A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
TIL is supposed to be like an interesting or suprising fact. or an easy overlooked lifehack.
this is like randomly picking a research paper and having chatgpt summarize it, then post it as TIL .
additionally, do we even know that this is a fact? its really just the outcome of their own case study. it probably says something about the intersection of education and technology at the current moment. but that could all change in less than a year.Thanks for posting this. It bothered me too but I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. It’s almost as bad as the soapbox rants that get posted to the asklemmy comms with “What do you think?” at the end.
Appreciate the summary, although I don’t even like holding office hours so I don’t mind that. The rest are depressing, though.
That said… my own experience doesn’t match up on the take-homes being useless. My God the way answers math problems are so bizarrely incorrect that I’ve given more 0s than I have in my entire fucking life.
At least, upside, my holistic approach with a lot of discussion, projects and oral components to assignments are really shining. Helps that my classes are only 25 max though- I can’t imagine how bad 80-300 classes are.
I had Claude read the results. Sounds like the changes are all positive and nobody should rethink their investments or effect on society at all
Silver lining is that even before AI, courses were bloated with busywork. Though it likely won’t happen, there’s a possibility that trimming down on coursework would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Save time on learning? Isn’t that where you should take time?
If they only have 5 minutes of homework tonight, then that should be OK.
This will not change. This will continue because every one of those things hold short term benefits for individuals, long term be damned.
No study groups? Students will see that as a win.
No office hours? More convenient for students. Professors / admin save time or money.
Homework and tests No longer work means Students and professors wont have to do them, or no longer spend much time on them.
Students lose mastery and confidence means more reliant on AI, and there is no way this is lost on tech bros as a selling point.
The free market WILL NOT solve this problem. These are classic externalities and capitalism DGAF about problems that don’t show up on the cost ledger.
This has been going on for a while. Even before llms. When I was younger, I was actually educated as in trying new things and learning about them. Then came the proficiency test focus of leave every child behind. Then came in gutting classes and programs to only focus on tests and sports. Then came the charging money for sports. Then when I worked in education; it got worse. You would have kids that are 14 that can’t write two sentences; can’t write an email without auto-correct; struggled to read, it looked like someone smacked a keyboard to try and write something. And so on; it’s just the next level of going downwards.
It was sad to see that students with so much access to tech became so … I don’t even know.
When I was thirteen I was writing programs, using pretty much any multimedia software, beta testing games (how to get free games for 500), tweaking the lawnmower engine (to mow the lawn faster, that pesky governor lol), and so on.
So you’re right, this won’t change, maybe when it backfires it might. But this is creating a huge void, not even a brain drain anymore. There’s going to be a general malfunction to society. I mean it’s sad
Swathes of the world are going full cyberpunk, for sure.
Oh I might be as well. I already have a partially titanium and bone leg. IM rod. And to lessen the pain; I’m thinking of getting something that’s like a Sandevistan. As in strands implanted in my spine with an electronic controller … that well I plan to hack. Who knows how that will work out but I’m also pretty dumb.
I am afraid that will be as proprietary as a HP printer cartridge.
…Not that it wouldn’t be fun to try the hack.
It’s not like I haven’t reverse engineered stuff before lol. I would share it. The only scary part is that well it’s modding your body. Kinda like the old school EEG stuff you can build at home, could kill you if you made a mistake.
How to solve this, then, from these bullet points:
Hire more grad assistants. Get them to administer one-on-one oral defenses —they’ll only need 10 minutes or less — of the undergraduates’ take-home exams. Watch the undergrads fucking crumple and get washed out. Those who are left are the ones who’d use office hours and study groups anyway.
Agreed except the office hours/study groups. I worked full time at uni and could not go to these as often as I wanted.
My partner was a grad student in Italy and I liked how they administered an oral exam for each student. Pretty easy to separate wheat from chaff that way I think, and quickly
Why not just start enforcing Anti-AI? Underperformers would still be tempted to use AI and then flunk themselves when they otherwise could have succeeded.
They do, but it’s an arms race and assessors have limited time. And if you get it wrong (and they didn’t use AI) then you’ve put an innocent person through a process that can be rather degrading.
So it ends up being that only the most egeregious cases get addressed and the smarter cheats get through.
I hate this so much
AI will not make people more productive
The last Windows Patch Tuesday had almost 1000 patches.
And it fucking broke Windows.
It wasnt broken before?
I should have said broke more.
The conclusion of the report looks like they are all in on saturating their university with ai use
What does MIT have to say about Palestine?
What does that have to do with the topic?
Ya for those who don’t know MIT banned a number of students from their own graduation for protesting in support of Palestine on campus… This was a HUGE deal among both the student body and many alumni. Unfortunately every US college is beholden to the their endowment, and in MIT’s case the massive endowment isn’t primarily from their own alumni. I wouldn’t say this impacts the quality of research occuring on campus though, with such a large endowment they do a very good job separating the funding from the science.
I publish book reviews on business books, the interactions have almost dropped to zero as have people in those channels. I imagine it’s related.
I try not to have discussions about AI online that are too lengthy, because I know no one really convinces anyone else, but every time I see someone talk about how they use local open weight models and how that makes their AI use ethical I think of scenarios exactly like this. That AI got the information from somewhere and that book or forum post or think piece is not getting the buys/engagement/ad revenue because the AI basically stole it. People aren’t joining communities and adding to a public knowledge base. They are just quietly solving their issue alone without contributing to the ecosystem that helped fix the issue and the ecosystems that sprung up around those.
It feels like a loss of so much. A loss of interest in research, but also of community, of a desire to share. I remember being on forums and knowing that if user X responded it was going to be the most thorough, interesting read. I remember following specific users because even if their post wasn’t directly relevant to me at the moment, I wanted to learn all I could from them. Not to be an old man screaming at a cloud, but I think AI is stripping a lot away from the younger generation that they don’t even know to miss, and I think that’d be true even if AI always provided the most engaging, in depth, accurate responses you could find on the internet.
I feel every word you typed. 💔
All true.
This was happening before “AI” though. It’s just oil for the fire.
I feel for you. I’m sure for authors, publishers, and consumers that such books and reviews have lost all credibility if sloppers can generate fakes with ease. It’s difficult to know whats real and can be trusted versus what’s just wasting our time.
Without a doubt.
And people who don’t know any better will believe what AI says. I see it at work all the time. People producing pages and pages of slop.
People join calls, output AI notes that clearly show they weren’t paying attention at all.
Sincere question: Can anyone explain to me where the youths are finding LLMs that write half-decent prose?
2-3 years ago, I would’ve bet money that the future was gonna be bluebook exams for every subject, but clearly I was wrong. I don’t get how you successfully cheat with ChatGPT in a productive way if you’re writing on paper with the teacher watching, call me old fashioned.
…finding LLMs that write half-decent prose?
They don’t.
But I am surprised the institutional response has been so slow. This is existential; every school should be moving heaven and earth to do stuff exactly like blue book tests.
So then teach stuff that AI cant solve for them.
We still teach math that calculators can solve for you. If they don’t understand the foundational stuff how will they understand things too complicated for the AI?
You can still teach it in a way that AI cant, right?
