How Students are Using AI: Here's what the Data Tell Us

  • AI use by students is increasing.

  • The higher the education level, the more likely that students will use AI. 

  • Business, STEM, and social-science majors are more likely to use AI and are less likely to have concerns about using it than humanities majors. 

  • Top uses by students: information or getting explanations (50-70 percent of respondents in the studies cited above); generating ideas or brainstorming (40-50 percent); and writing support, including checking grammar, editing, starting a paper, and drafting an essay (30-50 percent).

  • 86 percent of students who use ChatGPT for assignments say their use was undetected.

  • A plurality of students think AI will have both positive and negative consequences.

  • A study of high-school students conducted before and after AI became mainstream found no increase in the percentage of students who cheat.

  • 15-25 percent of students across several studies feel AI should not be allowed at all in education or refuse to use it themselves.

  • In a survey asking students why they use AI, the strongest agreement was with the statement that AI “will not judge me” followed by anonymity.

  • Four out of five students think their institutions have not integrated AI sufficiently.

  • 55 percent of students think overreliance on AI in teaching decreases the value received from a course.

  • 89 percent are worried about AI grading.

  • Students think AI is important, in other words, but not that it should replace professors.

    Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Ed