This year, Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, has boomed in our school. Both students and teachers alike can utilize this new tool in the classroom. It can help teachers draft lessons, grade quizzes and even annotate student essays. As for students, artificial intelligence can help them to complete assignments and prepare them the night before an important test.
The growth of AI has raised various concerns. Some students rely too heavily on AI, letting it complete assignments without them actually learning the material. They are able to use AI to generate entire essays or complete homework. This makes it hard for teachers to assess what students actually know. It also causes a loss of trust between students and teachers.
“It’s offloading all of the cognitive work to somewhere else… I just see cons,” English teacher Jeffrey Klein said.
With AI being used to complete assignments, teachers worry that students’ overall comprehension of material will decline. This is frustrating. Teachers don’t deserve the extra burden of questioning if their student’s work is authentic.
“I don’t want my job to be an AI cop… I want my job to be a teacher,” English teacher Kelly Dillon said.
Now, many teachers make students sign an honor code, promising not to use AI to complete assignments or cheat on tests.
In the Advanced Placement (AP) Capstone program, there have been updates on how you can use AI on assignments.
Students may use generative AI only for brainstorming, finding sources, checking grammar and clarifying material. Students are prohibited from using AI to generate sources. It cannot be used to create their argument and large portions of any summative project. For AP Seminar group presentations, if any member is caught using Artificial Intelligence, everyone in the group will receive a zero on that assignment.
Artificial Intelligence can be useful to both students and teachers. Teachers can use AI programs to generate classwork material, plan out lessons and grade students’ tests.
Students can use AI to study for tests by making study guides and practice tests. They may plug study materials into a generative AI and have it summarize a unit to deepen a student’s understanding.
Many students believe they can get away with using AI to shortcut assignments. They may plug entire worksheets into ChatGPT because the work is too challenging or they don’t feel it’s worth their time to complete it. This year more students have been using AI to “polish” assignments but from a teacher standpoint it does not go unnoticed.
“I’ve probably confronted about 40 to 50 students. Every single one admitted they used it… most often as a substitute for doing the work themselves,” Klein said.
Artificial Intelligence can be extremely beneficial in a classroom setting. AI can target specific areas where students may be struggling. Students are able to ask for help on certain questions and AI provides a detailed explanation. This teaches students the correct answer as well as how to get there on their own.
“Another argument is that teachers should be using AI as a partner to design personalized learning that’s going to hit the kids where they are,” Dillon said.
AI could help teachers to design personalized learning plans for each individual student. However, some teachers feel that they are not fully ready to use this plan.
Even with benefits, AI can draw a blurry line between comprehending material and shortcutting assignments. So, can AI be beneficial or is it just cheating that creates extra work for teachers?
This question depends a lot on how it is used. When students use AI to enhance learning/studying rather than shortcut material it can help to strengthen students’ knowledge. Relying on it too much can have the opposite effect. Now students and teachers will need to find a way to balance AI in this fast-changing landscape.
Can English Teachers Spot AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is only three years old; however, it’s gained a lot of attention at our school. AI was first detected in English teacher Jeffrey Klein’s class during the first few weeks of its existence. Since then, the increasing number of students relying on AI has made for an unhealthy regression in our school systems. However, English teachers at our school believe they can spot AI quite easily.
We’re here to test it out. In this experiment, we used an article written by The Yorktown Sentry staff, and we created an article using the same prompt and resources but rewritten by ChatGPT. We also used a freshman’s essay to create some variety, depending on the teacher. Our school’s English teachers, for the most part, were able to spot AI easily.
Out of 16 English teachers interviewed, 11 spotted the AI essay and four did not. Keep in mind, the level of the writing affected these results. To specify, teachers who got it incorrect were usually handed a more advanced writing piece.
Teachers shared what screams AI writing to them: perfect conclusions, the infamous em dash hyphen and more formulaic and concise writing.
“One of the things that I’ll be looking for in trying to figure out whether something is AI or student writing is the cadence in the flow. The off-the-shelf version of ChatGPT, if people are not manipulating the prompt too much, has a particular style to it and I’m not feeling that at the beginning,” Klein said.
Other teachers, however, including those who guessed incorrectly, argued it’s impossible to guess unless you understand the individual student’s writing style and the direction under which the writing was assigned. To combat this, many teachers have been switching to in-class timed writing assignments instead of at-home to ensure students are not using AI.
“I’m no longer sending anyone home to write their Romeo and Juliet essay because they’re just going to be cheating on it. The point is not for you to write the best possible essay of Romeo and Juliet. The point is to think….I just need to know, can you construct an argument with it in class?” English teacher Kelly Dillon points out.
The strong sense of AI throughout our school’s English teachers has led to a strong opinion of it as well. Numerous teachers addressed, and argued against, the calculator analogy: AI is technology that speeds up our work, like a calculator. We need calculators in school, so one could infer we need AI as well.
“For me the analogy actually seems to be like delegation. If I was to hire someone to do a task for me, an act of delegation, that is something that is central to professional life in the world and just how we move through things as an adult. But there’s no role for delegation in the school system. It would be utterly absurd to say I’m just gonna pay this person $10 to write this essay for me, and for them to turn around and say, ‘Well it would be delegating in the workplace; I might as well learn how to do it now.’ This is what AI feels like is doing. It’s offloading all the cognitive work to somewhere else,” Klein said.
The debate of teaching kids to partner with AI is widely opposed throughout our school’s English teachers.
“I think there needs to be a baseline level of literacy and interpersonal human communication that we have to teach high school students before they’re really ready to be interacting with a chat bot as a partnership,” Dillon said.
English teachers not only agree that AI will have a strong presence in our upcoming generation, but also believe we must learn the fundamentals of writing on our own first.
“People need to be creative and have good judgment. But how are you going to develop creativity and good judgment if you’ve never had to do the work that develops your brain in that way? Nobody has a good answer for that,” Dillon said.
Next time you sit down to write that paper, remember the exceptionality of a great mind. Remember that you’ve been granted the opportunity to grow into that great mind. It’s important to do so wisely and independently.
