By: Emma Catarino
The academic pressure that is placed on students of all ages is at an all-time high right now. I believe there are a number of factors that have led to this. With global populations continuing to rise, classrooms are filled to the brim with students who need to try even harder to stand out amongst the herd. The COVID-19 pandemic also gave students more leniency with deadlines and grade adjustments, leading to many students not practicing their time management or self-discipline skills. Homework loads have continued to get heavier, while children are still expected to be active in afterschool sports, take part in creative activities, and maintain a social life.
Usage of generative AI has been increasing over the last few years since sites like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok have emerged. Truthfully, all generations are guilty of using it — from millennials who want to create a picture of themselves in the 50’s, to Gen X using it to write emails in the workplace. Arguably, the generations that are most guilty of this are Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Increasingly, students have been using generative AI as an aid in school. Some usage of generative AI in school can be beneficial. When fact-checked, AI can be useful for creating flashcards or practice questions for studying. However, students have been using AI to summarize readings and do homework assignments for them. In less offensive cases, students who are burnt out from their workload use ChatGPT to come up with “creative” ideas for essay topics. In the worst cases, students use generative AI sites to write entire essays for them. Many students cite being overwhelmed as an excuse for AI use.
This begs the question: Is generative AI usage by students somewhat justified? Based on the overall principle: no. It should never be ok to plagiarize another person’s work, which is essentially what generative AI does. It takes thousands of written and artistic pieces available online and rearranges them to fit the prompt you give it. AI is a machine; it doesn’t have the capability to think or produce original work. Using AI-generated writing to complete your assignments is plagiarizing thousands of original contributors to avoid putting in any real effort yourself. This will always be wrong.
However, when we consider the pressure that students are under, AI use becomes almost understandable. One of my university professors once told my class that she expected us to dedicate five hours outside of the lectures every week to studying for her course. This might not seem like an unreasonable request until you consider the implications. Most full-time students take five courses, and spend about 20 hours a week in lectures and labs. Studying five hours a week for each of the five classes means studying for 25 hours every week. Along with the time spent in class, that equates to more than the typical weekly hours in most full-time jobs. Add in commuting times, extracurricular activities, volunteering, research, internship experiences, and self-care habits, students are left with almost no time for proper sleep or a social life. There are barely even enough hours in a week to accomplish all of this. These circumstances become even more strenuous for students of lower socioeconomic classes, who need to take care of their family or work part-time jobs to pay tuition and bills.
Many students don’t take on all these commitments just for fun. They are requirements for medical school, master’s, and PhD programs, as well as making candidates stand out in job interviews. With the job market getting increasingly worse, having previous unpaid internship experiences do help candidates land full-time positions. However, having 8+ hours a week taken up by an unpaid position does lessen the amount of time the student has for studying. Additionally with unpaid experiences becoming expected instead of appreciated by higher education institutes, there is now pressure to participate in multiple of these activities. All of these combined activities place a lot of stress on students. It makes reliance on AI understandable, as it lightens their workload.
Plagiarizing in any form will always be a bad idea. Every syllabus in every class you take will state that academic dishonesty is against your institution’s Code of Conduct. A violation of which will lead to course failure, academic probation, and even expulsion. A mark like that on your academic record could affect future academic or workplace pursuits; It’s also not worth it in the long run. Honesty and integrity aside, by plagiarizing an assignment or cheating on a test, you haven’t actually learned anything. The last thing that the workforce needs is more incompetent workers. The real solution to this issue would be to lighten students’ workload, and in turn, lowering the unreasonable expectations set on students. That could include giving less homework, focusing on helping students maintain a school/work life balance, and recruiters having reasonable hiring expectations. Unfortunately, this is a tall order. As generative AI becomes more commonplace, we are undoubtedly going to continue seeing an increase in this manner of academic dishonesty.