Artificial Intelligence in Schools
AI use among students has grown extremely fast. According to Pew Research, the share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled between 2023 and 2024. A College Board survey found that by October 2025, 84% of high schoolers were using generative AI for schoolwork brainstorming, revising, and researching. For educators, the same College Board survey found 92% of educators worried about AI-facilitated plagiarism, and 88% worried students were becoming overly reliant on AI instead of building their own skills.
That anxiety has led some colleges to adopt increasingly strict and sometimes invasive measures to prevent AI-assisted cheating. At UCLA, some instructors have required students to place a mirror behind their workspace so the entire desk is visible on camera, keep laptop cameras on throughout online exams, or even keep their arms crossed or hands behind their head during oral exams to prevent typing. These measures reflect a genuine dilemma: professors want to preserve academic integrity, but heavy surveillance can also feel like an invasion of student privacy and it doesn’t always work.
One of the more troubling consequences is a rise in false accusations. AI-detection software is notoriously unreliable and can flag genuine, original work as AI-generated. In response, some students have started saving every draft, recording their writing process, or keeping detailed revision histories just to protect themselves, a defensive habit that reflects how much trust between students and instructors has eroded. By the 2023–24 school year, an estimated 68% of teachers were already using AI-detection tools, despite their known flaws.
The traditional definition of cheating by copying someone else’s work doesn’t map cleanly onto a world where AI can brainstorm, outline, edit, or generate an entire assignment. Some experts argue that outright bans are the wrong approach. Jason Stephens, a researcher at the University of Auckland, suggests that instead of banning AI, schools should focus on transparency for example, requiring students to disclose when and how they used AI, or even submit screenshots of their AI conversations alongside their work. The bigger challenge for education going forward isn’t stopping AI use, it’s building clear, consistent, and fair guidelines for what responsible use actually looks like.