Teenage students often use AI to do homework, a survey finds. This is the impact on their grades
All 500 students in a CNA survey have got help with their homework from AI, with 84 per cent of those at secondary school using it at least weekly. The programme Talking Point explores the consequences.
Here are eight places around the globe where you can get a taste of the trippy and thrilling teamLab experience.
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SINGAPORE: In an age of ChatGPT, are students actually doing their homework any more? Even if they are, they would be using artificial intelligence tools, a local survey has found.
This is not only at the university level, where their usage is allowed with rules in place. All of the secondary school students surveyed said they used AI tools.
They are frequent users too: 84 per cent of secondary school respondents use AI for their homework at least weekly, while 29 per cent do so several times a week. The rest of them use it at least monthly.
The survey, commissioned by CNA’s Talking Point, reached out to 500 Singaporean students aged 15 to 25 from secondary schools to higher education institutions. One of its aims was to find out how they were using AI for their assignments.
This comes after Pew Research Center found that 26 per cent of United States teenagers aged 13 to 17 used the AI chatbot ChatGPT for their schoolwork last year, double the figure in 2023.
In Singapore, where all the survey respondents have used AI for this purpose, about 86 per cent said they were doing so for “generating ideas for their homework/assignment”.
Those at secondary school, however, were more likely than the rest to be using these tools for solving mathematics problems (63 per cent) as well as for proofreading and checking grammar (47 per cent).
The latest survey findings suggest a greater prevalence of AI use among students than previously thought.
What are the consequences if students are letting AI take over, asks Talking Point in a one-hour special this week.
HOW STUDENTS ARE USING IT
There is a wealth of AI tools that students can tap, and not only ChatGPT.
While it can help with various tasks, “other AI tools often specialise in specific tasks that I might not do perfectly or efficiently in certain situations”, the chatbot replied when asked why it could not do everything for students.
“Some AI tools like Photomath or Wolfram Alpha are specifically designed to handle complex mathematical calculations.”
There are also AI tools such as Grammarly and Wordtune for English homework, ChemBuddy and Labster for science homework, and Perplexity AI and Google Scholar for history and social studies, recommended ChatGPT.
Secondary 3 student Rebekah Low usually uses AI to “help generate points” for her English compositions. “If I feel I’m stuck, I’d just get ChatGPT to list some ideas, just to get the brain juices flowing,” she said.
