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.

> But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts.

This is what isn't explained or understood properly (...I think) to students; on the surface you go to college/uni to learn a subject, but in reality, you "learn to learn". The output that you're asked to submit is just to prove that you can and have learned.

But you don't learn to learn by using AI tools. You may learn how to craft stuff that passes muster, gets you a decent grade and eventually a piece of paper, but you haven't learned to learn.

Of course, that isn't anything new, loads of people try and game the system, or just "do the work, get the paper". A box ticking exercise instead of something they actually want to learn.