While many fear that students will use artificial intelligence tools for cheating, almost 700 students attending university in the UK and surveyed by Studocu show this is hardly ever the case. 71% of them indicate that they don’t know any student who has used AI tools to cheat. In fact, the usage in general may have been overestimated looking at the results of this survey: almost two third of the respondents (66%) say they have never used an AI tool for their studies.
While the vast majority (65%) of the UK students think AI will have a positive impact on education, only one third has actually used an AI tool for their studies. Of these AI users, 95% indicate that the tool they used was the popular chatbot ChatGPT. The students who used a tool like this for their studies show that there are many ethical use cases that can help students excel. Almost two third (65%) for instance indicate they used the tool to get an explanation on a topic they didn’t fully understand. Other use cases that wouldn’t qualify as cheating are getting inspiration for an essay (37%), getting help with a homework assignment – rather than letting the tool do the assignment for them, see below – (35%) or kick-starting a creative process (32%). Students also indicate to have used the tool for fact checking assignments (28%) and optimising texts (25%).
However, of course not all students are saints. Of the respondents, 7.6% indicate to have used the tool to let it do their homework for them and 6.2% asked the tool to completely write an essay for them. A very small group was not afraid to take a risk and used an AI tool during their exam (5.3%).
Although there is a lot of debate around the use of artificial intelligence in education, students are very positive about the innovation. 56% say the tool they used was very helpful, another 37% found it somewhat helpful. It’s therefore no surprise that 78.6% of all respondents – whether they had used an AI tool before or not – indicate that they will use the tool (again) in the future.
We have also asked all students what they expect the impact of AI to be for students on the long run. Almost half of them expect AI to improve efficiency in education (48.5%), a similar part (46.7%) beliefs AI will make education more accessible to all students, everywhere and 33.2% thinks it will help education become more personalised. However, not everyone is this positive about the impact of AI. 36.5% is afraid that it will reduce students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills and 23.4% thinks it will help students cheat. Others are worried that AI will replace humans in the workplace, making it more difficult for current students to find a job after graduating (18.7%) and reducing the need for human teachers (15%). A small part of the students thinks the impact will be neglectable: 7.9% says AI is just a trend and won’t have significant impact.
