When I graduated from college in 2016, the mind-numbingly advanced technologies currently on offer to today’s undergraduate students simply weren’t available. I had to hunt through books and navigate innumerable online articles to find a single quote needed for an assignment. Sometimes this research would take days, sometimes weeks.

That time, however recent it may be, is functionally ancient history. Now, a student’s grade on an assignment or completion of an undergraduate degree could be due to little more than their ability to efficiently and sufficiently prompt ChatGPT and Claude to produce all the answers for them.

MIT’s ad hoc AI committee, co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, published an alarming report on Aug. 13, claiming that AI “can produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in our undergraduate curriculum, including essays, math and science problems, proofs, and coding assignments.” Keep in mind that this statement was drafted by faculty at one of the most prestigious technology institutions in the world.

The report went on to say that, due to AI, there has been “decreased attendance at office hours, reduced participation in online discussions, and, as we heard anecdotally, a drop in in-person study groups in dorms, libraries, and other study spaces.” It appears that, yes, the academic portion of students’ academic experience is suffering, but AI is also affecting the social fabric on campus.

However, MIT is not the only prestigious school that is taking this development seriously. Princeton upheld an honor code for 133 years, which allowed students to take an exam without a proctor present. When the initial idea was published in 1893, the claim was that it was a “means of bad moral education” to treat students as inherently dishonest, because it could, paradoxically, lead to the production of dishonest students. Now, that honor code has ended.

Princeton faculty voted unanimously to bring proctors back after Dean Michael Gordin’s letter cited “their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread.” But no rational person is operating under the assumption that cheating is, somehow, a new development in academia. Though F. Scott Fitzgerald, who attended Princeton and later dropped out to join the Army during World War I, said that cheating in class “simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook,” he was later “scandalized” to learn that many students at the Ivy League school had not conducted themselves with academic honesty.

James D. Walsh wrote in New York Magazine last year about a Columbia University student named Chungin Lee, who, after initially applying to 26 colleges, wasn’t accepted into any of them. After attending a community college and eventually transferring to Columbia, Lee said that he wasn’t really interested in his GPA or academics, because “[m]ost assignments in college are not relevant,” going on to say that “[t]hey’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.”

When Walsh pressed Lee on why, if this was the case, he decided to take the hard route in applying to an Ivy League school, Lee said that it was “the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” Ultimately, Columbia suspended Lee for an unrelated incident.

Nevertheless, Lee’s story offers important insight into how many students ostensibly view a college education. The romantic notion that a college education is meant to educate, develop, and prepare students for adult life seems to be slipping off the proverbial tracks.

The MIT committee went on to say, “[W]hen AI makes it possible to offload the cognitive work of learning, how can we assess what students actually know and understand?” No one seems to have the answer to this issue yet. But professors across the country have tried to return to in-class blue books, oral exams, and typewritten essays to mitigate the use of AI. The Atlantic reported a similar point, but from the student side, mentioning a Princeton senior who described “an air of people cheating on take-homes and people just using ChatGPT.”

Students’ use of AI cuts both ways. On the one hand, students should be encouraged to become more efficient and knowledgeable of this technology, while on the other hand, this technology ought to be left outside the classroom doors in some domains.

For a long time, college was pitched to students as an environment to learn, grow, socialize, and ultimately come away with a degree that reflected that they had the requisite skills necessary to succeed in a given field. But now, whatever the purpose of a four-year degree means, it almost certainly is no longer that.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Unsplash