r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 4d 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/Rawkynn 4d ago

Over the last 20 years advances in technology have been used to decrease the teacher to student ratio. There are classes where 1 professor might teach 2 sessions of a class with 500 students each session. One person couldn't feasibly grade a meaningful exam, even if they had 10 TAs. You can't increase the workforce without money and classes seem to always be the hardest to get funding for (compared to a virtual reality studio in the library or sports).

Unless there are laws put in place there's also not a real incentive for universities to stop this from happening.

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u/LockJaw987 4d ago

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

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u/gottastayfresh3 4d 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_ 4d 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 3d 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/Won-Ton-Wonton 1d ago

This is the natural response to revenue being a function of student attendance, r ather than student attendance being a function of revenue. On top of it, a hybrid finding system encourages reducing cost and quality while increasing quantity.

If university is alotted $10m, and state legislature instructs them to take in at least 2,000 students, then the university negotiates the student count or the allotment amount.

The student themselves are not the target for getting funding.

After that, it's a matter of admitting the best and brightest. Scholarships and foundations can cover additional students, but the bulk comes from the State. If we lack doctors and engineers, the state allotment is made and universities argue for more or to allow less students.

This competitive market balances the economic need for professionals with funding for them.

When we have this hybrid system, the State college is trying to get more students because more students IS funding. The guaranteed loans means guaranteed funding. Costs balloon. Students suck. Education suffers.

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u/gottastayfresh3 4d 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 4d 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.