Students let the bot do the work

Most high schoolers use AI, raising fresh doubts about value of home assignments.

- HOWARD BLUME

SEVENTH-GRADERS Rylee Tucker, left, and Phelps Mauricio savor snow cones at their Inglewood school.

Homework has long been a topic of debate, but in 2025 it is facing an existential crisis: Has artificial intelligence and its instant answers made it pointless or even counterproductive?

Research released this month suggests that AI has become fully embedded in how students respond to homework and other assignments.

The percentage of high school students who report using generative AI for schoolwork is growing, increasing from an already high 79% to 84% between January and May of this year, according to surveys conducted by College Board, the nonprofit that manages much of the nation's standardized tests, including the SAT.

That means increasing numbers of students are assigning their own homework to AI—even if it puts learning at peril. AI can solve a math problem and also show the work step by step. It can summarize and analyze a reading passage. It can write an entire essay, in ways increasingly difficult to spot.

Inglewood high school English teacher Alyssa Bolden learned from one of her students that AI could customize an essay by incorporating the student's notes from Bolden's lectures as well as her unique evaluation rubric.

AI has given her an overpowering reason to consider homework pointless.

"They're not doing it," she said of students and homework. "They're not doing it."

Other teachers, however, continue to assign homework, which introduces a new tension in the learning relationship, said 10th-grader Aaliyah Herron, 15, who is one of Bolden's students at City Honors International Preparatory High School. In other classes, she finds herself having to prove her innocence given the quality of her work.