The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is calling for changes to its teaching, student assessment, and research as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into academic work.
The final report from the university’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, released last month, examines how AI is affecting education at MIT. It recommends that the university redesign educational practices for an AI-aware environment, strengthen human interaction and the residential college experience, and establish systems that can continually revisit AI policies and practices as the technology evolves.
The report follows five months of research, meetings, and outreach across the MIT community.
“It’s rare that a successful institution has to take a fresh look at many aspects of its mission,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in an Aug. 25 message to the university community. “But I’m convinced that the opportunities and risks generative AI poses for our model of education and research now constitute such a watershed for MIT – and for all of higher education.”
MIT formed the committee in January and tasked it with assessing how instructors and students use AI, identifying innovations in teaching and assessment, and proposing an AI use policy. Professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden co-chaired the group.
The committee found that GenAI is already widely used across the university and is creating both new learning opportunities and challenges. The report identified concerns including greater student isolation, weakened mastery and confidence, difficulties assessing student progress, and disruption to traditional academic experiences such as take-home exams, office hours, research opportunities, and study groups.
Rather than recommending a blanket ban or a university-wide approach to AI, the committee outlined eight principles in the report:
- Be humble. Course corrections – perhaps even major ones – will be inevitable as the technology continues its relentless evolution
- Be bold. The challenges AI presents in teaching and learning call for a bold strategic response – everywhere, and especially at MIT
- Put humanity front and center. MIT’s fundamental challenge and most important goal is to nurture and protect our shared humanity
- Lean into learning. What should worry us most is that many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to learn
- Teach with intentionality. It’s time to reflect deeply and extensively on what we teach and how we teach it
- No one size fits all. No single approach to AI in education will serve MIT well. MIT should provide a shared framework within which departments and instructors can make choices
- Augmentation not automation. AI should be used to augment and enhance curiosity, creativity, and learning, not automate them
- Think beyond the classroom and the campus. Students should learn to use AI productively and fluently, but also in ways that deepen their capacity to participate well in their classrooms, laboratories, workplaces, families, and communities
The report builds on these principles with recommendations that could reshape assessments and course design. The recommendations call on instructors and departments to revisit what students need to learn in an environment where AI tools can perform increasingly sophisticated work and to consider more experiential and social learning, project-based work, oral exams, portfolios, and other assessment methods.
The recommendations also call for a clear AI policy for every course that outlines when AI use is prohibited, permitted, or required, and say the university “needs to develop a clear and consistent menu of guidelines for instructors and departments to choose from and adapt as necessary.”
Instructors are also encouraged to disclose substantial use of AI in course content, evaluation, grading, or feedback.
“MIT is and must always be a place that activates the human mind and spirit and that unites creative people in fulfilling the Institute’s great mission,” Kornbluth said in her message. “As we define the Institute’s next chapter, AI will test our commitment to that educational ideal. For the sake of our students, for the future of MIT and for the shape of our sector and our society, it’s imperative that we get this right.”
