It’s 11:59 p.m. on a school night, and the essay is due tomorrow. Just years ago, a student would be frantically opening google docs, fingers rushing to type each painstaking paragraph. A calculated google search could maybe get them the information they need, or even a flip through a textbook. A scroll through an article to provoke thought. They might stay up until two, even three in the morning to answer said prompt.
But now, picture this – same essay prompt. Same time frame. A student in a time crunch rushing to finish a paper. But instead of Word, they click on Chat GPT. While the first student is formulating a thesis statement, the second types a prompt into the search bar. It thinks for a second, waits – then begins to write.
One student finishes their introduction while the other pastes their now finished essay into the assignment folder.
Who got the better grade? Safe to say there’s no way to tell, but there’s a good chance an essay written by a program with access to all the literature in the world wouldn’t get a “B”.
What if the classmate who always has the best written essays isn’t smarter – just better at prompting ChatGPT?
And this isn’t such a farfetched anecdote, either – Chat GPT alone receives almost 2.5 billion prompts daily into its servers. AI is used in schools to grade tests, create quizzes, and write curriculum.
But what do students think of AI? With such a malleable and useful search engine at their fingertips, it seems foolish to believe that it isn’t being used to its full potential by desperate and tired high school students, looking for an easy A.
When polled on how many days a week they use AI, Bellarmine students averaged five out of seven days a week (five of which are spent in school), all almost exclusively using Chat GPT over any other program. “It’s replaced google for me,” junior Cora Ecklund admitted.
However, a large misconception about AI is that students are primarily using it to slack off. While in many ways that can be true, students revealed that they used it as a teaching tool over an option for cheating. “Some of it is just for learning purposes.” Ecklund explained, “So let’s say I have chem homework, and I don’t understand something. I’ll be like, AI, here’s my problem and how do I do this, walk me through how to solve this because I don’t understand it.”
Over 80% of students agreed with Ecklund – that AI actually makes them smarter, as opposed to lazier because it does work for them. “It depends on the way you use it, because of me, I’m using to to learn, not to write a whole essay,” shared Ecklund.
Sophomore Harley Boe shared similar opinions. “I think as long as students aren’t using AI for every assignment as long as you’re using it to formulate ideas for a topic sentence for an essay or something, I think AI is a good tool,” she said. Many students share such opinions – 100% think it should be embraced as a learning tool in high schools, instead of limited or even banned permanently.
Junior Delya Lewis agreed that it should be embraced by means of learning after sharing that if you count the AI overview that appears whenever one does a google search, she not only uses it every day but multiple times each day. It brought about the question – is dependence on AI inevitable? More than one interviewed student conceded that AI really can’t be banned because it is too far down the road. “We can’t get rid of it, it’s here to stay,” Ecklund stated.
The 60% of polled students, when educated on the fact that AI is detrimental to the environment (predicted to contribute to up to twelve percent of global e-waste alone by 2030), still said that they would use AI in the same way they did before they were aware of its effect on the planet. “There’s a lot of things that contribute to the environment, and I feel like we have lots of ways to improve, not just AI,
” Hudson Hedrick claimed.
So the majority of high school students aren’t using Artificial Intelligence to cheat or evade doing real schoolwork. In their eyes, it really is a learning tool that, in their opinion, should be embraced in schools and work settings. As it grows in accessibility and information access, it is becoming a useful tool to both use and appreciate. But is it rapidly developing on its own, or is our addiction to it giving it a platform to be depended on?
