(American Greatness) As I noted last week, students often use AI to cheat. A Fordham Institute paper, “High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction,” reports that 48 percent of students use AI to solve math problems, 36 percent use it to summarize books or texts to avoid reading them, 29 percent use it to write the first drafts of their essays or reports, and 26 percent use it for help during quizzes and tests.
When asked to respond to statements about AI’s effects on school, 58 percent of students agree that it has made homework meaningless, and 57 percent agree that it lets students get good grades without doing real work. (As a former teacher, I can tell you that homework was problematic before AI came along. When students turned in homework, I was never sure whether they had done it or whether a parent, a sibling, or the next-door neighbor had.)
Most recently, the AI problem surfaced when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released findings from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global measure of educational achievement that assesses the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old students.