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.
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.