Cognitive surrender, and where the habit forms

The New York Times, via GV Wire

An MIT committee reports that AI use is producing what it calls cognitive surrender: students skipping office hours and study groups, and finishing the work with an illusion of learning rather than the learning.

The institutional responses are the part to read closely, because they are the same three choices in front of a school board. Ohio State is integrating AI across every major. The University of Chicago banned it in certain social science courses. Berkeley Law forbids it in assigned work. Three institutions looking at the same evidence and going three directions.

None of the three has done the harder work, which is deciding assignment by assignment what a student has to do unaided. Allowing everything and banning everything both avoid that question.

The students in the report did not pick this up at orientation. They are high school graduates who spent four years deciding what to hand to a machine, mostly without anyone teaching them how to decide. Whatever a college settles on in September, the habit arrived with them in August.

Read it before you write an AI policy this year. If you are writing one, our guide to what a school AI policy should include sets out the parts and the decision most policies skip.