AI tools are pervasive in a New York public high school and are used to generate classroom annotations and homework solutions. Students use ChatGPT to produce ready-made annotations for assigned readings, which are submitted and graded as class participation, reducing reflective discussion on topics like slavery and human resilience. Peers upload homework photos to receive step-by-step solutions and graphs. These practices normalize shortcuts, make cheating common, and erode shared late-night efforts to finish assignments. Deadlines lose meaning as AI softens procrastination consequences, prompting many students to avoid engaging in their own learning and diminishing collaborative academic experiences.
In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary.
In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate's screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs. These incidents were jarring-not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.
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