I remember the moment I knew my approach to student use of artificial intelligence was not working.

Early in a meeting at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus last fall, a philosophy professor, arms crossed over his chest, told me he’d tried one of the strategies my office had suggested — talking with his students about the ways A.I. could interfere with their learning — and it hadn’t worked. His students had listened politely, then several of them had used A.I. to write their papers anyway. He particularly wanted me to know that “even the good students,” the ones who showed up to class wanting to talk about the readings, were using A.I. to avoid work outside class.

This was a theme I’d hear over and over, listening to faculty members across disciplines at the end of the semester; even some of the students who obviously cared about the material and seemed to like the classes were no longer doing the hard work of figuring out what they wanted to say. Our A.I. strategy had assumed that encouraging engaged uses of A.I. — telling students they could use software like ChatGPT to generate practice tests to quiz themselves, explore new ideas or solicit feedback — would persuade students to forgo the lazy uses. It did not.

We cannot simply redesign our assignments to prevent lazy A.I. use. (We’ve tried.) If you ask students to use A.I. but critique what it spits out, they can generate the critique with A.I. If you give them A.I. tutors trained only to guide them, they can still use tools that just supply the answers. And detectors are too prone to false accusations of cheating and too poor at catching lightly edited output for professors to rely on them.

Learning is a change in long-term memory; that’s the biological correlate of what we do in the classroom. Now that most mental effort tied to writing is optional, we need new ways to require the work necessary for learning. That means moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward in-class blue book essays, oral examinations, required office hours and other assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time. The shift is already happening: The Wall Street Journal reported on booming sales of blue books last school year.

Students and teachers alike are skeptical of these changes. One professor I know described her new reliance on in-class work as “teaching high school.” But these strategies do not represent a loss of rigor. They are simply a return to an older, more relational model of higher education.

Talking, listening and reading have been part of academic culture since the beginning, but written assignments — the five-paragraph essay, the research paper, reading responses — were not. In the earliest universities, which coalesced in a handful of European cities around a thousand years ago, books were scarce, movable type was nonexistent, and education was organized around oral instruction and examination.