The use of artificial intelligence is rapidly increasing across the world – its most controversial area of interest may just be the classroom.
Students with easy access to generative AI are able to use these exciting new technologies in a variety of ways, creating both negative and positive impacts on their academic journey.
One of the most popular uses for AI among students is to complete assignments and generate essays with a simple prompt, before the student submits this AI-generated work as their own. In 2024, Intelligent.com reported that up to four in ten college students were using tools like ChatGPT for their assignments, with 96% of those students using it for schoolwork, 69% of them using it for writing assignments, and 86% of them saying their ChatGPT use was never caught by their teacher.
Worse, the AI detection tool Turnitin reported that, among the 200 million papers they had reviewed as of March 2024, over 22 million were at least 20% AI. More than 6 million were 80% written by AI.
By generating work using AI and submitting it as their own, students are practicing plagiarism and cheating, and facilitating the rise of academic dishonesty, a lack of understanding of content, and inaccurate, lazy work.
Using ChatGPT to write your essay does not expand your knowledge of a topic or deepen your understanding of its nuance, especially when ChatGPT is known for generating false or misleading information that can harm a student’s work. Negative AI usage has also caused students to develop a habit of laziness when it comes to completing simple homework or classwork assignments.
Although AI has been primarily used as a way to bypass schoolwork, in reality, it has the potential to make an enormous impact on the way high school and college students elevate their learning. If we want to grow as students and expand our understanding, the responsibility of using helpful technology tools honestly and efficiently falls on us.
For a driven student, one of the greatest benefits AI technology can offer is the ability to generate and reinforce customized lesson plans, specifically tailoring these materials to their teacher’s assignments and curriculum. The real-time learning capabilities of generative AI mean that these models can take your homework and class assignments, peruse the breadth of human knowledge in a matter of minutes, and come back with informed study questions that target the areas where your knowledge is the weakest.
Another advantage to using AI as a tool for educational development is the fact that it can provide immediate, personalized feedback on their work – identifying within seconds the flaws in their grammar and writing, the gaps in their scientific knowledge, or even the specific missteps they may have taken while executing a challenging math problem. AI offers an adaptive tutoring system that is easily accessible, highly efficient, and has the potential to drastically improve school performance with personalized insights.
For teachers, the potential benefits of AI applications are perhaps even greater: automating administrative tasks like grading or attendance, which take valuable time away from their engagement with students, and identifying the learning competency of every unique student.
Meaningful AI usage isn’t just a way for students to take control of their future and push themselves to new intellectual heights – it offers us a real chance to dismantle the learning equity gaps that divide students. AI is our pathway to creating affordable, high-quality educational content through the evaluation of real student data. In fact, it has already become a transformative tool for language development among students, an obstacle that is undeniably critical as more and more students fail to display basic literacy.
Perhaps most important of all, AI has the means to revolutionize the accessibility and strength of learning practices across special education, using this essential new tech to give students with disabilities a more equitable learning experience. AI can automate detailed image descriptions and alt-text for screen readers, create real-time audio descriptions of videos and images, and provide intelligent speech recognition software for those with vocal impairments. In fact, we’re already seeing the ways AI can be used in speech therapy — identifying exact, precise speech delays, and establishing treatment options and development pathways to help students keep up with their peers.
Ultimately, while AI tools have been criticized for making students lazy, the real issue lies in how we choose to use them. When applied correctly, AI has the power to revolutionize education by offering personalized learning support to help students overcome academic challenges. Instead of relying on these tools to do the thinking for us, we should cooperate and treat them as powerful companions that can elevate our learning experience as students.
AI tools are also coming at a time when education itself is in a slight crisis.
In 2022, a report by the World Bank Group established that an estimation of roughly 70% of 10-year-olds are unable to understand a simple given text. Before the pandemic, this percentage was roughly 57%, but with the depth of today’s learning crisis, it continues to increase. With AI, we can create a path for students to overcome illiteracy and decrease bad learning outcomes.
The future of education isn’t about avoiding AI, but learning how to use it wisely, responsibly, and to its greatest advantage – improving yourself one step at a time, rather than using the greatest learning tool in history as a crutch.
