We at the Vanguard believe something that has become so common these days has also become detrimental to those of us in school, artificial intelligence. AI is a tool that can and will be used to enhance our society significantly. But in schools, it has done damage to students and will continue to do so if not addressed soon.
Many of us have become accustomed to plugging anything and everything into any of the various AI programs available to us. This has significantly improved many aspects of school life, like asking for ideas about how to start essays and speeches or helping figure out a math problem we can’t quite solve. On the other hand, it has made cheating all the easier and quicker. Any online assignment now becomes a five-minute task of copying and pasting questions into Chat GPT, asking for answers and pasting those answers right back into the assignment.
This immediately removes the point of actually giving the assignment as nobody is learning anything anymore and hurts those of us who chose to do the assignments as they will both get an equal grade, but only the latter has done the work to earn it. Besides the assignments, online tests have become easy to cheat as well, just go through the same process and you will get mostly the same results as those who try to take the test honestly, which removes the need to put in any effort, and soon, even the kids who choose the ethical way to do their schoolwork will start using AI because the kids using AI don’t get punished accordingly and do a fraction of the work, so why wouldn’t they.
Artificial intelligence affects a few subjects differently, however. Subjects like math and science where the AI might need to make some complex calculations are still confusing for them. They will spit out incorrect answers and sometimes make up variables to include which makes the final product very wrong. When this happens, teachers are much more likely to find out when students cheated and used AI, but the software is constantly updating and soon, more complex equations and scenarios will become easier and then students will be able to cheat on more than just online assignments. Some teachers use AI detection software, like AP teachers, and can detect more AI works, but this is a small minority of the people who use AI as people who go into AP classes often care about the grade and will choose not to cheat.
AI is supposed to be a tool to better our experience as students, not take away from it. It is very understandable that many students do not see the need to do their schoolwork the hard way and use AI to get through the annoying, unwanted parts. Most of the time this will lead to negative long term affects not just in school like bad grades on tests where you cannot use AI in person or the teacher is using a lockdown browser to prevent accessing other websites like Chat GPT, but also general discipline that will hurt these students at their jobs, especially if they choose to use AI on important things that actually affect the company, not just spreadsheets and busy work.
AI is an amazing invention. It has allowed us to improve many aspects of life in school like getting ideas on how to format presentations, starting writing assignments, and helping us learn where we went wrong on a math problem when a teacher cannot help us like at home or in a different class, but many choose to abuse this tool, which negatively affects every student. If everybody continues to abuse these tools, nobody will have access to them which means taking away the ability to learn for ourselves or get help from them and instead having to revert to a time before which makes student life harder just because we wanted to take the easy way out.
