AI, or artificial intelligence, is like a robot that thinks for you. Collierville High School teachers, Ms. Cox and Ms. Scoggins, shared their opinions about AI. Ms. Cox teaches sociology, and Ms. Scoggins teaches Spanish II. Both teachers have found AI to be a possible issue in the classroom.
“AI has a positive impact on technology, but you have to be careful with it,” Ms. Scoggins warns. If a student uses AI to do an assignment for them when they are supposed to complete it themselves, they will receive consequences. Ms. Cox agrees, “AI is useful, but it cannot replace human interaction.”
A common assumption is that teachers won’t even notice when a student uses AI. “Teachers are smarter than students think,” Ms. Cox said. Both Ms. Cox and Ms. Scoggins note how when an assignment is submitted with AI, it generally has very high-level vocabulary, a level that signals to teachers that the students did not do the work themselves.
For example, if in Spanish, an assignment was submitted in the past tense and Ms. Scoggins has “only taught present tense so far,” she knows they used AI to do the work for them (“unless they’re a native speaker, of course”). When a student who uses AI is caught, Ms. Cox and Ms. Scoggins “follow the school policies” to assign consequences. Before the students start their assignment, the teachers address the class and tell them not to use AI, which serves as a warning. When a student is caught, the teacher asks the student to explain what they submitted. “If they understand it and can explain it,” Ms. Cox says, “I might give them some credit, but they still have to redo it.” “I let their parents know, and the kid gets written up. Using AI on an assignment that does not involve AI is cheating. Academic cheating,” Ms. Scoggins clarifies.
However, it is sometimes okay to use AI to save time. For example, Ms. Cox uses AI to “plan a trip to Dallas Texas” or find a restaurant that has healthy foods on their menu. Ms. Scoggins uses AI to create lesson plans for teaching. “I use AI to give me ideas, not to tell me how to teach or preform the lesson,” she explains.
Despite there being potential positives to using AI, “there’s a value in learning how to do things yourself. Sometimes finding out reasons and research behind an answer is better than just knowing the answer. If you use AI to do everything for you (especially with how it’s going to replace human workforce) what are we really learning?” Ms. Cox states. Ms. Scoggins similarly states, “In college, or in the real world, AI is not going to prepare you to think on your own. It’s a crutch.”
All in all, students who use AI must know where to draw the line. AI can have benefits to it, but students must be careful not to depend on it too much.
