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 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.
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.
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.