Dr. Shafiullah Qureshi, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics at the Institute of Business Administration, has published an opinion piece in Dawn questioning the practicality of the Higher Education Commission’s newly circulated guidelines on student use of generative artificial intelligence. The commission has notified a compulsory three credit hour AI course for every undergraduate and postgraduate degree in the country starting from Fall 2026, alongside a draft policy governing how students may use generative AI tools in their coursework.
According to Dr. Qureshi, the draft policy rests on two central provisions that are unlikely to hold up in practice: a ban on students submitting AI generated work as their own, and a requirement that they disclose which AI tools they used and for what purpose. While he describes both instincts as reasonable in principle, he argues they are effectively unenforceable in a real classroom setting. He points out that no teacher can realistically verify either the originality claim or the disclosure requirement, and notes that the draft policy itself acknowledges this limitation by ruling that no student may be penalized solely on the basis of an AI detection report.
The critique arrives alongside broader commentary from other education writers questioning whether HEC’s approach adequately reflects the realities of Pakistani university classrooms. Separate analysis published around the same time has argued that the policy’s disclosure requirements are difficult to enforce given large class sizes, and that if universities limit AI instruction to basic prompt writing, the resulting coursework risks holding little practical value in a job market where free chatbot access is already widespread. That commentary suggested Pakistani universities instead need to teach students how to build with AI directly, covering areas such as API integration and large scale task automation, rather than treating AI purely as a tool to be regulated through disclosure rules.
The debate around HEC’s new AI course and policy reflects a broader, ongoing conversation within Pakistan’s higher education sector about how to balance emerging technology adoption with meaningful academic standards. Separately, education stakeholders convened in recent discussions have called for greater collaboration between HEC and universities on shared AI licensing, secure institutional platforms and the development of AI tools built around Pakistani languages and local datasets, concluding that successful universities going forward will need to neither reject artificial intelligence outright nor adopt it without appropriate safeguards. As HEC moves toward implementing its compulsory AI curriculum ahead of the Fall 2026 semester, faculty voices such as Dr. Qureshi’s are likely to continue shaping how the policy is refined before it takes effect across the country’s degree programmes.
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