Smart Ass Take:
Turns out if you outsource your thinking to a machine, the thinking muscle atrophies. Shocking. We spent millennia figuring out that struggle is the whole point of learning — the fumbling, the wrong turns, the magic moment your brain finally figures shit out. But now we have handed students a tool that removes the struggle entirely (and act surprised when they can’t explain the essay they just submitted). The MIT researchers call it ‘the illusion of learning,’ which is a generous framing. I’m not anti-AI (Claude is my daily workhorse), but there’s a difference between a calculator and a prosthetic brain. LEARN doesn’t happen when the answer arrives frictionless and pre-polished. It happens in the tough part everyone’ can now choose to skip.
Article Excerpt:
“We’re seeing so many students who get a hundred percent by passing all the test cases, but when you ask them about their code, they have no idea, and they’re getting a zero or a one out of four.”
Article Summary:
Four years after ChatGPT dropped, professors have moved past worrying that students will cheat with AI and started worrying about something worse: that students using AI aren’t learning at all. Homework looks better than ever. Exam scores are cratering. An MIT committee is calling it “the illusion of learning” — it feels like understanding, right up until you have to actually understand something.
Early studies back up what faculty are seeing. Brain-activity research shows the weakest neural connectivity in students who lean on LLMs, and those students can’t even quote from essays they supposedly wrote. A Carnegie Mellon study found that people who lost AI access after just a few minutes of assisted problem-solving performed worse and quit faster than people who never had it.
The classroom anecdotes are grim. Humanities freshmen turning in dissertation-grade outlines with fabricated quotations they can’t discuss. Berkeley CS students acing take-home projects and then bombing oral exams on their own code because they didn’t write it. Record failure rates on finals with problems nearly identical to the homework.
Two-thirds of students themselves say heavy AI use will damage critical thinking. They’re doing it anyway, because everyone else is, and because the friction of actually learning something is exactly what the tool was built to eliminate.