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.
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.
Does it matter if it can’t write half-decent prose if none of your classmates can either and the system just adapts to that to avoid failing 70% of students.
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.
why would they do any of that? it isn’t in their interest.
If no one ever does any of the actual work, then the degree becomes meaningless. Why hire an MIT grad if they no longer demonstrate any of the skills and knowledge that come with 4 years of intense study, practice and research? And once that happens, why pay MiT the cost of a house to educate anyone?
Because of the Prestige.
Schools like MIT and ivys don’t teach you anything you can’t get at State Uni.
What they get you is social prestige, that is far more valuable than anything you could ever learn. And people are desperate for it.
Besides that, have you ever met an average student? They don’t want to do work. Often, they are so invested in avoiding doing the work, they will spend more time to not do it, than it would take, do it. Most students are only in school, even at university level, because it’s something they are ‘forced’ to do. Because learning is hard and painful, and human beings desperately avoid it at all costs unless they are weirdos.