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.
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.
Cheating in college was already an arms race, yet nobody asked for it to become the norm…