The essay is due tonight; a blank document sits before you. Just one tab over, ChatGPT is prepared to generate hundreds of words at the press of a button. It’s convenient. It’s quick.
But is it the right thing to do?
According to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17, roughly one-in-five teenagers who had heard of ChatGPT had used it to help them do their schoolwork. One-in-five teens who had heard of ChatGPT said it was acceptable to use it to write essays, while 57 percent said it was not acceptable.
In a Shakerite survey administered in English classes, 49.6 percent of student respondents said that they never use AI on schoolwork; 40.6 percent said they sometimes do; 7.5 percent said they often do, and 2.3 percent said they use it most or all of the time.
Junior Eliah Onkeles-Klein said that AI could discourage students from thinking independently. “If students learn to rely more on AI for easy tasks than doing it themselves, I worry they will stop being able to think critically,” she said.
The precipitous arrival of AI technology has forced academic institutions including AP and IB to create policies about its use. The AP website states that students may not use AI tools to write or create assignments, analyze evidence, read sources or make choices about how to communicate effectively in writing or presentations. The website states that for AP Computer Science classes, students may use AI tools as “supplementary resources” for coding development and debugging.
History teacher Joseph Konopinski, who teaches AP U.S. History, said that as an educator, he doesn’t like to rely on AI. “It’s just as bad as plagiarism or copying,” he said.
According to the IB website, IB does not ban the use of AI software. “The IB believes that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will become part of our everyday lives—like spell checkers, translation software and calculators,” the website states. “We, therefore, need to adapt and transform our educational programmes and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively.”
The IB program does not regard any work produced by AI, even in part, as students’ own. AI must be credited in the body of the text and referenced in the bibliography just like any quote or material gleaned from another source.
Laura Hartel, the IB Diploma Programme coordinator at the high school, said that the draft phase of IB papers or projects is integral in catching dishonest AI use. “If it is detected as AI during the draft phase, then we will talk to the student about it, about how it has to be their own thoughts and ideas,” Hartel said. “We try to catch all those things during draft phases, which is why drafts are so important. Because if the IB catches it, they can say that it’s basically plagiarism.”
Hartel said that to catch dishonest AI use, teachers use online AI and plagiarism checkers. A commonly used one is turnitin.com – a website that assesses originality and provides feedback.
Any case of academic dishonesty in IB, including AI use, is investigated and can put the full diploma in jeopardy. If student work is determined to be academically dishonest, full diploma students cannot receive credit for their classes or their IB diploma.
Though IB still relies on human examiners to grade IB assessments, they are “exploring utilizing AI as a quality control tool to detect inadvertent inaccuracies that could potentially be made by examiners during the marking process,” the website states.
Students aren’t the only ones using AI technology. At Shaker, 50.8 percent of students surveyed said that a teacher had used AI in the classroom for assignments or otherwise.
Hartel said that AI can sometimes be a helpful tool for teachers. “I don’t know any teacher that uses AI in a way that doesn’t also require massive tweaking and editing,” she said. “Because you have to; you can’t just do it blindly. A lot of times the AI can be wrong, because it can take anything off the internet.”Hartel said that AI can help teachers make academic language more accessible to students. For example, teachers could ask AI, “Could you please put this at a high school level?” Hartel said. AI can also be used to generate more sets of questions, or more practice material.
One anonymous student said that their parent, a teacher, uses ChatGPT to make lesson plans and study guides.
English teacher Emily Shrestha uses AI in some form more than once a unit, either as part of an assignment or as a “pilot to see if there’s something new that could be incorporated meaningfully,” she said. Last year she found an AI extension that could grade student work if she gave it a rubric. Though she graded the work herself, she offered students the AI feedback along with her own feedback so they could see if they found it beneficial.
Shrestha said that the AI feedback included “the little stuff that teachers sometimes forget to include, because we’re so focused on what can be better — it purposefully includes little things like, ‘You did a good job with this,’” she said. “Those are the things that I think teachers don’t always remember.” Students thought that her feedback was more helpful, but the AI feedback was more encouraging.
Shrestha also once uploaded Common App college essay prompts and told AI to generate essay examples. She mixed the AI-generated essays in with real, student-written essays, and had students read them. “Over and over again, students thought that [the AI essay] was the essay that had the least amount of personality, the least amount of specifics,” she said.
“Have I used ChatGPT as a jumping off point for things and made it into something that would work for my students? Absolutely,” Shrestha said. “But it should be something that’s comfortable, that fits me, fits my students. Not just something that Chat GPT spits out as the answer.”
Bots such as ChatGPT offer a time-saving appeal to students. An essay that would normally take hours of research can be generated in seconds. Hartel, who has taught the IB program in Romania, Tanzania, Spain and Germany, said that other countries often place more pressure on students, which could lead to more students using AI as a shortcut. “The U.S. is one of the only places that does non-conditional learning. Everywhere else is conditional,” Hartel said. “So if you’re expected to get a certain level and predicted to do a certain way, that university expects you to match it. And I’ve seen that lead to a student or two cut a corner because they were feeling pressure.”
Conditional learning means that universities accept students because they expect them to meet predicted academic achievement goals. If students don’t live up to that expectation, it’s possible for schools to rescind their acceptance.
Shrestha said that academic pressure can contribute to students’ AI usage. “I think when it comes to the academic honesty piece, having integrity is really hard when you’re stressed and when you’re rushed and when you’re a kid who’s trying to do their best,” she said. “But my theory is always that if you talk to a teacher and let them know that you’re stressed and you’re rushed and you’re just trying to do your best, you’re gonna have a better outcome than representing your work dishonestly and then having to have that kind of follow-up.”
Shrestha said that she wouldn’t accuse a student of using AI if she wasn’t certain about it. “I’m 100 percent sure that there are people that use it, and I don’t catch it,” she said. However, she uses brainstorming, prewriting and drafting assignments to see students’ process, as well as the document’s revision history.
English teacher Sharon Craig said that knowing a student’s writing style helps her determine whether they are using AI. She said that students often use the Google AI overview in class to generate answers quickly. AI overviews appear in Google search results, providing an AI-generated summary of information and links.
Craig said that she may use AI to generate discussion questions, but not to create full lessons. “To use it as an assistive tool is more than acceptable. [But] as professionals, we can’t just copy and paste AI,” she said.
Shrestha said that the possibility of AI threatening teachers’ jobs is real. “It would be really hard to replace a teacher in all of the things that a teacher does, but I think that people who aren’t in education diminish what that is anyway,” she said. “So on paper, it would probably look easy, and then in practice, it would be terrifying to see what kind of school we end up with,” Shrestha said.
Said Onkeles-Klein, “I fear AI will have multiple negative impacts on students, but the most prominent fear is the potential loss of a student’s ability to think independently.”
