cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/71499854
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.
Study groups are the best part of university.
I learned more in study groups than in some classes, because we’d all hit our heads until someone had an idea, then they had to explain it in a way 6 or more other people understood. Explaining an idea is much harder than thinking of it. Then we’d challenge it, we’d discuss it, build on it, and sometimes we’d show up at the prof’s office door to ask them about it.
It would be a tragedy to see them disappear to closed off AI based chats.
*college or A university.
It was fine as it was
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.
Undergrads are notoriously criminally underpaid. This is the academic equivalent of taking all the pennies out of the “Take a Penny Leave a Penny” tray to save money.
In the 80s it was “market rate.” In engineering my TA position paid $14k a year + free tuition. The money was a little less than half of what I could earn in industry at the time, but free tuition (and an actual job offer instead of an open-ended job hunt) made it attractive enough to keep me around for a Master’s degree. They offered me a PhD, with a raise to $18k/yr for the TA-ship, again right at 1/2 of what my MS was worth on the open market - I had had enough of academia, no thanks. Only took 6 weeks to find a “real” job.
Over in the business school, they had a lot more students competing for the TA positions, over there they paid $4k per year + free tuition. Seems that more business students come from families where their expenses continue to be paid by family through 6+ years of college.
I co-taught a lab with one other TA vs about 15 students, and we helped grade papers for the lecture class… could we have been replaced with AI? Maybe, but would AI stand over your shoulder and ask you “what happens when I pull this wire out of your breadboard?” then talk you through the reasons why your quick and dirty design may work in the lab, but it doesn’t meet design specifications and will likely fail in real-world use where it’s used millions of times a minute for years instead of 3 or 4 times for a bench test - pulling that wire is the same as your design being completely incorrect, and yet: your bench tests are all still passing… think about that.
Right, I read that and I was like saving what money lmao I never got paid as an undergrad researcher
I worked in industry for 12 years at market rates after getting my MS degree. In years 10-12 we hired post-docs to do some fancy lab work and publish findings - I could do that work but I was focused on other concerns. Welp, thanks to 9-11 those other concerns lost their funding, but the lab work continued. I inquired about possibly serving as the next lab-tech… those post docs were being paid less than 1/3 what I was making at industry rates. They were still getting around mostly on their bicycles, catching rides with other people when needed, and they had pretty much as many years of study and lab experience after getting their MS as I did industry experience, they just chose to continue on the PhD and Post-doctoral track for some reason… maybe they really like bicycles?
LOL…I guess MIT woke up finally.
My institution made sweeping changes to de-digitize a year ago, and it’s only increasing back to pen and paper, chalkboards. Writing and assignments are now pointless unless we teach how to use LLMs.
I went through Uni just as word processing was becoming accessible to students. Most assignments were still blue ink on paper… which really sucked for me because my handwriting is trash, easily bottom 2% in legibility even when I try hard and go super slow. The word processor was a “great equalizer” for me, I can type fine. For the pen-on-paper traditionalists, the thought of making “an accomodation” to allow someone like me to type instead of write my answers and papers was inconceivable, I may as well just withdraw from the program if I’m not capable of writing pen on paper - in their minds.
Back then we also had pen-plotters. They weren’t quite good enough to fool anyone that you were hand-drawing a thing, but they were pen-on-paper, very different from impact or laser printers. Since then, pen-plotters indistinguishable from handwriting have come out - and with AI/ML/LLMs I’d bet they can train on and mimic individuals’ handwriting indistinguishable from the real thing, you just have to smudge the finished product a little, put some skin-oils on the page for authenticity.
A little slow to things eh MIT?
