At about US$1,400 a subject, Macquarie swapped in-person psychology tutorials for an AI chatbot and one Zoom per 70 students

Macquarie University, one of Australia's largest, has replaced in-person tutorials in two mandatory psychology units with an AI chatbot called Virtual Peer, weekly online quizzes, and optional Zoom sessions. In-person teaching will return in alternate semesters from 2027, a structure the university says lets students pick the format that suits them.

The swap comes at full undergraduate price. Each psychology subject costs A$2,174 (about US$1,400 at typical 2026 exchange rates) for Australian students with Commonwealth-supported places in 2026, and a three-year degree now runs past A$50,000 (roughly US$33,000). For that fee, paid tutors still run optional Zoom sessions: six a week for an introductory subject of about 400 students, ten a week for a final-year subject of about 700, which works out to roughly one session per 70 classmates. The AI activities and online quizzes are not graded; assessment sits in separate research tasks and exams.

One psychology student, granted anonymity by The Guardian, said they felt "short-changed" after being funnelled into the online option. "Instead of a group discussion or a tutor teaching you, it's a class activity done with a robot. I feel like I'm teaching this robot how to take jobs away from my teachers," they said.

Macquarie describes Virtual Peer as built with educators to support, not replace, them. According to the Macquarie researchers project page, professors upload the content the chatbot draws on and review it. Macquarie can monitor student conversations on the tool, a control layer the university says makes the system less prone to hallucination. Virtual Peer has answered close to 80,000 student questions, though the Guardian's source text is truncated at that figure and the full count is not confirmed.

A March 2025 Microsoft News release reported that Macquarie students' exam scores rose by nearly 10 per cent using the AI-powered chatbot. The Microsoft News page is a co-marketing surface, so the 10% figure is a vendor-reported result rather than an independent evaluation, and it predates the in-person suspension by more than a year.

The 2027 alternate-semester return turns the swap into a deliberate A/B test. The same cohort will get in-person teaching one semester and the AI-led version the next, on the same A$2,174 fee. The data that test produces, including attendance, exam scores, withdrawal rates, and student satisfaction measured against a control subject, is the only result that can settle whether the fee still buys what the brochure promises.