Comment by testfoobar

Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.

Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.

That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.

I thought the recommendations in section 3 were substantiative. That is move away from time-bound exams and move towards semester length project portfolios.

     >"In the era of AI, some traditional learning goals may merit rethinking; for example, do the majority of our students need to be able to write complex programs by hand?"

     >"quick, high-stakes evaluations embody the opposite of the signal we want to convey to them right now."

     >"We urge instructors to consider forms of assessment that are less vulnerable to AI, and more valuable for learning, such as oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class assignments paired with in-class conversations. This likely means resources such as TAs and class time will become more central to evaluation."

I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:

> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.

It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.

They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past:

https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...

All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:

"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."

I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.

They have to do something. There's a cheating epidemic right now everywhere.

I think the axis of AI in Ed should be, use it to super-charge learning, while assessment should be impossible to outsource to AI.

Verbal exams.

> This is a bunch of fluff.

Accurate description.

I hope AI was used to generate those empty words. What a waste of human effort.

What human writes, "This is not a moment for patches and duct tape."

Is that AI or just horribly clichéd writing?

I'm shocked, shocked, that they recommend hiring more administrators and forming more committees to study the problem.