The fast lane generation aim at saving time

Can I submit it earlier?
Do I really need to attend?
Couldn’t ChatGPT do this faster?

These are some of the most common questions we hear during our hospitality lectures at Haaga-Helia. Students want to know when the grade will appear. A fixed class clashes with a work shift, an internship, or a project that feels closer to the career waiting outside the classroom. We have not counted the questions, but they come back course after course.

We have named this pattern the fast lane phenomenon: ohituskaista-ilmiö. By the fast lane we mean a student’s search for the quickest credible route through a course, an assignment, and often the degree itself: the least time that still produces an acceptable result.

Finnish research describes the same pull. Students at three universities framed their study time through ideals such as fast completion (Kosonen et al. 2023). It resembles the strategic approach to learning, which aims at the best assessment results (Gaynor et al. 2025). The fast lane aims at saving time. The name works if we avoid turning it into a lazy diagnosis of Generation Z. The fast lane is a strategy for navigating competing demands.

Why the shortcut looks reasonable to them

The requests we hear fall into five categories, a grouping drawn from our own teaching. Speed, flexibility, rapid feedback, career relevance, and digital shortcuts all stem from the same logic.

Students examine every part of a course and ask what it requires, what it gives them, and whether it gets them to the destination faster. They draw a sharp distinction between work that feels valuable and work that feels compulsory. This is our observation from teaching.

If an assignment looks like a document created for the teacher’s inbox, students compress it down. If a project involves a real client company, a difficult decision, or something useful for a future job, the calculation changes.

In 2022, Finnish higher education students spent more time on paid work and less time studying than in 2019 (Mäkelä 2023). This scheduling behavior is a form of triage.

Flexibility moves the pressure point. Flexible attendance, deadlines, and formats change where the pressure appears. The work itself remains. This fits the wish to submit early, as both are the same triage, where the course gets the time other demands leave.

One study tested a dual-deadline system, where an ideal submission date followed by an extension without penalty. Of the participating students 82 percent preferred this model over either a single deadline or no intermediate deadline (Ruesch & Sarvary 2024). Most students used the extension at least once, with no drop in final grades. The practical pedagogical answer is a visible structure with a safety net.

Which friction to keep

A student asking for a grade two days after submission is looking for a signal that they are moving in the right direction. Teachers cannot grade every substantial assignment overnight, and automated scores cannot replace considered human feedback.

A systematic review by Morris, Perry, and Wardle (2021) found low-stakes quizzing particularly powerful. In their studies, students who took short, lightly graded quizzes did better in their final exams. A quiz gives exactly the signal students ask for, within minutes.

We can separate confirmation from evaluation. A teacher can promise when deeper feedback will arrive and keep that promise.

Some friction in education is administrative. Waiting without information, attending a session that repeats uploaded material, or producing the same report format for the fifth time does not automatically deepen learning. Other friction is the learning.

The cost of the fast lane phenomenon shows most clearly in presentations. A student who has let generative AI do the work tends to read the script, most likely AI-written, straight from a phone. When we ask them to put the phone away, the presentation stops.

The shortcut tempts because effort feels like failure. In a controlled physics study, students in active classes learned more than those in lectures, yet felt they had learned less (Deslauriers et al. 2019). A student optimizing for time reads that effort as waste. The goal is a balance between efficiency and learning.

Defending a choice to a client, revising a concept after criticism, and discovering that the first solution fails takes time and perseverance. Generative AI can draft a plausible answer in seconds. It cannot take responsibility for the consequences of that answer. This gives us a practical test for course design.

As lecturers, we can remove friction that exists mainly for institutional convenience. We can preserve the moments where students must make, explain, and revise decisions. The fast lane phenomenon is direct feedback about what students believe is worth slowing down for. Assignments that can be bypassed without losing anything important are just administrative hurdles.

Picture: Haaga-Helia