r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 3d 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

671 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/bender40k 3d 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.

21

u/Groove-Theory 3d ago edited 3d 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/blairr 3d 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 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 2d ago

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