Tag: students

  • Beyond Digital Literacy: Cultivating “Meta AI” Skills in Students and Faculty – Faculty Focus

    Beyond Digital Literacy: Cultivating “Meta AI” Skills in Students and Faculty – Faculty Focus

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  • Limited resources at underserved schools can keep students from getting the support they need

    Limited resources at underserved schools can keep students from getting the support they need

    As the first in my family to attend college, I felt a profound commitment to excel academically and gain admission to a top university. Growing up amid the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, I always envisioned a bright future ahead, with college at the forefront of my goals since elementary school.

    At my Title I elementary and middle schools, student-to-teacher ratios were even higher than those listed online. There was a lack of classroom technology and resources like history textbooks. Our two middle school counselors each managed students by the hundreds, making it nearly impossible for them to keep track of individual academic progress and educational goals. Afterward, I attended a private high school, thanks to support from my family. Our caring teachers made the effort to get to know each student, and dedicated counselors advocated for me when it mattered most.

    Yet when conversations about college came around, navigating the complex system was difficult. I had to chart my own path to success through independent research, often looking at data that was scattered and inconsistent. It hindered my ability to educate myself on college-going rates, costs, outcomes and employment prospects post-graduation.

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    Limited resources available at many underserved schools across the nation make it a more challenging environment for students to get support and excel, thus limiting their true academic potential.

    In my senior year of high school, after gaining newfound confidence while serving as a commissioner at-large in my county’s youth commission, I decided to try to challenge the status quo in higher education through the power of data and find a way to speak up for other first-generation students who find themselves interacting with systems not designed with their experiences in mind. My mentors at a regional food bank where I volunteered shaped me to lead with confidence and heart.

    When I received my admission letter from the University of California, Berkeley, I felt deeply honored to earn a place at one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions.

    I am now an advisory board member of the recently formed California Cradle-to-Career Data System, the state’s longitudinal system that connects education and career outcomes data in one central place. I have learned firsthand that the resources available for students to gauge their potential postgraduate earnings often rely on self-submitted data or estimates, rather than on an accurate overview of college and career outcomes.

    Related: To better serve first-generation students, expand the definition

    As part of this work, I am now helping my state’s leaders develop tools like the Student Pathways dashboard, which provides insights on the higher education options available to students after high school.

    The tool provides information on a single website for everyone to access at any time. By streamlining access to this data, it allows students and the adults helping them to easily pinpoint which types of degrees or certifications are right for them, which may lead to employment opportunities where they live and which colleges or universities the students’ classmates are headed to.

    Students need access that can help them map out their futures — whether they hope to attend college, earn a certificate or enter the workforce directly after high school. Using data in the pathways tool can clarify how others have navigated to and through college and hopefully help students chart their own paths.

    As the youngest advisory board member, I have the opportunity to provide proposals and recommendations from a student’s perspective on how the system can engage with communities to make its data more accessible. Community engagement involves ensuring that Californians are aware of the data system, can understand and interpret the available data and have an opportunity to share their feedback.

    I often think about how the countless hours I spent trying to find information to help guide my goals and decision-making were both a burden and barrier to attending college. I know firsthand how the power of data can help build a successful future.

    Today, many first-generation and low-income college students do not have the opportunity to assess which pathways will yield the most fruit. I’m confident that with accessible facts and data for our decision-making, we can confidently forge the paths that will bring our dreams to life.

    Mike Nguyen is a rising junior studying business administration and science, technology, and society at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. This piece was written in collaboration with Alexis Takagi, a basic needs coordinator at Santa Clara University. Both Nguyen and Takagi are advisory board members of the California Cradle-to-Career Data System.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story first-generation college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • Co-curricular space is where students can find human experience outside the AI bubble

    Co-curricular space is where students can find human experience outside the AI bubble

    In his criminally underread 1978 book The Grasshopper, the philosopher Bernard Suits takes seriously the science-fiction commonplace that, once robots are doing everything for us, humans will have to find something else to do.

    His response is that we’d play, living lives of leisure, like Aesop’s grasshopper, and engaging in activities with a lusory attitude: living playfully, engaging in activities not because we have to, but because we want to. Fully-automated luxury play! As much as I could easily play videogames all day, work isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But the rise of AI in education has prompted me to revisit this topic.

    Universities are, quite rightly, thinking very carefully about what their staff and students do with AI, emphasising the ways in which it can enhance, and perhaps even replace, aspects of our work. But there are separate, parallel questions: what can’t AI do for us, and what shouldn’t it do? And what are we going to do with all the time it saves us?

    Doing and being seen to have done

    Human lives are full of experiences, and there’s a danger with the rise of AI that we weaken our connection with the actual doing of things. AI might help us to plan a holiday itinerary, book a hotel or draft a jealousy-inducing social media post (or even deepfake pics from a holiday that didn’t happen), but it can’t go on holiday for us. And similarly, in learning environments, whilst it can enhance learning, overreliance on AI runs the risk of hollowing out the experiential core of learning and leaving students not having actually done anything.

    A real challenge for educators is to know how to get students to understand the value of experience in a world that incentivises taking shortcuts. I lead Rise at Manchester Met: a co-curricular programme that is designed to draw together all the things that students do that aren’t their degree, and our team works hard to help students to understand that they are more than their degree subject.

    The traditional catch-all term for this is “extra-curricular” – it’s the things that students do in addition to the curricula they are following. But in practice “co-curricular” is a more accurate term. “Co” indicates that activity happens alongside and with the curriculum. There is a crossover in the experiences that students are having. Picture the curriculum and co-curricular activities as two streams that are sometimes totally divergent, sometimes parallel, and often overlapping in productive ways.

    Identity shapes participation

    Students don’t stop being students when they engage in co-curricular activities, but similarly they don’t stop being a community organiser, or a hockey player, or a freelance arts journalist, when they’re in the classroom. My doctoral thesis argued that half of the “game” of higher education is students understanding how they can bring their own identities to transform their participation, and “position-switch” between roles. The co-curricular is at its most powerful when these distinct identities and experiences begin to transform and enhance each other.

    Moving from “extra” to “co” also challenges the primacy of the core curriculum as the foundation of student experience, and acknowledges that, for many of our students, “student” might not be their primary identity. We must accept that, for some students, their co-curricular activity might be more engaging, more relevant and more career-focused than their core degree programme. For others, the stuff they are doing outside their degree programme might be necessary and unavoidable, and will often pre-date their involvement at university; paid-work and caring responsibilities tend to take precedence over lectures, and there may be ways to make this count too.

    However, when you type “co-curricular” into your search engine of choice, you won’t really see university websites. It’s a term that, at present, seems to be owned by the upper-end of British private boarding schools. In a sense this stands to reason; pupils essentially live in these schools during term time, and activities take place as part of their wider life at school. Here “co-curricular” is an expectation, and provides the social and cultural capital building for which British private schools are famous.

    This conceptual dominance raises an issue of social justice, though. There is a sense that all of the “extra” stuff, at both schools and universities, is the domain of students who are privileged enough to take part, and who have the time and resources to make it happen. Working outside the curriculum is too often seen as a privilege for the privileged, and effectively becomes self-fulfilling as students with the free time to volunteer reap the developmental benefits of volunteering their time. Other students are already on the back foot when it comes to claiming their share of experience.

    Embarrassment of riches

    Rise was set up to challenge this narrative, by giving students time and resource to develop their social capital in flexible ways, and to recognise developmental activities that might not have traditionally been included under the extra-curricular umbrella. There’s a broader conversation to be had in the sector, not about how we encourage already busy students to do more, but about how we encourage students to recognise their learning beyond the curriculum.

    In Manchester and beyond, the skills pendulum seems to swinging once more away from digital skills and towards “soft skills” – again, reflecting AI’s dominance of education conversations. Co-curricular space has a valuable contribution to make to developing empathy, critical thinking and interacting with other human beings. It is, ultimately, about sharing experiences, and the more we can expand this, the more everyone will benefit.

    Students will have experiences outside of their degree programmes whether we design for it or not, but a renewed emphasis on co-curricular activity would allow them (and us) to understand that formal education settings don’t have a monopoly on learning and development. We worry so much about students being “time-poor”; what happens if we understand this as “experience-rich” instead, and recognise their learning accordingly?

    In an AI-dominated dystopia, the co-curricular might be where we find the last vestiges of human experience in higher education. Being more optimistic, in a Grasshopper-influenced utopia, we’d all have the time to luxuriate in human experience. Co-curricular space provides insight into what this might look like, and gives students ways to develop away from the curriculum that might speak to future possibilities.

    Interested in thinking more about co-curricular experience? At Manchester Met we’re pulling together a cross-sector group of HE professionals working in co-curricular space, and we’d love your input. Click here to sign up for updates.

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  • Students call for AI art class cancellation – Campus Review

    Students call for AI art class cancellation – Campus Review

    Technology

    UNSW says the course explores creative and ethical questions about the use of gen AI in art

    NCA NewswireAugust 4, 2025Last Updated: August 4, 2025

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    The University of New South Wales has come under fire for offering a new subject that asks students to explore how to use generative AI to create art.

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  • Students Increasingly Rely on Chatbots, but at What Cost? – The 74

    Students Increasingly Rely on Chatbots, but at What Cost? – The 74


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    Students don’t have the same incentives to talk to their professors — or even their classmates — anymore. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have given them a new path to self-sufficiency. Instead of asking a professor for help on a paper topic, students can go to a chatbot. Instead of forming a study group, students can ask AI for help. These chatbots give them quick responses, on their own timeline.

    For students juggling school, work and family responsibilities, that ease can seem like a lifesaver. And maybe turning to a chatbot for homework help here and there isn’t such a big deal in isolation. But every time a student decides to ask a question of a chatbot instead of a professor or peer or tutor, that’s one fewer opportunity to build or strengthen a relationship, and the human connections students make on campus are among the most important benefits of college.

    Julia Freeland-Fisher studies how technology can help or hinder student success at the Clayton Christensen Institute. She said the consequences of turning to chatbots for help can compound.

    “Over time, that means students have fewer and fewer people in their corner who can help them in other moments of struggle, who can help them in ways a bot might not be capable of,” she said.

    As colleges further embed ChatGPT and other chatbots into campus life, Freeland-Fisher warns lost relationships may become a devastating unintended consequence.

    Asking for help

    Christian Alba said he has never turned in an AI-written assignment. Alba, 20, attends College of the Canyons, a large community college north of Los Angeles, where he is studying business and history. And while he hasn’t asked ChatGPT to write any papers for him, he has turned to the technology when a blank page and a blinking cursor seemed overwhelming. He has asked for an outline. He has asked for ideas to get him started on an introduction. He has asked for advice about what to prioritize first.

    “It’s kind of hard to just start something fresh off your mind,” Alba said. “I won’t lie. It’s a helpful tool.” Alba has wondered, though, whether turning to ChatGPT with these sorts of questions represents an overreliance on AI. But Alba, like many others in higher education, worries primarily about AI use as it relates to academic integrity, not social capital. And that’s a problem.

    Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has spent decades studying the way college students seek help on campus and how the relationships formed during those interactions end up benefitting the students long-term. Rhodes doesn’t begrudge students integrating chatbots into their workflows, as many of their professors have, but she worries that students will get inferior answers to even simple-sounding questions, like, “how do I change my major?”

    A chatbot might point a student to the registrar’s office, Rhodes said, but had a student asked the question of an advisor, that person may have asked important follow-up questions — why the student wants the change, for example, which could lead to a deeper conversation about a student’s goals and roadblocks.

    “We understand the broader context of students’ lives,” Rhodes said. “They’re smart but they’re not wise, these tools.”

    Rhodes and one of her former doctoral students, Sarah Schwartz, created a program called Connected Scholars to help students understand why it’s valuable to talk to professors and have mentors. The program helped them hone their networking skills and understand what people get out of their networks over the course of their lives — namely, social capital.

    Connected Scholars is offered as a semester-long course at U Mass Boston, and a forthcoming paper examines outcomes over the last decade, finding students who take the course are three times more likely to graduate. Over time, Rhodes and her colleagues discovered that the key to the program’s success is getting students past an aversion to asking others for help.

    Students will make a plethora of excuses to avoid asking for help, Rhodes said, ticking off a list of them: “‘I don’t want to stand out,’ ‘I don’t want people to realize I don’t fit in here,’ ‘My culture values independence,’ ‘I shouldn’t reach out,’ ‘I’ll get anxious,’ ‘This person won’t respond.’ If you can get past that and get them to recognize the value of reaching out, it’s pretty amazing what happens.”

    Connections are key

    Seeking human help doesn’t only leave students with the resolution to a single problem, it gives them a connection to another person. And that person, down the line could become a friend, a mentor or a business partner — a “strong tie,” as social scientists describe their centrality to a person’s network. They could also become a “weak tie” who a student may not see often, but could, importantly, still offer a job lead or crucial social support one day.

    Daniel Chambliss, a retired sociologist from Hamilton College, emphasized the value of relationships in his 2014 book, “How College Works,” co-authored with Christopher Takacs. Over the course of their research, the pair found that the key to a successful college experience boiled down to relationships, specifically two or three close friends and one or two trusted adults. Hamilton College goes out of its way to make sure students can form those relationships, structuring work-study to get students into campus offices and around faculty and staff, making room for students of varying athletic abilities on sports teams, and more.

    Chambliss worries that AI-driven chatbots make it too easy to avoid interactions that can lead to important relationships. “We’re suffering epidemic levels of loneliness in America,” he said. “It’s a really major problem, historically speaking. It’s very unusual, and it’s profoundly bad for people.”

    As students increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for help and even casual conversation, Chambliss predicted it will make people even more isolated: “It’s one more place where they won’t have a personal relationship.”

    In fact, a recent study by researchers at the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that the most frequent users of ChatGPT — power users — were more likely to be lonely and isolated from human interaction.

    “What scares me about that is that Big Tech would like all of us to be power users,” said Freeland-Fisher. “That’s in the fabric of the business model of a technology company.”

    Yesenia Pacheco is preparing to re-enroll in Long Beach City College for her final semester after more than a year off. Last time she was on campus, ChatGPT existed, but it wasn’t widely used. Now she knows she’s returning to a college where ChatGPT is deeply embedded in students’ as well as faculty and staff’s lives, but Pacheco expects she’ll go back to her old habits — going to her professors’ office hours and sticking around after class to ask them questions. She sees the value.

    She understands why others might not. Today’s high schoolers, she has noticed, are not used to talking to adults or building mentor-style relationships. At 24, she knows why they matter.

    “A chatbot,” she said, “isn’t going to give you a letter of recommendation.”

    This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.


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  • 150K fewer international students this fall? That’s what one analysis predicts.

    150K fewer international students this fall? That’s what one analysis predicts.

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • International enrollment at U.S. colleges could drop by as much as 150,000 students this fall unless the federal government ramps up its issuing of visas this summer, according to recent projections from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. 
    • The financial consequences could be severe. A 30% to 40% decline in new foreign students would lead to a 15% overall drop in international enrollment and, with it, a potential loss of $7 billion in revenue for colleges and 60,000 higher education jobs, NAFSA estimated. 
    • The organization attributed the projected decline to various Trump administration actions, including travel bans and an earlier suspension of visa interviews. NAFSA called on Congress to direct the State Department to expedite processing for student visas. 

    Dive Insight:

    Preliminary data from early this year suggested “flat to modest growth” in international student enrollment, but NASFA pointed to policy changes that could alter the landscape ahead.

    Since President Donald Trump retook office this year, many in the higher education world have worried international enrollment would decline in response to his policies and the perceptions abroad about America and how welcoming it will be to foreign students. 

    His administration has indeed taken an aggressive stance on admitting students from outside the U.S. In June, Trump signed an executive order banning travel from 12 countries and imposing restrictions on seven others. And the president has recently considered bans on 36 more countries. 

    Also in June, the State Department announced expanded screening that included surveillance of social media posts for applicants of F, M and J nonimmigrant visas. 

    That followed an announcement in May from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S. would move to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students. Trump later appeared to walk back that stance on social media, adding more confusion as to the administration’s actual policy.

    NAFSA pointed to reports of limited to no visa review appointments for prospective international students in India, China, Nigeria and Japan. The organization noted that India and China send the most international students to the U.S., while Nigeria and Japan are the seventh and 13th leading home countries, respectively. 

    On top of those moves, the administration has demonstrated interest in using international student enrollment as leverage against institutions and activists in Trump’s crosshairs. 

    Through various directives, for example,Trump and his government have tried to bar Harvard from enrolling international students in the administration’s ongoing feud with the university. Each of those efforts have been temporarily blocked in court. Had they not been, the consequences for Harvard would likely be dire. In the 2024-25 academic year, the Ivy League university’s roughly 6,800 foreign students made up 27.2% of its student body.  

    Earlier this year, the administration also moved to deny visas for pro-Palestinian protestors. 

    A July report from analysts with Moody’s ratings services pointed to the potential financial fallout for colleges from declines in international enrollment. They noted that foreign students tend to pay full tuition and fees, heightening the potential revenue impact. 

    A stress test by the analysts found that for 130 colleges they rate, a 20% drop in international enrollment would translate into a 0.5 percentage-point hit to their earnings margin before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization. For 18 colleges, EBITDA margin loss would be 2 to 8 points. Those with already low margins could face “significant financial stress,” the analysts said.

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  • The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

    The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

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  • The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

    The Collaborative AI Classroom: Teaching Students to Work With, Not Against, AI Tools – Faculty Focus

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  • Just 329 students with an EHCP got to a high tariff provider last year

    Just 329 students with an EHCP got to a high tariff provider last year

    Everyone who can benefit from higher education deserves to do so. That’s pretty much what people remember the Robbins report as saying – and it is a comforting story that higher education likes to tell itself.

    But it doesn’t really hold true in the experiences of an increasingly diverse pool of potential applicants.

    The state of the art of supporting and regulating fair access to (and participation in) higher education in England has moved far beyond the (rather unsophisticated) idea of national targets and metrics. Like it or loathe it, the risk-based approach taken by the Office for Students is commendably grounded both in the experience of individual students and the academic literature.

    However a weakness of this approach is the temptation to argue that any access gaps represent a failure of higher education providers rather than taking a whole system (educational and, indeed socio-economic) perspective. When we do glance at wider problems with, say schools attainment it may not always be universities that are best placed (or adequately supported) to address them.

    And let us not be coy here – there are gaps:

    [Full screen]

    The chart shows progression rates to HE, either to all providers or “high tariff providers” (of which more later) for each year since 2009-10. The size of the dots represent the number of students in that population, the colours represent the groups of characteristics: you get everything from measures of economic disadvantage, to ethnicity, to disability and – new for this year – care experience. We are looking at the students that might usually be expected to enter HE that academic year (so the cohort that turned 18 the previous year – those who took a year out before university or who progress after resits will not be shown as progression to HE).

    SEN and EHCP

    There’s thousands of potential stories in this data – for this article I’m going to focus on special educational needs (SEN) as a factor influencing progression.

    As you can see from the chart 21.1 per cent of students with any special educational need progressed to higher education by the age of 19 in 2023-24. This is the highest on record, but before you break open the champagne we should add that the progression rate for their peers without SEN was more than 50 per cent. And for progression to high tariff providers the gap is even starker: 14.9 per cent without SEN, 3.8 with.

    Though a traditional image of a student with SEN may be of someone who is less academically able, there are many very academically inclined students who have SEN and are able to progress to any destination you can think of if they can access the right support. Support is not exactly easy to come by, and it is very much a lottery whether support is available to a particular child or not. Progression to any higher education setting by 19 was 25.4 per cent for those with SEN who had more generalised support, and just 9.4 for those who managed to get an education, health, and care plan (EHCP).

    Again, the experience of pupils with an EHCP may make it more likely that they apply later on (and thus not feature in their cohort data) – those who do progress often need to top up their level 2 or 3 qualifications before being able to progress to the next level of study, all of which takes time.

    But just 1.5 per cent of students with an EHCP, 327 students, progressed to a high tariff provider. To me, that’s a systemic failing.

    Regional dimensions

    More so than any other characteristic, where you live (and, more germanely, where you go to school) has a huge impact on your educational experience with SEN. In Kensington and Chelsea, 45.5 per cent of students with SEN are in HE by the age of 19. In Thurrock, the figure is more like 10 per cent.

    The variation is similar for all students – 71 per cent get to university in Redbridge, 26 per cent in Knowsley.

    [Full screen]

    But this core variation (which covers everything from socio-economic status to school quality to aspirations) is overlaid by the varying proportions of students with SEN in each area, and the varying levels (and quality) of the support that can be provided.

    [Full screen]

    Some 23.3 per cent of all students in Middlesbrough have a SEN marker. In Havering the figure is 8.85 per cent (there are some outliers with low numbers of students in total)

    What is being done?

    As Alex Grady of nasen wrote on the UCAS blog earlier this year, the many misconceptions around SEN indicating some form of “learning difficulty” that makes higher education irrelevant or impossible still persist. Students with SEN very often flourish at university, but the assumption that they will not attend higher education – so thinking around support through and beyond the transition between compulsory education and higher education often happens late or in a piecemeal fashion.

    It is comparatively rare for a university to visit a non-mainstream school, or vice-versa. There are many reasons (not least financial) for this not to happen, but there is a clear benefit to introducing students from all settings to a range of post-compulsory routes early and often. Sometimes special schools and other alternate provision partner with larger local schools to make this happen.

    Student records do not transition neatly between the compulsory sector and higher education, a situation not helped by the presumption that an EHCP extends to age 25 if you don’t go to university, but ends if they do (this, beautifully, is considered a “positive outcome”). A student may be used to assuming staff understand the best way to support them (as this is what happened at school) and feel uncomfortable or ill-equipped to effectively argue for similar support in HE.

    Universities do address this, both in highlighting the support that they offer students and in signposting what is available via the Disabled Students’ Allowance (many students with SEN do not identify themselves as “disabled”, and the variations in terminology are a recognised issue). But schools also have a role to play in preparing students for an application and choice experience that is pretty bewildering for all students.

    Additional data

    The DfE Widening Participation release is the only place where you get a definition of a “high tariff” provider – in 2023-24 this term referred to higher education providers with a mean tariff of 125.8 or above (last year this was 129.4).

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  • What we lose when AI replaces teachers

    What we lose when AI replaces teachers

    Key points:

    A colleague of ours recently attended an AI training where the opening slide featured a list of all the ways AI can revolutionize our classrooms. Grading was listed at the top. Sure, AI can grade papers in mere seconds, but should it?

    As one of our students, Jane, stated: “It has a rubric and can quantify it. It has benchmarks. But that is not what actually goes into writing.” Our students recognize that AI cannot replace the empathy and deep understanding that recognizes the growth, effort, and development of their voice. What concerns us most about grading our students’ written work with AI is the transformation of their audience from human to robot.

    If we teach our students throughout their writing lives that what the grading robot says matters most, then we are teaching them that their audience doesn’t matter. As Wyatt, another student, put it: “If you can use AI to grade me, I can use AI to write.” NCTE, in its position statements for Generative AI, reminds us that writing is a human act, not a mechanical one. Reducing it to automated scores undermines its value and teaches students, like Wyatt and Jane, that the only time we write is for a grade. That is a future of teaching writing we hope to never see.

    We need to pause when tech companies tout AI as the grader of student writing. This isn’t a question of capability. AI can score essays. It can be calibrated to rubrics. It can, as Jane

    said, provide students with encouragement and feedback specific to their developing skills. And we have no doubt it has the potential to make a teacher’s grading life easier. But just because we can outsource some educational functions to technology doesn’t mean we should.

    It is bad enough how many students already see their teacher as their only audience. Or worse, when students are writing for teachers who see their written work strictly through the lens of a rubric, their audience is limited to the rubric. Even those options are better than writing for a bot. Instead, let’s question how often our students write to a broader audience of their peers, parents, community, or a panel of judges for a writing contest. We need to reengage with writing as a process and implement AI as a guide or aide rather than a judge with the last word on an essay score.

    Our best foot forward is to put AI in its place. The use of AI in the writing process is better served in the developing stages of writing. AI is excellent as a guide for brainstorming. It can help in a variety of ways when a student is struggling and looking for five alternatives to their current ending or an idea for a metaphor. And if you or your students like AI’s grading feature, they can paste their work into a bot for feedback prior to handing it in as a final draft.

    We need to recognize that there are grave consequences if we let a bot do all the grading. As teachers, we should recognize bot grading for what it is: automated education. We can and should leave the promises of hundreds of essays graded in an hour for the standardized test providers. Our classrooms are alive with people who have stories to tell, arguments to make, and research to conduct. We see our students beyond the raw data of their work. We recognize that the poem our student has written for their sick grandparent might be a little flawed, but it matters a whole lot to the person writing it and to the person they are writing it for. We see the excitement or determination in our students’ eyes when they’ve chosen a research topic that is important to them. They want their cause to be known and understood by others, not processed and graded by a bot.

    The adoption of AI into education should be conducted with caution. Many educators are experimenting with using AI tools in thoughtful and student-centered ways. In a recent article, David Cutler describes his experience using an AI-assisted platform to provide feedback on his students’ essays. While Cutler found the tool surprisingly accurate and helpful, the true value lies in the feedback being used as part of the revision process. As this article reinforces, the role of a teacher is not just to grade, but to support and guide learning. When used intentionally (and we emphasize, as in-process feedback) AI can enhance that learning, but the final word, and the relationship behind it, must still come from a human being.

    When we hand over grading to AI, we risk handing over something much bigger–our students’ belief that their words matter and deserve an audience. Our students don’t write to impress a rubric, they write to be heard. And when we replace the reader with a robot, we risk teaching our students that their voices only matter to the machine. We need to let AI support the writing process, not define the product. Let it offer ideas, not deliver grades. When we use it at the right moments and for the right reasons, it can make us better teachers and help our students grow. But let’s never confuse efficiency with empathy. Or algorithms with understanding.

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