How University Students Use Claude

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used.

I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem.

Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous issue. For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

IMO it's so easy to ChatGPT your homework that the whole education model needs to flip on its head. Some teachers already do something like this, it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable. It means less class time for instruction, but students have a tutor in their pocket anyway.

I've also talked with a bunch of teachers and a couple admins about this. They agree it's a huge problem. By the same token, they are using AI to create their lesson plans and assignments! Not fully of course, they edit the output using their expertise. But it's funny to imagine AI completing an AI assignment with the humans just along for the ride.

The point is, if you actually want to know what a student is capable of, you need to watch them doing it. Assigning homework has lost all meaning.

> it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Flipped classroom is just having the students give lectures, instead of the teacher.

> Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable.

This is called "proctored exams" and it's been pretty common in universities for a few centuries.

None of this addresses the real issue, which is whether teachers should be preventing students from using AIs.