This is an opinion piece. All opinions stated in this article only represent the author’s viewpoint, not The Eagle’s Eye as a whole or Wake County.
It may seem that AI has completely taken over the world. Wherever you go, you’ll likely observe both the professional and casual use of ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Google Gemini or any of the other various and comically named AIs. As students, we’ve all heard the AI lecture about why academic integrity is important and why it’s unethical to plagiarize someone (or something) else’s work. Why, then, do we see teachers constantly using AI?
I have a teacher who uses a split screen to directly copy and paste questions for our upcoming test from ChatGPT into a Google Doc. No rewording, no changing the answer options, just straight copy and paste. The worst part is, they’re proud of their AI usage, too, but in reality, it’s truly immoral for them to be doing so. If students aren’t allowed to use AI as a tool in class, then why are teachers allowed to use it on their school-issued laptops?
Another teacher of mine has given our class many assignments that were completely made by AI. One notable assignment had extremely long and confusing questions on topics that hadn’t been discussed in class, and multiple AI detectors showed it as 100% AI. The assignment itself stated at the top: “AI of any kind is not acceptable.” How contradictory is it that teachers expect students to live up to certain standards that they can’t even hold themselves to?
A junior at Enloe reported that after having absences related to health issues, which were clearly communicated to the teacher beforehand, they were made to take a test they had missed on the first day back without prior notice. Instead of giving the test that the other students had taken in the same format or even another version of the test, the teacher opened up an AI platform and asked it to make a test for the student, without checking over the problems. If teachers can’t write their own questions about the subject that they were hired to teach, then how are we, as high school students, expected to answer them?
Another junior at Enloe said they had a teacher who used ChatGPT to make their projects and quizzes.
“It’s not helping us be creative. It’s just making it more complicated for us,” the student said. “Not only [is the project] harder, but we’re also not gaining anything from it. It’s discouraging learning at that point,” they said. “If teachers are expecting students not to use AI so that students will learn, [then] teachers making these prompts and everything from AI [is] hypocritical … even when they use it, it’s not beneficial for us.”
While some may argue that using AI might save teachers’ time and help them manage heavy workloads, saving time should never come at the cost of a quality education for students. The difference between teachers using other resources and AI is the lack of human oversight. Textbooks are written by teachers who have specific skills, whereas AI doesn’t have a grasp of the curriculum that is taught in the class. Most students are trying their best in class to understand the material, impress their teachers and get good grades. After putting in this level of effort, the least teachers can do is give the same amount of effort back to their students. Students aren’t machines, so they shouldn’t be taught by one, either.
Social Studies teacher Mr. LeBlanc shared his thoughts on this issue. “[AI] can help with creativity … as a teacher,” he said, because “Sometimes it can be beneficial to have another party, even if it’s a digital party, help [teachers] get ideas for how to make things more interesting.” He also added that there is a clear distinction between appropriate and inappropriate ways of using AI. “The appropriate ways might be brainstorming lesson plans, … some of the monotonous tasks [like] splitting up and making groups for a project, [and] copying and pasting a table,” he said. He mentioned that using AI to grade work would be an inappropriate way to use AI. “If the teacher isn’t authentically presenting their own point of view on a lesson, that would be inappropriate.”
There are many reasons why AI overall is unethical. First, AI can be wrong a lot of the time. There has never been a guarantee that what AI produces is 100% accurate, which is why it is dangerous for teachers to use it to make tests and quizzes, especially without proper fact-checking. Second, there is not always a definite rubric provided when AI is used to generate projects and assignments, or even to grade them. Thus, students don’t fully know what to expect, causing unnecessary stress over how their grades will be determined. Third, the use of AI results in high carbon emissions and water wastage, which is extremely harmful to our environment. Fourth, schools claim to value fairness and honesty in their systems, yet AI plagiarizes original content without proper citation. If their own teachers can’t follow these policies, what kind of example does this set for students?
As you can see, teachers using AI isn’t just a one-time occurrence. Many students have faced similar and even worse experiences than those shared above. Most students understand that using AI to write an essay or complete a lab is cheating. But teachers, as people whom students look up to and come to for help, should understand that their use of AI breaks trust between them and the student. Going forward, we as students urge teachers to rethink their use of AI: is it really a beneficial tool, or is it being misused?
