Contributors: Cameron Serkland, Luis Bencomo
Introduction
Students face a multitude of challenges in their studies, such as a heavy courseload, complex concepts, and tight deadlines. When used responsibly, AI can be a helpful tool in saving time, studying more efficiently, and increasing productivity. The crux of the issue is to use AI in a way that supports learning rather than replacing it.
This article hopes to help students like yourself learn how to responsibly use AI to enhance their learning experience while ensuring that they use it responsibly and ethically in an academic setting.
Understanding Difficult Concepts
Regardless of your major, your courses will likely contain various topics and concepts that will be difficult to understand just by listening to lectures. Reviewing slides can be a great way to sit down and digest particularly difficult concepts. If you find that you still struggle with or have questions about these concepts, you could ask specific questions to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini. Additionally, you can include your level of understanding so that the AI’s response can be adjusted to be easier for you to understand. Then, you can ask follow-up and clarification questions to further refine your understanding.
Of course, you should always double-check the information you receive from AI tools, since they may get something wrong, but AI can, at the very least, point you in the right direction. Additionally, it is very important to ensure that you use AI as a means of furthering your knowledge, rather than replacing it. Having AI tools do your homework for you robs you of a valuable learning experience, especially since knowledge is cumulative. That is, if you do not properly understand one concept, you will have a much harder time understanding more advanced concepts built upon it. For example, if you do not understand basic arithmetic, you will not be able to understand algebra.
Studying and Review
Another excellent use of AI in your academic life is studying and reviewing course material, such as lecture slides. Reviewing lecture slides after class can help reinforce what you have learned. You can attach the slides to your prompt and ask AI to quiz you on the material. It can also provide you with bullet points to summarize the lecture information.
You can also prepare for tests using AI. You can tell it what the test covers, and it can generate a study guide to help you out, or you could ask it to generate a practice quiz for you. If you get some questions on the practice test wrong, you can use it to understand what you got wrong and why. If a test will cover certain chapters or lectures, you can use AI to summarize said material. Though it should be noted that you should still read the material. The summarizations are best employed as refreshers. They are supplemental and do not give you the same benefits as the actual course material.
Of course, you should double-check that everything it says is correct, but reviewing the information can be a form of studying in itself. You do not want to end up in an exam having learned incorrect information. As always, AI should be used as an aide, not a replacement.
Essays: Brainstorming and Grammar
One common application of AI tools for students is in writing. This section will discuss the applications of AI to writing, as well as some common pitfalls students fall into when utilizing AI tools for writing assignments.
AI tools can also be very useful when you have writer’s block, structuring an essay, or just want to catch some grammar mistakes. For writer’s block, you might have a general idea of what you want to write, but you might have difficulty putting it into words. In such a scenario, you can describe what you want to an AI chatbot, and it will help you refine your ideas. It can also help correct you if your ideas are based on incorrect information or assumptions before you reach. This means that you can get the ball rolling and start writing, since you have a more concrete idea of what you want to write.
Structuring an essay is arguably the most important part of writing. It helps you logically organize your ideas before you get started. For some students, this is difficult, which is where AI comes in. If you’re struggling with structuring your essay, you can present your ideas so far, which can help you develop them into something more cohesive, and you can start writing, having a better understanding of what you want to write and where you want each piece of writing to go.
Now that you have written your essay, you can check for spelling and grammar mistakes. Of course, most text editors nowadays have basic spelling and grammar checks, but human language is very context-heavy, so such basic programs can miss obvious errors. Sometimes a misspelled word can make sense where it is placed in a sentence, as far as the program is concerned, but the word itself may mean something completely different from what you intended. With AI chatbots or even specialized AI grammar checkers, you can more finely proofread your work.
With all of that said, there is one pitfall that many students fall into. AI is a very powerful tool, and it can be very tempting to have it not just refine your work, but have it do the work in your stead. This siren’s call is dangerous, as heeding it will not only deprive you of developing your writing ability (which is vital in daily life) but will also potentially get you in trouble academically. Passing off AI-generated work as your own may be penalized as a form of academic dishonesty or even plagiarism, depending on the class and school. As such, you must be very careful about the degree to which you use AI tools in regard to schoolwork. You must always follow your school’s academic policies when using AI tools, so you should definitely familiarize yourself with said policies if you have not already. Additionally, even if a school is more lax in regard to AI usage, a teacher may have stricter rules. Usually, such rules can be found in your course’s syllabus. If not, you should ask your teacher to what extent, if any, AI is permitted in regard to coursework.
As this article comes to an end, there is one last piece of advice you would likely benefit from: do not procrastinate. Even before AI, this would be solid advice. However, with the ease of access to AI tools, the temptation to simply have AI do the work for you is a very common problem. If you procrastinate and suddenly find yourself with little time left before an assignment is due, the temptation is only stronger. You will be much less stressed and have a much more fulfilling academic experience if you avoid procrastination, only using AI to bolster your pre-existing knowledge and aid in your work, not replacing it.