Districts shift focus to teaching students about responsible AI use

How teachers, students use AI amid its infiltration in classes

- BY HOWARD BLUME

how to respond have shifted dramatically.

Like many concerned educators, Cuny is not calling for an AI ban. Instead, "AI literacy" has become a buzzword of the back-toschool season, with a focus on how to leverage the potential of AI while minimizing its risks.

Ultimately, students will need to know how to use AI effectively and ethically, said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford who is the co-lead researcher of a longterm, ongoing study of student cheating.

"Let's really look at what is the purpose of education," Pope said. "What are the skills that kids will need to know when they get out of this sort of particular environment of school."

Researchers at Stanford, led by Pope and colleague Victor Lee, have concluded that the prevalence of cheating does not appear to be greater than before AI. What's changed is the technology that underpins cheating.

In the Stanford study, which began well before the public availability of ChatGPT, students report anonymously on behaviors within the last month, including:

·Looking at someone else's answer during a test Using crib sheets

Hiding textbooks in bathroom stalls and using bathroom passes during exams

·Paying students from earlier periods to leak test questions to later test-takers.

New behaviors include using AI to write all or parts of papers or using it to summarize books that the student will never crack open. The Stanford researchers concluded that cheating was common before AI - and it remains so. It is the nature of cheating that is evolving.

"This year's data is showing a decline in copying off a peer and it seems there is more use of AI instead," said Lee, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

In these surveys, about 3 in 4 students reported behaviors in the last month that qualify as cheating, figures similar to what was reported prior to AI.