assessment failure

When Performance Becomes Free, Learning Becomes Invisible

Student studying alone in vast library with empty desks and open books, illustrating how AI makes learning invisible while completion metrics show success

For two centuries, the ability to perform a task well signaled that someone had learned to do it. This assumption—implicit, universal, structural—organized how we hired, certified, credentialed, and allocated human capital across civilization. It was never perfect. But it worked because producing sophisticated performance required possessing the capability that performance demonstrated. That coupling broke between When Performance Becomes Free, Learning Becomes Invisible