How common is it for students to use AI to complete their assignments?

[Darkling1]

Either at school, college and university.

I’m asking as a friend of mine is having her university assignment investigated for potential AI use. Friend swears that she didn’t use AI to complete this work.

Is it commonplace now?

Congratulations!

I despair at young people wasting the product of millions of years of evolution - our brains, our consciousness, our ability to reason, our ability to communicate with our own voice - and de-skilling themselves, as well as instrumentalising their own education.

This is what I was going to say. And I believe it’s more of a problem for neurodivergent people - they are more likely to have works incorrectly flagged as AI.

Teacher judgement would be better, because they know what a student is capable of and how they write. Although of course, if you give AI ten essays you’ve written before and tell it to copy your style, that may be pretty convincing.

That's not my experience, but then my experience is FE so maybe different.

I find the students who are lazy can't be bothered to actually dress up what the have used AI for or other form of cheating.

I can spot Wikipedia a mile away because they always include the date of birth and death.

Even a year ago it was incredibly easy to spot AI. I now think it's often much more difficult, particularly if students use it carefully and create several different iterations, interspersed with a bit of original material.

Actually I don't agree with you on dates - nothing to do with Wikipedia- it's for clarity in the essay to ensure that the correct John Smith is being discussed. I prefer dates to titles as they don't change during a lifetime.

I teach in a college and each year we have a small number of students who are investigated for using AI to write all or a significant proportion of an assignment (or multiple assignments). This is sometimes detected by teachers and sometimes through turnitin, although turnitin isn’t always accurate. Teacher judgement is nearly always right though, it’s easy to see when students are writing about stuff they haven’t been taught, or is vaguely relevant but just doesn’t quite fit right with the brief and goes off on strange tangents. I am currently doing a postgraduate course and I use it to help with assignments sometimes, to find relevant research (which I then read) or I ask it to pose questions to me to help clarify to myself what I am writing. It sometimes makes up academic papers so I always ask it for a link to the paper, saves me time hunting for something that doesn’t exist!

Schools will flip classrooms/learning soon
And make them do prep at home and write the "homework" in class.

So like they will have a work to prepare for writing 300 word essay on about "life after the Norman conquest". They'll write the essay in the lesson.

Quite and paying £30,000 for a computer to do their work for them...

The person you responded to referred to OU, the Open University attracts mature students rather than “young people” - so I’m not quite sure why you’re directing disparaging remarks towards young people in particular.

Secondly, AI isn’t going to go away. So to a certain extent, the academic world will have to adjust, and accommodate for AI. Just like they did decades ago when internet search engines became popular and widely used. AI isn’t any different than people Google searching their university answers after all. Instead, diligent referencing and plagiarism checks emerged, and it was accepted that students can use search engines to research. Likewise, it will likely become accepted for AI to be used in higher education to a certain extent, as long as it has been disclosed.

beyond that, I do wholeheartedly believe there is no point having humans undertake rudimentary work that AI can complete in seconds. Hence, higher education institutions will have to adjust their portfolio to be more specialist whereby AI has no edge over it. If AI can soak up basic tasks, a certain level of knowledge becomes common knowledge, and humans will compete by getting better. Just like how the basic admin jobs of the past, have little relevance in 2025.

I once read an 'essay' from a student that told me all about The Spy Shop in London and what you can buy there.

They were supposed to be talking about Health Surveillance. Things like the film badges radiographers wear and blood tests to check you vaccine has worked.

Staff absolutely don't.

I’m doing an OU degree at the moment and different modules have different rules for AI and what you’re allowed to do with it. I personally wouldn’t use it to write an essay for me because I’m trying to get good marks and I think I can do it better myself. Often the assignment is designed to make that kind of AI use difficult too - we are expected to reference course materials that are not in the public domain, for example. But it’s sometimes a useful helper. So I might ask it three ways to structure an essay comparing blah and blah. Or what are the most cited studies on topic x, to get me on my way with a lit search. I can see it would be tempting to rely on AI, but I don’t like its writing style and would also be very anxious and uncomfortable waiting to find out if I would get away with it.

probably common, but Uni have technology to detect it, so little point.

I think schools and universities should, in an ideal world, teach courses on how and when to use AI as an introductory or Y1 course - both ethically and in terms of how to use AI well as a tool. I’m not in this world - maybe they do?

Part of my work entails writing grant applications in the charity sector. I use AI in this. I’ve compiled a bank of successful applications I have previously written myself and ask it to use that to answer questions within a particular word count. I then re-work those answers. Yesterday it saved me an hour at least, when I asked it to come up with a Risk Assessment for a particular activity, in spreadsheet format. Obviously it needed my attention to improve some content, but it was better than starting from a blank page.

Except most universities don't allow the use of the detection software as it's too unreliable.

Universities are all playing catch-up really. The tech is evolving so fast, lecturers are learning at the same time as students.

I teach an arts subject so many of mine do not like Ai or engage with it on an ethical stance. However, use if Ai won't go away and they are allowed to use it. We must coach them in acceptable usage.

Most academic misconduct cases have involved Ai recent. But the trick is going to be where students are using it within guidelines and it is going to have an impact on their practice and skill development. A bit like, I suppose, the impact search engines have had on research for students. We coach them on how to find quality sources not just the first search engine result.

Students with dyslexia are allowed to use it as a tool as well and that can be very different to their usual writing. So much so that we suspected Ai usage without acknowledgement but it was just he hadn't declared use of grammerly. It was not good writing though.

I tried it to jump start a presentation. Cost me more time than doing it from scratch because it was poor quality. The trick for all of us is to work out where it actually helps.

As per the university’s own website:

The average age of an OU student is 28 and the biggest age group range is from 25-34 years.

www.open.ac.uk/blogs/news/student-stories/start-your-degree-in-2023/

Hence I was correct that the OU attracts mature students and the disparaging comments towards “young people” was unnecessary.

Very common. Pretty much the norm I would say.

Then again, the teachers and lecturers who get all indignant about the use of AI are using it themselves to plan lessons and grade assignments. Unis often have their own version of Chat GPT, but students usually don't bother with it and stick to the mainstream versions.

People are saying that the use of AI is 'very obvious' but as it becomes more and more sophisticated, that will change. AI is going to pose, and indeed is already posing, massive challenges for education institutions, and I don't think any of them have a clue how to deal with it.

No we are not using it to plan lessons and grade assignments. I work in a STEM subject and we recognise the benefits of AI but also the limitations and dangers.

The problem is students are not using it as an aid to learning but rather as a replacement for learning. We are very much encouraged to design assessment in a way that limits their use of AI to authorised usage. Unfortunately, it also means a return to more in-person exams rather than continuous assessment.

No we are not using it to plan lessons and grade assignments.

Maybe you're not but I know many teachers and lecturers who are doing just that.

Where I work, we are definitely not. We are completely open with one another on how we use it.

That's great, but there's a whole world out there beyond your particular workplace.

Our university allows the use of AI, it just has to be declared.

I have used it to understand a concept I’ve found confusing in a lecture, but I haven’t used it in assignment writing.

No need to be so patronising.

I know plenty of people who work in other universities and with whom I have discussed this. Obviously there will be some lecturers who do use it for corrections and planning lessons but I suspect it is a minority. I have no idea what happens in schools.