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.
I don’t think the news should be in TIL. TIL should be for info the details of which has been around for quite a while.
Notice that these are also all ways to eliminate the few remaining places where people actually first meet in person, realize they have things in common, form groups/relationships, organize towards common goals…
It’s like they just want two people, sitting in separate rooms, depressed and constantly delivered targeted messages they control about how the other person, in the other room, hates and judges them.
This is long, but worth reading. It probably was warranted at the onset of the internet to be honest; education has changed so little despite memorization to pass a test in many subjects being worth little in the real world now. It would be supremely ironic if the suddeness of the onset of AI and the fact that institutions/educators/learners are all existentially terrified that it can actually led to critical mass that allows for updating the educational model in the US. It won’t change the rapacious nature of current actors but hopefully can allow society to better manage and process what is being forced on us by PE.
I had one class in undergrad where the teacher was like “we’re gonna cover far more than you could possibly learn in a semester. I don’t expect you to memorize it all, but you should be familiar enough with it that you could look it up if needed.” But it was a senior-level class that basically was taught with the expectation that you were gonna go into grad school and the tests questions overwhelmingly were about research methods/analyzing results, not the specific details covered in class. It works really well for that class imo, but only because it was niche enough that the next step if you wanted to learn more was either go into research within that field or read primary research papers, so it focused on teaching what you needed for those.
For most other classes, the basic facts are necessary to know to be able to do more advanced thinking. Unless you just want people who just have to blindly access whatever computers tell them is correct because they’ve lost any sense of what a reasonable answer or process is.
Yep, obviously basic knowledge familiarity is helpful, but it’s a push and pull with critical thinking, which I mentioned above has barely been taught in the US while memorizing facts has. Much more balance of the latter is needed in a world full of information.
Yeah. Its frustrating seeing how many people have no idea on how to even attempt math word problems if they don’t just have an algorithm memorized for a specific wording of a question. Or can’t tell when a problem gives additional information that isn’t necessary and complain about such. Real-world problem solving doesn’t just give you number you need and only those numbers.
Yeah. I think a lot of folks make attribution errors. They don’t remember how much introductory work is memorizing stuff, because they haven’t done introductory work in 10-30 years, so they are like 40+ and don’t understand how all their skills and experience make them not have to memorize anything… because they already know tons of stuff.
It’s like… how do you learn a foreign language? You memorize the words, the phrases, and learn the grammar to take the words you learned and put them in the correct sequence… but folks today are like ‘nah I’d rather just use my phone to translate it all and then claim I am speak a foreign language’.
Our issue is our education system isn’t teaching people memorization anymore and hasn’t done that for 20-30 years. That technique was already ‘out’ when i was a middle schooler, and frankly I had to go back and re-learn things later in life because well, I never memorized it as a kid because my school refused to teach us to do that. Like English Language Grammar. Today I doubt kids even know what grammar let alone can identify the basic parts of speech and their functions in a sentence.
Education today is so far removed from the basics. It’s funny… in countries where they do focus on rote learning… their outcomes are better. Because they actually understand knowledge in hierarchical and you can’t learn advanced things without strong foundations of the basic skills that require memorization via repetition…
Yes. Memorizing things is part of building your tool set. You can’t be flipping to look up basic info, or not even aware of it, as you progress. Having a preexisting knowledge of specific information also is necessary for making quick evaluations of situations and problems.
Oh yes, the problem definitely lies in a outdated system that seems to go against how and why people learn. Route memorization is a joke. What we need is a lot of critical thought and deep understanding which is not the goal of universities or more importantly primary education. The fact that you can graduate highschool, let alone college, without critical thinking skills is bonkers.
if you don’t know the basic facts and history of your profession, what do you know at all?
memorization is a basic skill. you can’t learn anything without memorization. the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
memorization is how you build pattern recognition.
but please go off on how memorization is ‘useless’ and how schools need to teach ‘critical thinking!’ as if critical thinking can exist without… memorizing the basic fact of anything.
That’s not how the real world has worked in a long time. Memorization of facts is essentially useless. Knowing how to find facts quickly how to analyze facts and how to apply them has far more function in modern society. That’s the difference between memorizing a multiplication table and using a calculator. Why would you memorize a multiplication table when you need to know the basis of multiplication and then utilize a tool to do that work for you much quicker? Its like saying you need to learn to write cursive before typing on a computer.
“I’m ok with my surgeon not having memorized anatomy. He can look it up.”
what is the ‘real world’ then?
am I in a fake world, because memorizing shit is what I do all day. I have to do that because it’s my job to know things and teach those things ti other people… I guess my 150K IT security job is ‘fake’ though, right?
how can you find a fact if you don’t eve know what a fact is or isn’t? what if i google a multiplication table and it tells me 2 x 2 = 16? am i suppose to just take that as the ‘answer’ even though I have memorized it’s 4?
the analogy at the end doesn’t really make sense. the goal of wriiting cursive was to speed up the ability to record information via text. typing and the ubiquity of computers has basically made cursive vestigial. memorization of facts is important to fully grasp complex problems. you don’t need to sit down and memorize by staring at a sheet of paper, but eventually if you look something up enough times, you should be able to memorize it, so that you can mentally go “oh it’s that” and move on, which allows you to juggle multiple of these types of things at a time.
how are you going to quickly analyze whether a fact is true without enough knowledge to verify core concepts? a better example in your rationale would be “its like saying you need to learn chemistry and metallurgy before you can become a mechanic”, which is obviously absurd. but would you trust a mechanic to fix your car after a crash, or properly diagnose if it was totaled, if he had to ask you where the manual is for your car first?
Lol that it’s faster to use a calculator than recall a memorized result.
I am very so so at math and can do an unmemorized calculation faster than pulling out and typing it into a calculator.
The point is that memorization doesn’t mean much when you can easily access facts, e.g. through the internet, and now perhaps put them in maybe a useful context situation with an LLM.
Facts without critical thinking is where we’ve gone post-war in the US, and it’s yielded thinking that has gotten us where we are.
right, so why bother with education at all?
let’s just hire 5 year olds with tablets. clearly just as good as a 25 year old with a master’s degree in engineering.
both of them are just gonna google everything and input into the LLM anyway, right?
Experience is still the most critical part. Having the knowledge (not simply knowing facts) and being able to synthesize that knowledge is what makes the 50 year old engineer with decades of experience more valuable than the 5 year old with an LLM.
How do you get experience? oh right… buy doing shit… which is from memory…
So what you did there is called logical fallacy called a “straw man”, where you suggest an argument that the other party isn’t advocating as a way of avoiding the actual discussion. Bill O’Riley was famous for them as much if his entire approach to “discussion”, and one of the reasons attempting to debate someone who isn’t seriously interested in a discussion is generally a waste of time.
Best of luck.
No, jackass. You put up the straw man. It’s called ‘memorization’ there.
But I’m not surprised you go around telling other people their arguments are logical wrong, rather than, realize it’s your own that are…
How are you even typing sentences to me in the English language? Maybe because… you memorized the language, it’s grammar, it’s rules, and you use it every moment of every day of your life? Who taught you that, did it just spontaneously occur, or did you learn it by using google?
the very fact you can write comments here undermines your own argument that ‘memorization is worthless’. but your own critical thinking is so stunted you don’t even realize that. you’re under the false impression that you can run a marathon without knowing how to walk, and why bought teaching people to walk, because everyone can just drive a car 26.2 miles rather than walk or run!
You are the reason the education system is so horrid, because everyone thinks like you. And they make arguments to avoid learning the basics rather than… shutting up and doing it. Just like the kids in PE class who would sit out ‘in protest’, who then wondered why it hurt when they ran…
Ad hom, nice touch. Find a hole to scream into.
If it’s a month old, it’s probably news vs TIL.
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.
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
I just realised why I find AI enthusiasts so repulsive. I was already aware of how rude it is for someone to share the output from an LLM. Someone sharing an opinion they formed based on such an interaction, I realised is as repugnant, if not more.
Or to put it in a different way: “I couldn’t form my own opinion on the matter. So I shook a magic 8 cube a bunch of times, and the ‘conversation’ we had, is something I think is worth while for others to hear”.
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.
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
How do you get the connections to beta test games?
Now, you have to know someone to be referenced if you want to get paid. If you want play games for free, you can always apply for closed or open betas; at lot of times stress tests are needed as well as hardware tests. Then again “early access” has become a bit of a plague to that.
You also get the perk of not reporting glitches. I don’t know if you’ve played World of Warcraft, there was a fun reason they implemented a global cooldown for skills. One reason was you could write a macro to swap weapons and do a backstab or ambush with the slowest blunt weapon possible. Oh the joys of 4k to 8k crits. It was quite a bit of a “solo leveling” dungeon experience. I mean if you think about it, getting
backstabbedrearended with a big blunt mace probably would be a more serious crit than a tiny dagger.
It was sad to see that students with so much access to tech became so … I don’t even know.
Tech became too easy to use. In the 00s, you’d need to have an understanding of file paths. You’d need to know where a programmes files were located, to fix whatever broke
Eventually “auto repair” became the standard, then we moved onto handheld consoles (smartphones and tablets). Which relied on app stores, that already confirmed the app wouldn’t destroy anything. So all these annoying to deal with issues just… Vanished. But so did skill, because you never needed the skill to solve a problem in the first place
The skills simply change over time. It’s great that you could muck about and maybe fix something back in the day, but does that same skill apply to modern architecture? No. The true skill you learned what your ability to be curious, to constantly learn and improve, and use those skills across a wide variety of problems, not just simple tech issues. Those are the skills we should be teaching the next and future generation, rather than what the classic education paradigm has been, which is memorization and how to show up on time, to make good factory workers, which are existing less and less in the modern world. Does AI help or harm that? It’s just another tool that can be used in good or bad ways, just like the calculator.
In a way you’re right but a lot of this comes at a cost. As in people are not used to being bored anymore. Not being bored leads to less creative thinking and procrastination. Internet is out, well I guess I’m working on the motorcycle instead of sitting at the computer.
AI harms curiosity
but does that same skill apply to modern architecture
Architecture hasn’t changed all that much. It’s just more hidden
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.
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?
no, silly, learning is a waste of time.
half the people on lemmy basically think education is stupid and pointless unless it immediately and directly needs to employment. they’d rather we stick 13 year olds in internships.
If they only have 5 minutes of homework tonight, then that should be OK.
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…
I hate this so much
AI will not make people more productive
I dunno, for me at least it’s less about ‘AI’ making me more productive, but rather automation that absolutely makes me more productive. Ai certainly makes the process of getting automations in place a whole lot quicker. Any time I do something repeatedly that I don’t want to do, it’s the question of ‘how can I automate this process’, and that frees up time for other things, and ensures that what I do is more accurate. That’s not something new because of ‘AI’, but rather python has been the beacon for that for many years, with tons of books on the topic.
Creating efficient automations is the basic must-have-skill of a good engineer. If you outsource that to a slop bot, you surrender to being a replacable mediocre button pusher. And your slop automations will be shit.
AI is like the microwave. Sure it a huge time saver to eat a microwave meal but that doesn’t make a good cook obsolete.
The last Windows Patch Tuesday had almost 1000 patches.
And it fucking broke Windows.
It wasnt broken before?
I should have said broke more.
Yep, lots of stuff to fix. Its been in bad shape for decades.
Not sure why you got downvoted for that. It’s true.
The conclusion of the report looks like they are all in on saturating their university with ai use
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 more 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.
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.
…finding LLMs that write half-decent prose?
They don’t. In fact, newer LLMs are regressing on that aspect.
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.
the goal of most admins is juking stats. it’s not educating kids. thy are only concerned because test scores are going down, if they went up, they’d be worshiping AI.
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.
We know this institution will change their mind as soon as they start producing synths.
