Lab 2073

I have read several articles and heard many people complain about teachers and professors using artificial intelligence to help grade and prepare lessons. These same educators forbid or restrict the students in their use of AI to complete these assignments. “It is a double standard,” they claim!

Although it may seem to be a double standard, it is not. It is not a double standard because the teacher’s job is very different than the student’s job. In the classroom, the student’s job is to learn. The teacher’s job is to facilitate learning by planning, implementing, assessing, and providing feedback to the student for continued learning.

Why is it not a double standard? A student using AI to complete their assignments, in this situation, short-circuits the learning process. The student who uses AI to write their essay for them, for instance, avoids learning how to write a good essay.

The teacher’s use of AI makes their job more efficient and often higher in quality in all four phases mentioned. Consider the essay example. If the teacher uses AI to read and provide feedback for 100 student essays, the students receive far better, and quicker feedback. The learning cycle is much more efficient and the student learns more and improves their skill.

I recommend that teachers do not forbid the use of AI in learning, but instead, build their lessons around its strengths. Teach the students how to use AI to learn and improve themselves rather than simply producing a finished product. The essay, for instance, can be written by the student. Then the student can upload it to an LLM with a prompt that says, “You are an expert writing instructor. I am learning how to write a quality essay. Please read my essay and assess it according to these criteria: [criteria go here]. Without rewriting the essay, provide feedback to help me improve it.”

Now the student has an opportunity to learn using AI. Now the teacher has far fewer iterations of the essays to grade and can do so more thoroughly and objectively. Using AI on their end. Even better, the class can share and read each others essays in a writing-workshop style class.