AI in schools
ChatGPT is in the classroom. Multiple studies have tracked ChatGPT activity patterns and observed that usage peaks around finals season, before slumping off for the next few months during summer break—and then picking back up again when the next school year starts.
One Australian university found that since ChatGPT went viral in 2022, the average scores of students in its first-year statistics course jumped by nearly 22 percentage points. These scores were on multiple-choice, online, non-proctored exams, where students could have fed questions into Artificial Intelligence (AI) during the test.
I have used ChatGPT myself and found that it can answer basic questions, though it often makes mistakes when classic problems are tweaked. Teachers use LockDown browser and other tools to deter cheating, but most require students to take proctored tests on site.
In the US, the Wall Street Journal reports that sales of blue books, or paper exam booklets, have boomed over the last two years as universities bring back in-person, proctored exams. China takes it one step further: during the high-stakes “gaokao” national exams, Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and ByteDance shut down key features in their AI apps that can enable easy cheating, such as image recognition, until exams are over.
The same Australian study above found that while exam scores went up, average scores on written reports fell by almost 10 percentage points. The author Peter Dunn says, “Students may also assume GenAI is producing sensible and quality output, but the students do not have the knowledge to check or confirm that the output is sensible. Generative AI may produce paragraphs inconsistent with the language elsewhere in their report … [or] may even suggest statistical tests that are not taught or are inappropriate.”
Other studies corroborate the risks on specific skills students should learn. On essay writing, an MIT Media Lab study tracked adults asked to write SAT-style essays, one group with ChatGPT, one group with a search engine, and a control group without, while researchers measured their brain activity via EEG. The group using AI showed the weakest brain connectivity and engagement, and underperformed on neural, linguistic and behavioral measures.
The authors call this “cognitive debt,” where overreliance on AI can “replace the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking. Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, and decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.”
On math drills, a study of almost 1,000 high school students in Turkey by Wharton researchers found that students who had access to AI tools scored higher than students without access during open-book practice exams, but scored 17 percent lower on a closed-book proctored test. The authors of this study write, “While generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can make tasks significantly easier for humans, they come with the risk of deteriorating our ability to effectively learn some of the skills required to solve these tasks. [While AI] is not the first technology to exhibit this tradeoff … typing diminishes the need for handwriting, and calculators diminish the need for arithmetic … ChatGPT differs from prior technologies in two significant ways.
“First, the capabilities of ChatGPT are substantially broader and more intellectual compared to prior examples; for instance, our experiments focus on a broad variety of mathematical topics, which encompass fundamental skills required by a wide range of knowledge-intensive professions. Second, unlike many prior technologies, ChatGPT is highly unreliable and often provides incorrect responses. Our results suggest that students are either unable to detect these failures or unwilling to spend the effort needed to check correctness.”
(Next week: What we can do)
Queena N. Lee-Chua is on the Board of Directors of Ateneo’s Family Business Center. Get her print book “All in the Family Business” at Lazada or Shopee, or e-book at Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks. Contact the author at blessbook.chua@gmail.com.
