iStockphoto
According to a new survey, more than 70 percent of secondary students in the United States are using an AI chatbot to help them with schoolwork. Plus, they are doing this while knowing that AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT still make many errors and the fact that it is against their school’s rules.
“I realized that a lot of the people around me were using large language models, and more specifically ChatGPT, for a lot of school assignments,” said Tiffany Zhu, an 11th grade student at The Harker School in San Jose, California, who assisted in conducting the survey.
According to a report by New Scientist, Zhu, along with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, surveyed 306 students in the 6th to 12th grades (middle school to high school) to find out how often they use an AI chatbot to help them with their school assignments.
The results of the survey, published on the pre-print server arXiv, revealed 71 percent of the students said they had used large language models (LLMs) at least once for their school work, which is “higher than the usage percentage among young adults.” Nine percent said they used AI chatbots daily to do their assignments. And about 5 percent said they actually paid for an AI tool.
“Students also reported using LLMs for multiple subjects, including language arts, history, and math assignments, but expressed mixed thoughts on their effectiveness due to occasional hallucinations in historical contexts and incorrect answers for lack of rigorous reasoning,” the researchers wrote.
“The paper shows that high school students are actively using LLMs, with or without the knowledge of their schools and teachers,” said Thomas Lancaster at Imperial College London, adding, “There’s quite a danger here where students are relying on LLMs without proper training and expecting fully formed answers, plus the potential for them to have gaps in their learning.”
After seeing the results of the survey, Zhu reasoned, “There needs to be a way where students and teachers and AI developers are working collaboratively to understand how we can use AI. We can tell from our results that students are already going to use them despite school rules or ethical consideration.”
The researchers concluded, “The survey feedback called for LLMs better adapted for students, and also raised questions to developers and educators on how to help students from underserved communities leverage LLMs’ capabilities for equal access to advanced education resources.”