Leveling Up Learning (and Grades!) using AI

By Manan, Grade 10

Happy 2025 New Years! With the turn of the years and the completion of first semester midterms, every student is looking for ways to speed up their schoolwork and put it into practice a very common proverb: “work smarter, not harder”. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to make this a reality. After all, a chemistry lab is a chemistry lab; a ten page Macbeth essay is a ten page Macbeth essay, right? So how do we speed up our work while not sacrificing accuracy?

Let me tell you how it worked for me. Before we dive into that, it’s important to understand how the emergence of AI amongst the backdrop of the pandemic and school shaped how students behave today. This whole discussion will be broken up across many blogposts, so stay tuned!

2022, the Year of two Cs: Covid and ChatGPT

In November of 2022, ChatGPT released to the public, taking the world by storm. We had an AI assistant at our finger tips, seemingly with infinite knowledge and capabilities! It was not long before students either hacked their parents GPT account or made their own to start “helping” them in school.

As a consequence of the massive online-to-physical shift that had taken place a year ago, most student materials were on online platforms, the most common one in the US being Schoology. English classes particularly had drastically reduced the number of handwritten, on-paper essays in class and increased the amount of typed, long-term essays that were to be submitted as a google doc to the assignment.

Starting, much less writing, an academic essay is hard on paper: it’s even harder online. Did you know a handwritten draft helps you brainstorm ideas easier? Thing is, no one actually cared. The goal was fast, fast, fast; 100%, 100%, 100%. Now guess what tool is “fast, fast, fast” and SUPER accurate?

That’s right: AI

In less than a month, students began to use AI in massive numbers, almost proliferating prompts everywhere, at anytime. Find a quote that tells you why Lady Macbeth is evil? Instead of flipping though your 100-page Shakespeare text, just ask GPT! How do I balance a redox reaction? Too lazy to go to the textbook, just quickly ask GPT! Forgot how to perform a systematic search of a binary tree in C++? No more hours on StackOverflow, just ask GPT to write it for you!

AI ≠ ChatGPT

It’s interesting to note that although I reference ChatGPT a lot here, it isn’t my favorite model: indeed, you might have not heard about anything other than ChatGPT, but many exclusive, fast, and all-powerful models exist. I use them in tandem with each other, getting two responses from different models which then I can use a little from each to craft my product. Some of my favorite ones include Elon Musks’s xAI, Perplexity, Llama, Gemini, and Claude (all of these are LLMs— “Large Language Models”).

A timeline of different AIs. Source: https://sungkim11.medium.com/list-of-open-sourced-fine-tuned-large-language-models-llm-8d95a2e0dc76

Soon, the school meta wasn’t memorizing slides or finding the secret textbook where the test problems came from. With all semblance of “hard work” out the window, we students asked ourselves one question:

“Who here can ChatGPT the fastest?”

However, clearly we forgot to ChatGPT Newton’s third law: for every action exists an equal and opposite reaction. And this opposite reaction to the surge of ChatGPT was the increasing occurrences of plagiarism. Indeed, students could now just copypaste their essay prompt and copypaste that answer back and submit. For better or worse, two things happened: teachers started monitoring AI work and stated catching cheaters, and second, students’ performance on tests deteriorated rapidly. Because everyone was GPTing their Ancient Civilizations Project, they were failing test questions like “Name the ancient civilizations”.

Tit-for-tat

So, the catch of using AI is that students tend to become overreliant on it. For us, the short-term goal of “overcoming” a mountain of homework outweighs any risk of not learning the material fully enough: we either tell ourselves that we can prepare for the test later and give excuses about what will actually BE on the test (best case), or we give ourselves a false sense of security when receiving back an A+ grade on a ChatGPT-ed assignment that we know the material (worse case). But for now, students were cruising along with their beautiful new engine—both literally and figuratively.