Entering her first year of teaching as a graduate assistant at Bowling Green State University, Sydney Koeplin had more on her mind than how to relate to her students. She was worried about how to deal with generative AI.
At first, Koeplin took a "hard line" against allowing students to use AI beyond basic grammar and spelling checks. (The school's curriculum dictated that it could be used conditionally, but those conditions were left to the professor to define.) After several students in her first semester used AI to generate assignments, Koeplin changed her approach. She moved away from traditional grading to "contract grading," where a student's final grade was based on how much effort they put into the work. Koeplin didn't receive any more AI-generated papers.
"I would tell my students, 'the world wants to hear your voice,'" Koeplin said. "The whole point of writing is to give a piece of yourself to the world, and if you're relying on a machine to think for you, then you're not having freedom of thought."
As students return to school this fall, they will step into a landscape transformed by AI. Educators are reimagining teaching, while students must learn to use these tools critically, collaborating with AI without outsourcing their own judgment and self-expression. Acquiring knowledge and skills, after all, is the true goal of learning. Learning is so important that, as a society, we dedicate much of the first couple of decades of our lives (sometimes more) to it. Yet education faces the specter of unavoidable change in how we consume and digest information, how we study and how we think -- all while an entire generation's cognitive development hangs in the balance.
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Schools are trying to catch up with students' AI use
Students have been quicker in using AI than their schools have been to prepare for and regulate it.
The numbers are staggering. In one survey, 86% of students globally reported using AI tools in their schoolwork. It's not just college students either, 46% of students in grades 10 to 12 reported using AI tools for academic and non-academic activities.
Many are using AI tools not just for homework assistance but as study partners, research aids and writing collaborators. For instance, Grammarly recently introduced new specialized AI "agents" along with a writing platform called Grammarly Docs. These tools are built to helps with tasks ranging from essay drafting to refining workplace emails to estimating your grade on an assignment.
But schools and educators are scrambling to catch up with training and developing policies addressing AI use for schoolwork.
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