A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
This is long, but worth reading. It probably was warranted at the onset of the internet to be honest; education has changed so little despite memorization to pass a test in many subjects being worth little in the real world now. It would be supremely ironic if the suddeness of the onset of AI and the fact that institutions/educators/learners are all existentially terrified that it can actually led to critical mass that allows for updating the educational model in the US. It won’t change the rapacious nature of current actors but hopefully can allow society to better manage and process what is being forced on us by PE.
I had one class in undergrad where the teacher was like “we’re gonna cover far more than you could possibly learn in a semester. I don’t expect you to memorize it all, but you should be familiar enough with it that you could look it up if needed.” But it was a senior-level class that basically was taught with the expectation that you were gonna go into grad school and the tests questions overwhelmingly were about research methods/analyzing results, not the specific details covered in class. It works really well for that class imo, but only because it was niche enough that the next step if you wanted to learn more was either go into research within that field or read primary research papers, so it focused on teaching what you needed for those.
For most other classes, the basic facts are necessary to know to be able to do more advanced thinking. Unless you just want people who just have to blindly access whatever computers tell them is correct because they’ve lost any sense of what a reasonable answer or process is.
Yeah. I think a lot of folks make attribution errors. They don’t remember how much introductory work is memorizing stuff, because they haven’t done introductory work in 10-30 years, so they are like 40+ and don’t understand how all their skills and experience make them not have to memorize anything… because they already know tons of stuff.
It’s like… how do you learn a foreign language? You memorize the words, the phrases, and learn the grammar to take the words you learned and put them in the correct sequence… but folks today are like ‘nah I’d rather just use my phone to translate it all and then claim I am speak a foreign language’.
Our issue is our education system isn’t teaching people memorization anymore and hasn’t done that for 20-30 years. That technique was already ‘out’ when i was a middle schooler, and frankly I had to go back and re-learn things later in life because well, I never memorized it as a kid because my school refused to teach us to do that. Like English Language Grammar. Today I doubt kids even know what grammar let alone can identify the basic parts of speech and their functions in a sentence.
Education today is so far removed from the basics. It’s funny… in countries where they do focus on rote learning… their outcomes are better. Because they actually understand knowledge in hierarchical and you can’t learn advanced things without strong foundations of the basic skills that require memorization via repetition…
Yes. Memorizing things is part of building your tool set. You can’t be flipping to look up basic info, or not even aware of it, as you progress. Having a preexisting knowledge of specific information also is necessary for making quick evaluations of situations and problems.
Yep, obviously basic knowledge familiarity is helpful, but it’s a push and pull with critical thinking, which I mentioned above has barely been taught in the US while memorizing facts has. Much more balance of the latter is needed in a world full of information.
Yeah. Its frustrating seeing how many people have no idea on how to even attempt math word problems if they don’t just have an algorithm memorized for a specific wording of a question. Or can’t tell when a problem gives additional information that isn’t necessary and complain about such. Real-world problem solving doesn’t just give you number you need and only those numbers.
if you don’t know the basic facts and history of your profession, what do you know at all?
memorization is a basic skill. you can’t learn anything without memorization. the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
memorization is how you build pattern recognition.
but please go off on how memorization is ‘useless’ and how schools need to teach ‘critical thinking!’ as if critical thinking can exist without… memorizing the basic fact of anything.
That’s not how the real world has worked in a long time. Memorization of facts is essentially useless. Knowing how to find facts quickly how to analyze facts and how to apply them has far more function in modern society. That’s the difference between memorizing a multiplication table and using a calculator. Why would you memorize a multiplication table when you need to know the basis of multiplication and then utilize a tool to do that work for you much quicker? Its like saying you need to learn to write cursive before typing on a computer.
what is the ‘real world’ then?
am I in a fake world, because memorizing shit is what I do all day. I have to do that because it’s my job to know things and teach those things ti other people… I guess my 150K IT security job is ‘fake’ though, right?
how can you find a fact if you don’t eve know what a fact is or isn’t? what if i google a multiplication table and it tells me 2 x 2 = 16? am i suppose to just take that as the ‘answer’ even though I have memorized it’s 4?
Funny, so never would your brain be wrong? You never ever have to reference a book or wiki or anything for your knowledge? You must be a special kind of person then, and one who quickly wouldn’t have new information.
Since you know what 2 x 2 is because you know how to multiply, it’s pretty easy to go ‘hmm, that doesn’t seem correct, let me try something else here’.
But you do not have domain level knowledge of all subjects, and can’t memorize everything. Perhaps you know there are resources for that, and it’s more important to know how to access and synthesize information rather than stuff it into a squishy brain that more often than not get’s ‘memories’ incorrect.
“I’m ok with my surgeon not having memorized anatomy. He can look it up.”
Funny, they literally already are doing that. Projections in surgery to help surgeons find target tissues and help them you know, remove the tissues they are supposed to.
They are used to target locations of things like brain tumors but you are still expected to know the anatomical layout of where you are going and to confirm it makes sense. Go before a courtroom for a malpractice suit and tell them you don’t know anatomy and relied blindly on some AI tool.
Lol that it’s faster to use a calculator than recall a memorized result.
I am very so so at math and can do an unmemorized calculation faster than pulling out and typing it into a calculator.
You can? That’s impressive. Because you multiplication tables do nothing for you when you start getting into multi digit calculations. The important part is learning how to conduct multiplication, then after that you often will let a tool do it for you.
So now you moved the goal posts.
How about this example. It isn’t a problem if a family doctor has to do research an odd case. It is actually preferable that they do.
But I would hope that someone working in the ER isn’t googling procedures when loved ones are bleeding out and minutes away from death.
And quarterbacks need to know plays. Lots of information is best left memorized and in the head. And computers and tools like the internet can’t be taken for granted that they will always be there.
Power failures, computer ransomware, etc.
the analogy at the end doesn’t really make sense. the goal of wriiting cursive was to speed up the ability to record information via text. typing and the ubiquity of computers has basically made cursive vestigial. memorization of facts is important to fully grasp complex problems. you don’t need to sit down and memorize by staring at a sheet of paper, but eventually if you look something up enough times, you should be able to memorize it, so that you can mentally go “oh it’s that” and move on, which allows you to juggle multiple of these types of things at a time.
how are you going to quickly analyze whether a fact is true without enough knowledge to verify core concepts? a better example in your rationale would be “its like saying you need to learn chemistry and metallurgy before you can become a mechanic”, which is obviously absurd. but would you trust a mechanic to fix your car after a crash, or properly diagnose if it was totaled, if he had to ask you where the manual is for your car first?
Damn, almost the perfect analogy. Technology and tools make humans able to do things faster, more effectively and often more accurately.
You recognize that most mechanics would literally have Hayes manuals to do exactly that right?
I swear, it’s like folks don’t think before they type. Everyone uses reference information to pull from. Law books, medical books, scientific papers. No way do you memorize all or even the majority of it. You use these materials because you know how to look up information quickly, and the information is accurate, so you synthesize ideas and thoughts around it.
The point is that memorization doesn’t mean much when you can easily access facts, e.g. through the internet, and now perhaps put them in maybe a useful context situation with an LLM.
Facts without critical thinking is where we’ve gone post-war in the US, and it’s yielded thinking that has gotten us where we are.
right, so why bother with education at all?
let’s just hire 5 year olds with tablets. clearly just as good as a 25 year old with a master’s degree in engineering.
both of them are just gonna google everything and input into the LLM anyway, right?
Experience is still the most critical part. Having the knowledge (not simply knowing facts) and being able to synthesize that knowledge is what makes the 50 year old engineer with decades of experience more valuable than the 5 year old with an LLM.
How do you get experience? oh right… buy doing shit… which is from memory…
You may be a chef and use your recipe book to make recipes, especially ones you haven’t make much, your experience tells you what substitutions you can make, what tweaks you can make, and how to create new recipes. All without memorization.
So what you did there is called logical fallacy called a “straw man”, where you suggest an argument that the other party isn’t advocating as a way of avoiding the actual discussion. Bill O’Riley was famous for them as much if his entire approach to “discussion”, and one of the reasons attempting to debate someone who isn’t seriously interested in a discussion is generally a waste of time.
Best of luck.
No, jackass. You put up the straw man. It’s called ‘memorization’ there.
But I’m not surprised you go around telling other people their arguments are logical wrong, rather than, realize it’s your own that are…
How are you even typing sentences to me in the English language? Maybe because… you memorized the language, it’s grammar, it’s rules, and you use it every moment of every day of your life? Who taught you that, did it just spontaneously occur, or did you learn it by using google?
the very fact you can write comments here undermines your own argument that ‘memorization is worthless’. but your own critical thinking is so stunted you don’t even realize that. you’re under the false impression that you can run a marathon without knowing how to walk, and why bought teaching people to walk, because everyone can just drive a car 26.2 miles rather than walk or run!
You are the reason the education system is so horrid, because everyone thinks like you. And they make arguments to avoid learning the basics rather than… shutting up and doing it. Just like the kids in PE class who would sit out ‘in protest’, who then wondered why it hurt when they ran…
Ad hom, nice touch. Find a hole to scream into.
Oh yes, the problem definitely lies in a outdated system that seems to go against how and why people learn. Route memorization is a joke. What we need is a lot of critical thought and deep understanding which is not the goal of universities or more importantly primary education. The fact that you can graduate highschool, let alone college, without critical thinking skills is bonkers.
A college prepetory high school is supposed to and a liberal arts college that is also the goal. So it a bit depends on the institution but the direction has been away from classical learning and philosophy requirements are minimal now.
Critical thinking should be taught in kindergarten and by first grade kiddos should be able to use evidence to discern their own opinions about a subject and provide proof. Anything else is criminally negligent.
thats patently unrealistic unless you mean at the most basic level. Elementary logic is basically at the algebraic level.
I see you are part of the problem with the education system. Good luck!