A professor watched an AI take his entire online course.
Lixiang Yan, an education researcher at Tsinghua University, built an online course and let an AI agent take it. The agent finished every assignment, answered the questions and joined the discussions by itself. Students in his trials then avoided tools that asked them to explain their reasoning.
Why it mattersIn a 2025 survey, 90% of more than 1,000 US professors said such tools weaken critical thinking. The effort a student skips is exactly where the thinking was supposed to happen.
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