Michigan is one of the best universities in the country, and it answered a student distress problem by deciding to cover first-semester grades. The number I think its administrators were looking at is true, excellent, and aggregated at exactly the level where the actual problem disappears. This is how capable people miss a root cause, and it is the same error the college-ROI research made for twenty years.
Juniors learned the trade by doing the grunt work next to seniors. AI is cutting the grunt work and remote work is cutting the proximity, so the apprenticeship that quietly made partners is breaking, and few firms I know of are designing a replacement. Who becomes the next partner?
Michigan said it will cover first-semester grades, and the internet answered in a day. Some replies were careful, most were not, and nobody could tell them apart without doing the work. That is a market failure with a Nobel Prize behind it. It explains why good arguments go unread, why I chose to argue without standing anyway, and what anyone with an audience can do about it in about a minute.
Michigan’s College of LSA will stop putting first-semester letter grades on transcripts, to help students explore and to curb a mental health crisis. The pressure is real. The evidence on hiding grades mostly runs the other way, and the university kept the measure for itself.
The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and more than two decades of fund scoreboards show nearly nine in ten large-cap funds trailing the plain index over fifteen years. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, and for most uses there is no scoreboard. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
A genre of social media post promises the prompts that replace McKinsey: the SWOT, the market analysis, the deck. Nine prompts, sometimes ten. Every list I have seen omits the same one, the prompt that checks whether the AI got any of it wrong. That omission is the tell. The deck was never the product. The checking was, and it still has to be human.