A student has many responsibilities. They have to feed and bathe themselves, some are responsible for putting a roof over their head, doing chores for their parents, taking care of their siblings, sports, instruments and a million other things to keep up with the world.
When most people hear “student,” they automatically feel a sense of empathy and understanding that this individual is learning, that they still have potential and that they are trying to achieve.
However, when students are offered a tool that sabotages how we have learned for decades, is the student who uses it and adapts to new circumstances, considered a bad student? Is the student who sticks to their guns and works honestly but laboriously, considered a good student? What box do these students go in now?
This is a question that arises all the time when we are talking about AI and technology in academia. What’s more important for students, the act of learning how to do something, or simply being able to do it, through whatever means necessary?
Lauran Combs, a teacher at Sammamish High School with nine years of experience, revealed that the biggest deterrent to learning in her classroom is actually technology. Combs states that, “When we are able to put the technology away, I am often surprised by how engaged students can be.”
A major reason as to why technology is so harmful to the classroom environment is the role it plays in providing distractions. Combs explains, “whether playing on your laptop or being on your phone, obviously, if there is a more exciting thing you can access, in your teenage brain, that’s what you are going to do. Because distractions are so easily accessible, it takes a lot of self-control and motivation to put down distractions like that, especially for teenagers.”
But of course, we cannot talk about technology without mentioning artificial intelligence, widely known as AI. AI has opened a whole new dimension in the world of possibilities for assistance with education.
The biggest gift it has given students is convenience and saving time. At first, a student may use it when struggling to meet a deadline, so generating an essay seems like the natural response to keeping up with responsibilities and maintaining a good GPA. After a certain point, it feels useless to keep putting in hours of work when it can easily be achieved, sometimes with even better results, through the use of AI. Time is constantly being saved, although one has to wonder what it’s being saved for.
There is no better example of a student who has completely adapted to AI and succeeded than Roy Lee, the founder of the famous “cheat everything” app Cluely. Lee found himself in a precarious position when he revealed to the world that he used AI to cheat on his Amazon interview. His university, Columbia, and Amazon were both livid at the breach of trust. So, like any protagonist, after being kicked out of his school, he broke away from the mold and forged his own path by launching his startup Cluely, where he is now worth anywhere from 20-30 million dollars.
Whether or not Cluely challenges the inherent nature of choice and labor in academics feels irrelevant when considering that Lee has proved with the launch of his app and his story that you can succeed without having to learn in the traditional sense.
Cluely is also one of the few AI apps and websites that teachers, employers and educators are all struggling to keep up with.
Combs states that “It’s just such a new technology that there is no policy about AI in some school districts, or maybe they are just scrambling to put one together. And also, AI changes so fast that whenever you write a policy, it is easily outdated. Initially, if you catch a kid using AI, you run it through a checker, and that’s your proof. Well, now AI is becoming even more human, where the checker cannot catch it anymore . . . There are just these kinds of on-the-fly solutions that teachers try to come up with.”
Plagiarism and cheating are looked harshly upon because it is stealing someone else’s intellectual property. However, the question regarding ethics have only been made more confusing with AI, as there isn’t any explicit proof of ownership to that work. So, the avoidance of using AI has to come directly from a desire to genuinely do the work and exercise the brain. That can be challenging for students in high school and younger who are legally mandated to attend class.
When talking about the quality of assignments she receives, Combs revealed that, “Students get into a habit of googling things for so many content-related things, it’s just bleeding into reflective questions. As a teacher, you have to be really aware and explicit about communicating that it must come from their own brain. Again, not saying that that’s the fault of the student; they have just been trained that the computer has the right answer. Their focus is that this has to be the right answer.”
She went on to explain that, “It can interfere with a student’s thinking and it leads to a lack of confidence in their answer, where they think ‘oh I need to have the exact perfect phrasing as it is said online, and my own thoughts are not as eloquent, so they’re crap.’”
Consistently relying on technology for the right answer causes students to raise the bar for the work they turn in to be so high, that they feel their own intelligence is incapable of reaching it. It creates a vicious cycle where, in the end, the student degenerates in their abilities instead of learning and getting better.
A new box is created for students, not labelled lazy or hard-working, but a currently unlabeled, nascent category. Is technology really helping students learn, or is it just taking away the learning aspect of learning? Maybe we do not have to blindly embrace every single new technology. Saving time for the sake of saving time has turned us into time frugals, optimizing our brains like machines.
