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.
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?
Damn, almost the perfect analogy. Technology and tools make humans able to do things faster, more effectively and often more accurately.
You recognize that most mechanics would literally have Hayes manuals to do exactly that right?
I swear, it’s like folks don’t think before they type. Everyone uses reference information to pull from. Law books, medical books, scientific papers. No way do you memorize all or even the majority of it. You use these materials because you know how to look up information quickly, and the information is accurate, so you synthesize ideas and thoughts around it.