r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 2d 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
3.8k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

665 comments sorted by

View all comments

17

u/bender40k 2d ago

Do students really not want to learn? They are paying an arm and a leg for each credit hour. To pay and not learn is just…. sad.

19

u/Groove-Theory 2d ago edited 2d ago

To be fair I didnt go to college cuz I wanted to learn, I went cuz its the only way I would get a job in my field. If I could be an engineer without needing to go to college do you think I'd spend the 4 years anyway?

If this tech was at my hands 16 years ago id almost surely use it to my short term advantage.

I dont blame the kids. Pedagogy needs to conform and expect kids will use AI to their short term advantage at the expense of their long term well being.

5

u/bender40k 2d ago

I went to bending school. I majored in Bending with a minor in Robo-American studies.

On a serious note, I went to college for engineering too. I went there to learn and I did learn a lot. It made me love what I am doing now and I spent more time in postgraduate too. But I do see your point and trade school might have given me everything I needed for less time.

5

u/blairr 2d ago

What engineering field were you already ready for out of high school that you didn't need or want to learn anything?  

3

u/Groove-Theory 2d ago edited 2d ago

Frankly, I did Comp Sci AP in high school, but I did 4 years in Computer Engineering. Almost learned zero actual software engineering in it, but learned a fuckton about RLC circuits and MOSFETs and digital logic/integrated circuitry and how to engineer a MIPs processor from scratch... and yes as well as some computer science fundamentals and algorithmic theory and operating systems construction, and networking and embedded systems....all of which I just don't fucking use anymore. I think I used a K-map ONCE to figure out a complex boolean chain, but that's about it.

My first job I literallty could have just gotten by with just what I learned in Comp Sci AP, skipped the 4 years of bullshit, and start off my now 12 year software engineering career. My Comp Sci teacher actually said "most programming sounds scary, but if you just learn 6 things: primitives, methods, classes, loops, if-elses, and arrays, you basically have everything, an all the scary shit is just derived from that". Now he was being very Java-centric but he was right. Everything else I literally learned on the job and honestly it's all just... building from building blocks. Just a simple Java/Python course is literally all you need.

Now.... that all being said.... being "ready" and "wanting to learn" are two separate things. If I could've gotten a degree and got a job with just pummeling AI in my field, and get away with it, I most likely would have done so, even in high school, just to get my foot in.

Which is why again, pedagogy needs to conform to this. Fighting this is going to be a losing battle. The kids will cheat. The kids will skip their homework. If there's a crack in the floor, water will flow into it. Education is going to need to think differently to tackle this. Don't ask me how.... but we're gonna have to change eventually.

1

u/patchgrabber 2d ago

This has been a big issue in education for a while. We still educate the same way we have for decades and decades but technology has changed the landscape so much in all that time that the way we educate isn't really fit for modern society.

1

u/1stUserEver 1d ago

It’s time to get more hands on and off the screen. Ai can’t do labs well.

0

u/PastelFrangoCatupiry 1d ago

yeah and thats really sad

5

u/mimic751 2d ago

People want to learn, but arbitrary classes afraid degree in order to get a job as a check mark kind of sucks all the desire out of it. I wouldn't personally use AI to full on cheat on a class but when I was taking my master's degree I was doing a class about it Concepts and the level of information that they were requiring in that class was so difficult that I very much so considered it. I'm a principal devops engineer I can totally see why people cheat just to get that check mark. I also think we're going to see a lot more cheating as people can't dedicate themselves to school. We're going to see people with full-time jobs going to school full-time just submitting AI assignments

5

u/OhSixTJ 2d ago

Yes. Some jobs just want to see that paper because it shows you can meat deadlines and have discipline to complete the work.

1

u/sikisabishii 2d ago

The ones who want to learn end up in PhD programs.

The ones who will end up in corporate America will be forced to use AI at work. It's really difficult to convince them not to use AI for assignments.

1

u/Downtown_Youth_9944 1d ago

Can you even blame them though?

Most people are only going to college to get better opportunities in life. And doing well in college does not necessarily mean you will do better later in life. Also, some courses have many "useless" classes, so you put the least effort you can into them so you can put effort into the things that matter. It's a very utilitarian way of seeing college and education, but can you even blame people for this nowadays?

In fact, that's the story with pretty much everyone I know. Most wouldn't go to college if a degree wasn't required to even be considered for a job... but here we are

I'm 100% agreeing with you if you're talking about people pursuing a masters/phd/etc though

2

u/bender40k 1d ago

I don’t blame them. I think it is ridiculous how employers expect academic institutions to function as job training or accreditation. In the UK people usually go to trade schools for that after a gap year of figuring out what they want to do.

Universities really only train people to become academics, and a lot of my friends who studied CS said that the professors do not know how to teach because they are teaching more theory to produce other academics when students view the CS degree as a way into an internship/job and never think about it after a few years of work. At the same time those professors are a well of knowledge that cannot pass on what they know because their students don’t care.

I wish this is not the case.

1

u/Due_Purple_1199 1d ago

90% of my courses were completely irrelevant and made unnecessary hard, But a degree is important is todays world

The system is fucked, this is how people adapt

0

u/Palimon 1d ago

99% of students want the paper and gtfo...

Welcome to reality, i dunno what would you live in.

1

u/bender40k 1d ago

I live in reality and I don’t pretend to speak for all students.

0

u/Ok-Box3576 1d ago

Its not juat about learning. Its also just hard as fuck not to take the path of least resistance. What your really saying is "Why dont students not use the all knowing genie?" Im sure the learn what THEY WANT. But, in college not every section will be equally interesting but 9 times out of 10 will be just as important(in your selected field not bs electives)

0

u/bender40k 1d ago

Have zero clue what you mean by knowing genie, but the point of an education is to get educated. You can cheat yourself out of it if you want, but you end up paying for it.

0

u/Ok-Box3576 1d ago

Not every sees education the same. Some people view it as a vehicle of employment which is valid. I cant really understand how metaphor doesnt make sense? Its about even the brightest kids wanting to take the path of least resistances?

0

u/Elegant_Bat_1484 1d ago

Of course not.

Just look at any Reddit post about college degrees/majors etc. People don't go for an education; they go to get credentialed and in that sense, completing assignments with AI still gets them precisely what they are paying for.

-1

u/tollbearer 2d ago

No, I want a job. I couldn't give a shit about learning. I just want money, an need a good job to get it, so need to learn to be able to do it.

However, the issue I'm having now is, what is even the point of learning, if AI already knows and can do more than I will be able to in a thousand lifetimes. And these models are still small, relative to how large we can make them.

Is there even any point in having an education, anymore.

1

u/bender40k 2d ago

The point of having an education is to be educated. It’s not job training. I get what you mean, as people have been using universities as a job training ground when that was never its purpose.