When Student Work Looks Right, but No One Is Thinking

📅 Tuesday, April 21, 2026      🕐 11 AM CT | 30 minutes

A conversation for strategy, management, and capstone faculty — and for academic leaders focused on strengthening critical thinking in their programs.

Student work has never looked better across business schools. Writing is polished. Presentations are clean. Strategy recommendations sound increasingly professional.

But ask a simple follow-up question: Why that direction? What tradeoffs did you weigh? What would you do if conditions changed?

That’s where the reasoning often begins to unravel. The deliverable looks right, but the thinking behind it doesn't hold up.

AI didn’t create this gap. But it has made it harder to ignore.

It’s tempting to treat this as a technology problem. But in many cases, the deeper issue is learning design.

Many assignments let students move directly from prompt to answer. The messy middle — weighing options, committing to a direction, and dealing with consequences — quietly disappears.

But that middle is where critical thinking actually forms. And in a market where polished output is easy to generate, the ability to demonstrate real thinking is increasingly what differentiates graduates.

In this session, Dr. Erich Dierdorff will explore how course design shapes the thinking behind student work. He'll outline principles for structuring experiences where reasoning can't be skipped, shortcuts don't work, and students must do the hard thinking themselves.