Artificial Intelligence has reshaped the way students approach class and homework, prompting them to use it for instant answers instead of doing traditional research.
Stacy Sajder Adams has worked as an assistant principal and a business teacher in four different schools for over 18 years and runs East’s Business Professionals of America. She has observed how students have approached schoolwork since the quarantine, when the use of technology increased.
“A lot of our things were then forced to be put online, which can be a good thing for some students. But then with AI, it became a huge copy-paste cheating scandal,” Sajder Adams said.
With this, some students have developed a reliance on using AI to complete work instead of doing it themselves, leading to weaker analytical skills.
There have been plenty of examples in different classes of AI use being caught due to overconfidence and a lack of work ethic. With teachers having a general understanding of the work their students are capable of producing, it is harder to get away with the use of AI.
“I can totally tell if somebody uses AI, because everything is completely spelled right. If the students are not using AI, it’s not spelled correctly, so I’m having a hard time deciphering whether or not I should take off points,” Sajder Adams said.
AI has also changed the way students interact with their teachers in the classroom. It influences the way they answer questions about their work or the material they are learning.
Angel Gonzalez, a junior at East, sees the impact AI has on students today.
“Since they [students] are using ChatGPT to do their work, they don’t know how to answer the questions that the teachers ask,” Gonzalez said.
As students become more fluent with the use of AI, the question isn’t whether or not it’ll be used, but if it will be used wisely. With too much confidence in the tool, the line between a learning aid and a replacement for education becomes blurred.
Written by junior Nicholas Reingold and senior Ethan Lin. Edited by staff writers for Oswego East’s online news magazine The Howl.