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.

I don't think asking "what's wrong with my code" hurts the learning process. In fact, I would argue it helps it. I don't think you learn when you have reached your frustration point and you just want the dang assignment completed. But before reaching that point, if you had a tutor or assistant that you could ask, "hey, I'm just not seeing my mistake, do you have ideas" goes a long way to foster learning. ChatGPT, used in this way, can be extremely valuable and can definitely unlock learning in new ways which we probably even haven't seen yet.

That being said, I agree with you, if you just ask ChatGPT to write a b-tree implementation from scratch, then you have not learned anything. So like all things in academia, AI can be used to foster education or cheat around it. There's been examples of these "cheats" far before ChatGPT or Google existed.