With generative AI becoming more prominent, students and teachers have to learn how to navigate a new system involving it.
Before, AI was completely unacceptable, now, due to its commonality, a certain amount of AI usage can be encouraged in classrooms.
Generative AI can be a very useful resource for students, especially for review or in needing to learn new material. AI can come up with mock test questions, explain and break down topics at a simple level and pull out important topics that a student may have to know.
“I lean toward seeing AI as a useful tool or digital assistant,” said Bible teacher, Kyle Varner. “With this in mind it becomes more acceptable to use AI for select assignments. AI is a wonderful tool to jump start the mind.”
While being very useful, AI still negatively impacts how students learn and the amount of effort they put into their education. Using AI to do assignments does shorten the amount of time a student has to work, but in doing that, they aren’t actually learning.
“Using AI not only for the idea but also for the work needed should never be an option. Students should learn to think for themselves instead of letting a “robotic writing” machine do it for them,” said English teacher Greer Dover. “Believe it or not, creativity is swimming around in all of our brains–it’s just that sometimes we need a kick start.”
Students are expected to either meet a certain threshold of AI in essays or have no use of it at all, but this can be difficult to do. A student’s writing, while having no AI in it, can be marked as AI because of their writing style, use of punctuation such as oxford commas and em dashes, and words that teachers might not commonly see in a student’s writing.
With this, AI checkers that use AI to check for AI are often not accurate because it can flag things like quotes, punctuation, words and commonly used phrases. Students can fail an assignment due to suspected AI usage or if they go over a certain percent on an AI checker. This is unfair to students because they can be flagged for very simple things.
Not only are students using AI, but some teachers will use it to help create tests, quizzes and assignments for students. If a teacher can use AI to make an assignment or use it to grade them, then shouldn’t those teachers be more lenient on students who use it as well? If a student is expected to not use any AI, then teachers should be held to that same standard.
