We have all been affected by AI technology in recent years.

The education sector has been one of those most heavily influenced by AI.  It is estimated that the global market for AI in education was worth $5.18 billion last year.

One of the biggest ways that AI is changing education is that many students have started to use it in their studies. This has raised a number of questions in the education community. People are debating whether AI is actually helping students learn or it’s just making it easier for them to cheat. This is one of the reasons there are new AI detection and ChatGPT discovery tools. 

More Students Rely on ChatGPT to Do their Assignments

More students have started using AI since ChatGPT became widely available. One survey found that 86% of students use AI to help with their work. Around one out of four of them use it every day. But is it a good thing that many students are using AI? Or is it normalizing cheating? There are a lot of factors that need to come into play to answer this question. Here are some of the issues that need to be considered.

Data on Students Using AI to Cheat Remains Somewhat Elusive

One of the concerns that many educators have raised is that AI has made it easier for students to cheat on their assignments. It has been surprisingly common for many students to do so. One major education news website reports that 10% of the 200 million papers that were submitted to an AI detection tool were flagged as being AI generated. Around 3% were made entirely with AI. 

Of course, there is some sampling bias in these figures and it doesn’t necessarily mean that 10% of all students are cheating on their papers. Here are some caveats to this data:

  • Professors may not necessarily use AI detection software on all student papers. They are probably more likely to scan papers that they already suspect were written with AI. Therefore, the percentage of papers in this sample that were written with AI may be higher than papers that were actually written.
  • On a similar note, some students might use an AI detection tool to see if their own assignments might get flagged by an AI detector by their teachers. Students that intend to cheat by using AI might be more likely to do so. They might even submit their papers multiple times after making tweaks to see if they could bypass detection.
  • Some students might cheat on multiple assignments. This could cause the number of assignments that get flagged to seem higher than it actually is.
  • Even the best AI detectors are not 100% perfect. They might have erroneously flagged some assignments that were not made with AI and missed others that were.

The most interesting thing about this data is that it shows a small minority of students seem to be cheating on assignments with AI. It can be hard to reconcile this figure with the fact that nearly 9 out of 10 students report using AI in their studies. This could be due to a couple of reasons:

  • Many students using AI to cheat are not getting caught.
  • Many students are using AI in ways that don’t constitute cheating.

Overall, it seems that most students are using AI in constructive ways. However, this doesn’t negate the fact that some of them are using it in dishonest ways.

Cheating Doesn’t Seem to Have Increased Overall

While research shows that more students are using AI to cheat, it does not seem to suggest that cheating is becoming more common overall. Of course, many students were cheating long before generative AI technology was readily available. They would often borrow term papers from students that had taken the same class with a different professor or paid other people to write their papers for them. Some students would also outright plagiarize content from books and websites. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t unique challenges to catching students that are using AI to cheat on assignments. AI detection technology has already become very effective, but it still is not quite as reliable as plagiarism detectors. Nevertheless, educators seem to be getting better at sniffing out students that have cheated on their assignments with AI.

Many Educators Support Ethical Use of AI

While there are some concerns about using AI to cheat, there are also some great things about it. One Ivy League university argues that educators need to accept and embrace the recent advances in AI. This is going to make it easier for students to learn more effectively. The trick is to make sure that students use it to facilitate the learning process, rather than trying to short-circuit steps that help them develop critical thinking skills and learn the material better. This will likely be one of the biggest challenges facing educators in the years to come. 

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