15 Articles about How Students are Using AI

Thoughtful discourse on college campuses

The capacity to entertain different views is vital not only on a college campus but also in a pluralistic and democratic society. With shouting matches replacing thoughtful debate everywhere, from the halls of Congress to school-board meetings, a college campus might be the last, best place where students can learn to converse, cooperate, and coexist with people who see the world differently. 

The University of Chicago famously enshrined this principle in a 2014 report by a faculty committee charged with articulating the university’s commitment to uninhibited debate. “It is not the proper role of the university,” the Chicago Principles read, “to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” 

Daniel Diermeier writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Struggling for Knowledge

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. the study’s sample of American students, on the other hand, spend less than one percent of their time in that state.

 “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who co-wrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the (Japanese) teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.”

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

30 Great Quotes about AI & Education

ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content. The tool seems more beneficial for those who already have a lot of experience writing–not those learning how to develop ideas, organize thinking, support propositions with evidence, conduct independent research, and so on. Critical AI

The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?” The Atlantic

The reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? New York Times 

The student who is using it because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content. Inside Higher Ed

Don’t fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience. ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A.I. will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess. The most important thing about A.I. may be that it shows us what it can’t do, and so reveals who we are and what we have to offer. New York Times

Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post

Ideas are more important than how they are written. So, I use ChatGPT to help me organize my ideas better and make them sound more professional. The Tech Insider

A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. New York Times 

We surpass the AI by standing on its shoulders. You need to ask, ‘How is it possibly incomplete?’” Inside Higher Ed

Our students are not John Henry, and AI is not a steam-powered drilling machine that will replace them. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to surpass technology. Inside Higher Ed

These tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If the data set of writing on which the writing tool is trained reflects societal prejudices, then the essays it produces will likely reproduce those views. Similarly, if the training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Inside Higher Ed

Students may be more likely to complete an assignment without automated assistance if they’ve gotten started through in-class writing. Critical AI

Rather than fully embracing AI as a writing assistant, the reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed

“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. Washington Post

(A professor) plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.New York Times

ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking. MIT Tech Review

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing. Inside Higher Ed 

Discuss students’ potentially diverse motivations for using ChatGPT or other generative AI software. Do they arise from stress about the writing and research process? Time management on big projects? Competition with other students? Experimentation and curiosity about using AI? Grade and/or other pressures and/or burnout? Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions. Cultivate an environment in your course in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Barnard College 

We will need to teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question. To teach them how to do that, we don’t need to hastily construct a new field called “critical AI studies.” The intellectual resources students need are already present in the history and philosophy of science courses, along with the disciplines of statistics and machine learning themselves, which are deeply self-conscious about their own epistemic procedures. Chronicle of Higher Ed

We should be telling our undergraduates that good writing isn’t just about subject-verb agreement or avoiding grammatical errors—not even good academic writing. Good writing reminds us of our humanity, the humanity of others and all the ugly, beautiful ways in which we exist in the world. Inside Higher Ed 

Rather than trying to stop the tools and, for instance, telling students not to use them, in my class I’m telling students to embrace them – but I expect their quality of work to be that much better now they have the help of these tools. Ultimately, by the end of the semester, I'm expecting the students to turn in assignments that are substantially more creative and interesting than the ones last year’s students or previous generations of students could have created. We Forum 

Training ourselves and our students to work with AI doesn’t require inviting AI to every conversation we have. In fact, I believe it’s essential that we don’t.  Inside Higher Ed

If a professor runs students’ work through a detector without informing them in advance, that could be an academic-integrity violation in itself.  The student could then appeal the decision on grounds of deceptive assessment, “and they would probably win.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

How might chatting with AI systems affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental-health challenges? Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Are we going to fill the time saved by AI with other low-value tasks, or will it free us to be more disruptive in our thinking and doing? I have some unrealistically high hopes of what AI can deliver. I want low-engagement tasks to take up less of my working day, allowing me to do more of what I need to do to thrive (thinking, writing, discussing science with colleagues). Nature

A Digital Generation Gap

An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy. “Our students are in deep trouble,” one educator wrote. But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. 

Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, for all his knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as his students do, despite having had an account for a year. He’s had students try to explain the app in detail, but “I still can’t figure it out,” he complains. “They use a computer one way, and we use a computer another way,” Guarin-Zapata emphasizes.  

Monica Chin writing for The Verge

Entrenched Opinions

While lack of knowledge is certainly a major source of bias, professional expertise doesn’t fare much better. Whether we are looking at judges, lawyers, professors, scientists, doctors, engineers, architects, writers, journalists, politicians, investors, economists, managers, coaches, consultants, or computer programmers, sharp differences and entrenched opinions are the norm. Deep experience and expertise do not necessarily lead to objective consensus. As behavioral scientists have long noted, subject matter experts tend to:

1.    Rely too much on societal and professional stereotypes

2.    Overvalue their personal experiences, especially recent ones

3.    Overvalue their personal gut feel

4.    Prefer anecdotes that confirm their existing views

5.    Have limited knowledge of statistics and probability

6.    Resist admitting mistakes

7.    Struggle to keep up with the skills and literature in their fields

8.    Burn out and/or make mistakes in demanding work environments

9.    Avoid criticizing, evaluating, or disciplining their peers

10. Become less open-minded over time

For decades, we have seen the unfortunate results of these traits in criminal sentencing, student grading, medical diagnoses and treatments, hiring and salary negotiations, financial services, editorial coverage, athletic evaluations, political processes, and many other areas.

We may think that we are being impartial and fair, but our minds are full of stereotypes, preconceptions, self-interests, confirmation biases, and other discriminatory forces.

David Moschella writing for the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation

Where the value lies

Education is not acquiring knowledge; it is best defined as using knowledge. The dictionary defines knowledge as the fact or awareness of knowing something. I recognize that you have to know something to use it, but except in some television quiz shows or party games, there is little value in merely knowing something. The value is in using what you have learned. Education is worth the effort; schooling is not.

William Glasser, Choice Theory

Minding the nurture gap

Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer (with two professional incomes) and more stable; they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Robert Putnam calls “Goodnight Moon” time (after a popular book for infants).

(Putnam reports in his book “Our Kids” that) educated parents engage in a non-stop Socratic dialogue with their children, helping them to make up their own minds about right and wrong, true and false, wise and foolish. This is exhausting, so it helps to have a reliable spouse with whom to share the burden, not to mention cleaners, nannies and cash for trips to the theatre.

Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time; in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organise their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase.

The Economist