The Golden Trident

By Angelica Loya Lopez

Photo courtesy of College of Education, My Educator 

The plagiarism percentage in schools went from 48% to 64% in a year with the introduction of AI, a skyrocketing increase. While AI has come a long way when it comes to generating writing pieces, it limits creativity of students, becomes a huge plagiarism problem, and doesn’t help with learning whatsoever. As a high school student, I have seen classmates use ChatGPT for countless assignments in many classes that aren’t just ELA. Although most teachers allow students to flourish ideas from AI websites, most students use these websites just to get answers to an assignment. This limits the creativity of students and doesn’t allow them to learn at all.

In a recent article, the Harvard Independent mentioned that students should think for themselves and develop the life skills necessary to make decisions in the real world. AI doesn’t allow for that growth in students. AI is used positively in many different ways, but this tool can be taken advantage of very easily, to the point where our students feel the need to rely on it. It takes away creative thinking and unique ideas that a robot sadly cannot generate. That’s what makes humans so special; their creativity, their way to solve problems and come up with new ideas. We are limiting our future generations if we allow this to go on. 

The International Center for Academic Integrity collected statistics on 70,000 high school students, in over 24 high schools; 58% of those students have plagiarized at least once in their high school career. I am willing to bet that more than half of those students used AI for part of that plagiarism. It’s gotten to the point where teachers have become more strict on checking assignments to make sure students don’t plagiarize, not to mention with the resources of AI, plagiarism has definitely become a bigger problem in high school students. In this study by K-12 Dive: “How much are students using AI in their writing?” They mention how the root cause of increasing rates of student’s plagiarism has been because of AI usage. Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school year, plagiarized pieces have increased in schools by 20%. This is a huge percentage increase! On big tests such as SATS, students aren’t allowed to use any resources on the internet. Now because lots of students depend on AI for support, they could get lower scores on important tests like these; impacting the school and the student later on in life and overall academic success. 

With AI you can get instant feedback, and this can be super helpful especially when a teacher can’t always be there to help. But we can all agree that we’ve taken this resource too far and have mistreated it for the worse. Many may argue that AI does in fact help them learn easier and quicker. The University of Pennsylvania did research on two groups of high school students during a test; One group had access to ChatGPT during the test and the other group didn’t. The test was based on solving math problems, the group with ChatGPT did worse compared to the other group of students, they solved 48% more of the practice problems correctly, but on the actual test, they ended up scoring 17% worse on a math test topic that the students were learning. This is hard evidence that AI doesn’t really help students, studying in other ways can be more useful and will probably stick to the student more.

In order to learn well, you need to make mistakes and when you have help from a robot through a computer, you won’t make any. Although AI has a promising future, high school students are not using this technology to its true potential, instead we are using AI in a negative way. In a way where it doesn’t benefit anyone, in a way where we are limiting our own creative possibilities. Let’s limit the usage of AI for students and see how far it takes us.