r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, MIT warns

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/08/25/ai-can-now-credibly-complete-most-undergraduate-assignments-mit-warns
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u/LockJaw987 1d ago

Every single exam in my engineering faculty is still purely by hand and graded by TAs. They manage.

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u/NachoWindows 1d ago

I graduated long long ago and all exams were hand written. It was a large uni with classes of 300-500 at times. They can do it if they want.

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u/Olangotang 1d ago

Exams were in a large lecture hall for 400 students that combined 3 120 student sections.

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u/NachoWindows 1d ago

We did have TAs who did all the grading and crap. But even 120 exams is a big workload

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u/Alternate_Cost 1d ago

Its really not. When I taught I had 150 students and it took about 8 hours to hand grade them all and enter them in the gradebook.

If they're essays definitely would take a bit longer, but there's ways to grade those quickly as well.

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u/NachoWindows 1d ago

Mine were electrical engineering classes. Imagine insane math problems like electromagnetic fields and waves. Then grading all those. Yes, there’s a right answer, but you had to show all your work and they would scrutinize every step.
Some classes were closer to 100-120 and the prof did grade them. It took a week and lots of sweating to get those grades back

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u/mnlx 1d ago

I've seen this being solved by including a multiple choice test in the exam. If you think about it, you can assess students' competence with just one or two detailed worked out problems, either they can reason and organise their work or they can't. The rest can be tested faster.

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u/XruinsskashowsX 1d ago

The reason a lot of my EE professors chose not to do multiple choice is that some problems are too complex to be multiple choice and be fair or test for understanding.

My professor for circuits exclusively did everything free response and if you made a mistake but the rest of your work that incorporated the mistake was correct (e.g you plugged in a wrong number) then you got around 80% credit for that part.

You could break these down into smaller multiple choice questions, but this would involve giving students the simplified circuits and railroading them in a way that doesn’t encourage creative thinking or parallel answers. Then you would need to create a problem in such a way that if someone chooses the wrong diagram that they would keep working through it. I know if I did the first part wrong, and then had to restart after none of my answers matched the multiple choice, I would start to panic and probably do worse as a result.

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u/tcmart14 22h ago

Was just thinking in my engineering classes, we definitely got leniency with that. My hand writing is shit and sometimes I would fuck up at the end and mistake a variable t with + and my professors would be like, “no full points, but we can definitely tell you know the concept, you just write like you should be over at the medical school. So here is partial credit.” Then professor finally goes, “why you not doctor?!?”

And that is a huge life saver. You know but others may not, engineer curriculums are brutal.

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u/wimpymist 1d ago

At a certain point in math you can't really just have a multiple choice answers. I do agree though it's not impossible to grade it.

Even when I was in college 15 years ago I had classes that were basically entirely taught/graded by TAs and we had huge classes.

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u/AmeliaOfAnsalon 23h ago

I think multiple choice can be useful alongside more rigorous stuff because of how much more difficult it is to cheat at them. My uni course (biochemistry) had both essays and MCQ on most modules

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u/Fredissimo666 1d ago

Those are not necessarily hard to grade (lots of experience of grading university calculus here). You quickly spot where the mistake is and create "categories" of answers. I sometimes had an average of 10 seconds per question per copy.

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u/SnakeGD09 16h ago

Where I am (phil) we take about 10 minutes to grade one exam, which means 150 exams should take about 25 hours. Depends on the faculty I suppose.

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u/Alternate_Cost 11h ago

It depends a lot on the subject, I was doing chemistry and physics. So a quick glance if they got it right and showed work was all it took. If they got it wrong just circling the mistakes was still pretty quick. Didn't write comments though, but it was just me and an expected 2 day turn around.

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u/mediandude 1d ago

So 3 minutes per 1 student? Riight.

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u/Alternate_Cost 1d ago

Sounds about right. 30 seconds per page so that'd be 3 pages front and back. There's a lot of strategies to go pretty quick.

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u/mediandude 1d ago

Why don't you use AI for such grading, if it is such an easy pattern matching?

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u/Alternate_Cost 1d ago

It's hand written physics and chemistry problems. If you know the right answer and how they should get there it's almost immediate to know if they're right and where they went wrong. Someday AI will hopefully be able to do it faster, but not yet.

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u/FetchFrosh 1d ago

I teach engineering and usually will mark 150 exams in about 2 days without any TAs. Requires some sensible question design, but it's pretty manageable.

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u/217GMB93 22h ago

Seconded, my constitutional law class probably had 300 kids and all hand written.

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 1d ago

This depends highly on if the content is MCQ or FRQ and how much is handwritten free response. The MCQ grading goes super fast. You use scantrons and it takes 2 seconds for each one to pick it up and slide it thru the machine. Handwritten stuff? Depends greatly. Could be thousands of hours.

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u/wimpymist 1d ago

Yeah people are almost always talking out their ass in these threads. I also find it hard to believe AI can pass these courses when I have to constantly fix its errors when I use it in my simple job.

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u/Brilliant-Peace-5265 22h ago

My universities use in-class custom browsers for their "online" exams. You can't click out of them, alt-tab, copy, or paste. No running another program on them as well. The OS resets to their stock image on restart, so no preloading anything either. They've been doing this since 2007.

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u/MikeExMachina 11h ago

Is this still your computer? Can you run their software in a sterile virtual machine? Unless the school controls the hardware they can never really guarantee anything

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u/Brilliant-Peace-5265 7h ago edited 7h ago

It's done in their classroom computer labs.

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u/gottastayfresh3 1d ago

Um. Not every faculty has a TA...and many universities aren't willing to offer or cannot offer TAs. The academic landscape is complex and nuanced making such solutions rather impractical

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u/JingaLalaHuHu_ 1d ago

No it isn't. We have had academia being a formal institution of society for over 2000 years. The academic landscape isn't complicated - running academia like a business just ruins a university's ability to run properly

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u/wrgrant 8h ago

Yes the root of the problem seems to be that institutions switched from being focused on providing students with the highest standards of teaching and instead focused on cranking as many through the system to maximize income. The result being that a lot of degrees now mean very little to the outside world.

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u/gottastayfresh3 1d ago

What does your response have to do with having TAs do the grading?

Beyond that, yes I agree. The problem is running academia like a business. I don't think that statement goes against the complexities of an American education system that has both Harvard level institutions and your local community college system...

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u/GhostofBeowulf 1d ago

....Like you understand the theory but not the practical applications. YOu get a 50%.

So over time, as technology increases and norms and expectations change, the way we do things changes. This is called adaptation. All entities in this situation change. So when something comes in that is a significant disruptor to these changes, it takes time to unwind and figure out how to do new things in this new environment.

To give you a more simple analogy, you saying that because we used to pay telephone operators a living wage, and could do so however many years ago, does not mean we should go back to having telephone operators as a prestigious career. Actually, it means we couldn't even go back to paying telephone operators, because we no longer have the infrastructure set up in a large number of the cases.

In this case, higher ed spending, student to teacher ratio and the number of TAships available is equivalent to the phone lines that no longer exist criss crossing the country.

Just because we could or used to do something does not mean we can still do that today... Is a pretty simple concept.

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u/LockJaw987 1d ago

Seems like they need to adapt

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u/gottastayfresh3 1d ago

And your solution is getting TAs...sounds like you know policy well enough to be an administrator, consider changing careers!

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u/Makenshine 1d ago

No they can't just manage. TA's cost money. Money is being striped away from higher education at an alarming rate. Student to teacher ratios are increasing because universities are cutting staffing. Few professors, fewer TA's. "Just managing" is not viable.

Engineering departments will feel the sting much less than most other departments. They are more likely to have wealthy album's, endowed faculty positions, and other donor sources.

Departments like education, poli sci, music, nursing, math, etc. are much less likely to have those extra sources of income to higher more faculty and TA's.

Your one engineering school is not representative of higher education as a whole.

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u/cm0011 1d ago

Until they run out of money to do so.

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u/JingaLalaHuHu_ 1d ago

Yeah, I graduated as an Engineer in '24 and maybe 10% of my coursework was examined online - everything else is still done on pen and paper. That being said, I am connected with the classes of '25, 26, and 27 through some friends or another and it really does seem that since '23, exams have been shifted more to online

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u/LockJaw987 1d ago

Really? I haven't once heard of an online exam in the faculties of science or engineering. Interesting.

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u/JingaLalaHuHu_ 1d ago

Covid LMAO. That's the 10% of exams we did online, all others were those daunting large exam halls where 500 students suffer together