scholarship. Its AI-era revival appears in Segal's You On AI and in educational research on AI-resistant assessment emerging in 2024–2026.
Questions reveal comprehension. Formulating a good question requires identifying what one does not understand — a harder operation than demonstrating what one does.
AI cannot substitute. Prompting produces the appearance of evaluative capacity without the substance; question-grading requires the substance.
Ancient pedagogy, new urgency. The Socratic tradition supplies the method; the AI moment supplies the necessity.
Working against the metrics. Institutional adoption lags individual innovation, leaving the innovating teacher unsupported.