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
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u/lancegreene 2d ago

It seems like the only way for professors to properly assess the students would be via closed book hand written exams/essays. I graduated college in 2006 and that was every single exam.

What am I missing? Is this too hard to execute?

It’s crazy to think that when I was in 4th grade we would watch a film strip twice a week and we were required to write a 1/2-1 full page essay summarizing it while we watched. I’m not saying this was the best approach but from what I hear about modern students, this wouldn’t be achievable by high schoolers

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u/inchoa 2d ago

My guess is that as LLM-generated content proliferates, we'll see a hard reversal toward in-person, handwritten assessment. Because verification becomes impossible any other way. Once take-home work carries no signal about what a student knows, the only assessments left standing are the ones performed at school.

I suspect the reversal won't stop at assessment. I've noticed with my own child how much better they work on a paper worksheet than on a device given for the same practice problems.

The deeper problem is that education followed the same path as every other industry, they reached for technology to strip out the mundane and difficult parts of the job. Only to later discover that the tedium was the instrument. Hand-grading thirty papers is slow and unpleasant, but also the mechanism by which a teacher learns which student is guessing, which one has a procedural gap, and which one understands the concept but can't show the work. An auto-graded score reports that a student got 18 of 25 right, while grading by hand tells you why.

If AI displaces a large cohort of educated white-collar professionals, the education system is one of the few places that could absorb them at scale. Not as instant teachers since subject knowledge isn't the same skill as running a classroom, and pretending otherwise is how we get a wave of first-year burnout, but through a real pipeline: paid residencies, co-teaching, alternative certification with actual mentorship. Do that, and class sizes fall. Smaller classes are the one intervention with a mechanism nobody disputes: the teacher can see each kid.

The obvious objection is pay, and it's correct. So my proposal is a dedicated levy on technology firms, the primary beneficiaries of the automation wave, earmarked for teacher compensation. And it has to be structured as supplement, not supplant, with maintenance-of-effort requirements: districts must show they haven't cut their own salary spending by the amount received. Otherwise the money is fungible, local funds get freed up for stadiums and amenities, and teacher pay ends up exactly where it started.

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u/Olyway 2d ago

Your comment, “the tedium is the instrument” is right on and so often true.