Are Students Using AI To Study?

The more AI technology advances, the more students are using it in their every day lives. Most people are well aware of students using AI to write their essays and do their homework, but this isn’t the only use students are getting out of these AI tools.

Studying and reading is subject to AI integration just as much as academic writing. Generative AI is able to read the assignments either from an uploaded document or the web and create summaries, pinpointing relevant quotes and points so students can quickly get all the necessary proof that they did their assigned reading.

The use of AI in studying and reading has caused higher education institutions to rethink how they assign reading, signaling larger changes on the horizon for academia.

Table of Contents

• How Are Students Using AI to Study?

• How is Academia Rethinking Reading Assignments?

• Why Are Students Reading Less?

• AI Solutions for AI Problems

• TL;DR

• FAQ

How Are Students Using AI to Study?

For the longest time, college students have looked for ways to skirt this schoolwork, either by reading Cliff's Notes, web summaries, watching YouTube summaries, or simply skimming the material and crossing their fingers that they glossed over the material that’ll end up on the quiz.Now though, with advanced artificial intelligence at their fingertips, students only need to ask these AI chatbots to read the material for them and generate a summary.

Many of the caveats of using generative AI tools to create essays aren’t present when summarizing pdf’s. For instance, misinformation that an AI-generated essay might have aren’t present when the AI is tasked with simply reading a piece of text. This was once one of main hallmarks of AI writing for plagiarism detection, however in this case this fatal flaw is lacking from AI-powered studying.

AI powered studying takes many forms. With students even asking AI to generate flash cards, so they can educate themselves the right way.

Still, professors are not convinced that academic integrity is not being tarnished with this less intrusive use of AI tools. If students use AI to read everything assigned to them, professors will have to change what, why, and how they ask students to read in the first place.

How is Academia Rethinking Reading Assignments

Unlike high school students, some college students have anywhere from 100 pages to 300 pages a week for varying fields of study. Whether because they deem the reading unnecessary busywork, they just don’t have the bandwidth to juggle the load, or for their own mental health, there has been a larger decline of reading for Gen-Z and younger students than previous times in academia.

You can look to studies from the 90’s and see a steady decline in reading begin only to dip further and further all the way up to 70% of students saying they don’t read the texts their professors give them in a 2021 study.

Where most professors take issue with the refusal to read and use of AI to take on reading assessments for students, is that such practices deprive young learners of the student learning experiences that are required to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

The solution as many professors have found, is conducting more in-class assignments, including in-class reading that teaches them how to read larger loads in a given period of time. Cognizant of declines in reading, some professors assign large reading loads for homework with intentions to quiz students on such hyper-specific material that no chatbot could possibly prepare the student for the quiz.

Other solutions may involve explicitly advocating for using AI as well as changing the way students read. One of the many factors as to why students aren’t reading is surely changing technologies and mediums from which student derive information. Some professors advocate for joining this trend and assigning material to watch or listen to, in the form of YouTube videos or podcasts, instead of traditional reading.

Why Are Students Studying Less?

Technological advancement holds a large share of fault for the decline in reading by college students, however, there are numerous factors beyond these advents. The Coronavirus pandemic served a large role in changing the way Gen-Z students learn, from shifting school to fully-remote settings and making mental health play a larger role in academia, students were tasked to read less and became used to these behaviors.

With social media, podcasts, streaming services, and an infinite amount of media choices available to them, people have shorter attention-spans than ever, constituting a threat to reading at large, beyond school work. Even English students, who love to read and write, are using AI to complete and summarize the reading their assigned from less interesting classes.

Lastly, economics has a role to play in why students read less. More students are working simultaneously to doing college work and this limits the bandwidth for school work they’re able to take on.

This isn’t just students that need to work at the same time as they study to afford tuition and other bills, it’s student taking advantage of job opportunities that have been made available to younger candidates with remote capabilities that allow them to work anywhere and anytime. In our changing world, young people don’t see graduating as a pre-condition to starting their hustle, and studying often gets in the way.

AI Solutions to AI Problems

Artificial intelligence is unique from previous Edtech advances that have changed the world. Any problem is subject to new solutions with unlimited capabilities to improve student learning experiences without having to sacrifice academic integrity.

AI tools will soon be able to customize curricula down to each professor’s student and address all of their personal needs, whether they have jobs, mental health concerns, or simply prefer other media to text to get their information. Once curricula are personalized towards students, learning experiences can be crafted that ensure students acquire the skills they need to truly educate themselves, that students don’t just consider boring busy work, and that professors approve of.

TL;DR

More than half of students are using AI tools to study. Some reports suggest it’s up to 86% of students, meanwhile as previously cited in this article, 70% of students are refusing to read. Obviously, if we truly care about student learning experiences, AI is not the issue. Students are already being deprived of learning experiences simply because they don’t care.

AI should be considered an opportunity to reengage students in academia. AI’s impact on academia has yet to materialize, but we can already expect that it will be responsible for more positive results than cases of plagiarism. OpenAI’s updated versions of ChatGPT alone are capable of more computing power than ever, making it essential in scientific fields. When the humanities become subject to such advancements, they will make AI essential to educating yourself in a field.

FAQ

Is Using ChatGPT plagiarism?

Using ChatGPT or any other generative AI software to do your homework is not traditional plagiarism. It may be considered academic misconduct, but plagiarism is defined the theft of words or ideas without proper credit, which is not what AI does when generating text. Generative AI creates original content, so having it ghostwrite your essay is not plagiarism but the newer classification of “AI plagiarism”.

How Many Students Use Generative AI?

A recent Digital Education Council survey reported that 86% of students use AI at varying capacities for their studies. Given that using AI for schoolwork is often prohibited, some students may have felt pressure confessing that they use AI as well. Meaning the actual percentage of students using AI may even be higher than 86%.

What Are People Using Generative AI For?

Students use generative AI for homework but professionals also use these AI tools for all sorts of tasks from writing blogs, to SEO, to social media posts on platforms like LinkedIn and X. Using tools like Stealth Writer and SEO Writer give digital content writers huge advantages for making content personalized to any audience.

What Other Generative AI apps are People Using?

Beyond ChatGPT, students and professionals are realizing that in order to implement AI into their work, they need to use undetectable AI services to bypass AI detectors. The best of these services is StealthGPT, with more capability in beating AI detection than any competitor, while also providing high quality content for professionals and academics alike.