Considering the current educational landscape, it’s hard to blame students for cheating with AI. The temptation to turn to their nonjudgmental bestie ChatGPT in a weak moment is strong.
Competition for securing a job in the workforce is fierce, and major companies aren’t hiding their interest in AI solutions to problems only humans could previously solve. As a college professor, I see students staring down the twin barrels of potential unemployment and irrelevance, and some of the scholars in my classes have expressed a fear of being professionally disadvantaged if they avoid AI.
But there are risks to using AI for school work. Academic integrity violations come at a serious cost at most institutions, and even if you don’t get caught cheating with AI, leaving an expensive and time-consuming college experience with no fluency in your area of study is a huge waste.
So I’ve put together this list of how to use AI to ethically optimize your learning experience and get better grades.
Simulate and customize tests and tutorials
Even when a guide is provided, studying for a test can prove fruitless for people who learn best in unconventional ways. Hands-on and visual learners are at a natural disadvantage to those who pick up concepts via words on a page, but AI tools like ChatGPT can take learning materials and easily translate them into tests or study guides that fit your unique learning needs.
A long collection of links or pages — the mind-numbing text wall of death — can be turned into a video, illustrated slides or flash cards using AI tools.
If you’re more comfortable studying with a partner, you could also use AI to simulate a verbal test of the materials.
Organize group work
Group assignments and presentations are academic torture for some students. The project management element of this type of school work is what a majority of my students complain about. Someone isn’t pulling their weight, or someone else is overdoing it and leaving the group out.
Students are tasked with balancing their busy schedules and are also expected to keep their peers on task, which can get super awkward and result in conflicts petty enough to rival any reality show drama.
AI tools like Taskade, an AI-infused project management app that has free and paid versions ranging between $10 and $50 per month, can reduce the stress associated with managing a group project by putting elements like deadline enforcement and division of duties into the cold, calculated, unbiased hands of a robot. No one can get pissed off at the project manager if the project manager has no feelings.
Spice up discussion posts
Discussion posts in online classes tend to deeply irk the students I’ve spoken with about what grinds their academic gears. The repetitive nature of responses is the No. 1 complaint, with students citing serious fatigue from reading the same soulless posts from other students trying to get the assignment over with as quickly as possible.
Students can use AI tools like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT to quickly scan the current discussion posts for commonalities and find a post with a fresh take you can respond to, rather than wading through a sea of sameness.
You could also ask the AI chatbot to scan the discussions and tell you what points haven’t been brought up yet, so you can easily chime in with a unique contribution.
Adapt to your teacher’s preferences
We’ve all had teachers who like to do things their way, and any deviation from their preferred methods can result in points lost that quickly add up. I once had a professor dock points from an otherwise perfect essay because I hadn’t read his mind and discovered he preferred the course’s keywords to be highlighted and in bold.
AI can help you avoid hard-to-spot pitfalls buried deep in addendums, instructional documents and RateMyProfessors.com reviews by quickly scanning web pages and documents for any out-of-the-ordinary requirements you should keep on your radar.
