Educators are still attempting to keep pace with their students’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom and are having difficulty slowing utilization.
Some experts say the focus has shifted from how to prevent students from using AI for their classroom assignments to whether students using AI are developing skill sets or just adding to their grade point average while diminishing their writing ability.
The survey of approximately 1,600 students and 1,000 faculty across more than 600 unique higher education institutions showed tensions between how students use AI in their studies and what their faculty allows.
Portland State University School of Business professor David Raffo told The Epoch Times that he believes the determining factor in the classroom adoption and success of AI is the process of learning versus the singular goal of raising a GPA. He says it’s becoming increasingly difficult for educators to determine when and where students rely on AI or do their own work.
“For students doing assignments independently, it’s very difficult to assess. There are tools that show whether an assignment has been plagiarized, but it’s challenging and requires a constant change of assignments,” he said.
“What I’ve realized is that AI tools have improved some of their writing but not their writing skills. We have a real problem when the digital revolution impacts social discourse, engagement, and written communication,” he added.
Many educators have echoed Mr. Raffo’s concerns that reliance on AI in the classroom may cause students’ competence to decline. In the Tyton study on written assignments, faculty cited concern about academic integrity if more than 30 percent of a writing assignment’s content is flagged as written by AI.
However, Catherine Shaw, a managing director with Tyton Partners, told The Epoch Times that AI is here and will not go away, so educators must learn how to manage it.
“They’re not putting that genie back in the bottle. Students are saying that the deterrents put in place last year are not going to stop them from using AI this year,” she said. “If students are telling us they’re using these tools and spending more time in their studies, they’re not cutting corners.”
Ms. Shaw says professors’ lack of use of AI is also contributing to the classroom disconnect. According to the study, only 22 percent of faculty use the tools primarily to understand what their students are looking at. “I tell instructors, don’t judge students for using them until you know how to use them,” she added.
Some educators say using AI is nothing more than giving students another cheating tool, but Ms. Shaw says the claim misses the bigger picture.
“If students were going to use AI to cheat, they wouldn’t be telling us that they’re actually spending more time on academics. If they were just using it to cheat, their time working on their studies would come down, not go up,” she said. “Some faculty have actually told us their classwork time has decreased because they’re developing course content with AI.”
School AI policymaking, in general, has also come much slower than student adoption. The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), in the Tyton study, called out the developing use of AI to support instruction without systematic policy action.
The report also stated there is a concern that AI policies are focused on academic integrity instead of addressing issues like bias in large language models and lack of accessibility support, including text-to-speech for visually impaired users.
Mr. Raffo says his biggest concern is that AI might inhibit student development.
“It comes down to what we are teaching. What are the goals of the education for the students? To know content? To develop skills? And at what level are we developing those skills? Is it to get a result or encourage brain development?” he told The Epoch Times.
“I gave a survey to my students and asked them about their AI usage in the classroom, and the results were fascinating. One of the things I asked was how they see AI improving their writing skills, and the response was, ‘When I use AI, my paper is better; therefore, I’m a better writer.’ They had no sense of the difference between skills and results.”
