Should students use AI for their schoolwork and learning? The growing influence of AI in K-12 education makes academic dishonesty easier than ever—students can simply ask a chatbot for the answers to their homework questions. This erodes the involved process of trying, failing, and trying again that is crucial to learning. Still, students can benefit from learning how to use AI as an effective tool that doesn’t replace their efforts, but supports them.

Any use of artificial intelligence in education should be cautious and purposeful, and it should never replace opportunities for students to think things through on their own. Our recommendation is for AI to be used as a tool to help students visualize concepts, experiment with ideas, troubleshoot technical issues, and support their learning in other ways that do not disrupt the problem-solving process necessary in meaningful learning.

In this article:

The Current Presence of AI in Education

AI programs and tools are now widely available and used by many, including children and teens. A September 2025 survey showed that over half of K-12 students indicated that they’ve used AI for schoolwork. A separate October 2025 survey by College Board revealed that 84% of high schoolers have used generative AI for schoolwork. This steep surge is worrisome—if students are using AI to get the answers to their problem sets or to work on essays or projects for them, they are cheating. Using generative AI to complete assignments keeps them from understanding and practicing the material they need to know to succeed in their academics and future careers.

Due to the risks AI poses to children’s education, many schools and districts banned ChatGPT outright when it first popped up around 2023. After three years of AI proliferation in the world and students’ continued use of it even when prohibited, districts are now determining how to compromise constructive AI use with academic integrity and data privacy.

On the more conservative side of AI adoption, NYC Public Schools is retracting their AI ban and implementing a four-phase plan to define their policy on artificial intelligence with significant stakeholder input. Other schools are more confidently embarking on programs to bring AI into the classrooms, such as HISD’s rollout of ChatGPT Edu, an OpenAI offering that helps educators develop and share teaching materials with student & teacher data privacy at its core.

AI Don’ts: Ways AI Harms Student Learning

Before exploring the ways students can tactfully use AI to enhance their learning, let’s first highlight uses of AI that should be avoided by students. Generally, AI should only be used as a tool to extend the student’s capabilities—NOT as a substitute for learning.

DO NOT use AI…

  • as a homework helper, answer machine, or math solver.
  • to explain/summarize concepts or assigned readings.
  • to brainstorm ideas for essays or projects.
  • to write assigned essays or short answers.
  • in any way as a shortcut for assigned work.

DON’T Use AI as a Shortcut for Assigned Work

Using an AI chatbot as a “homework helper” can have serious negative effects on a student’s ability to understand and remember material. A student would ask AI a question, get an answer & explanation, then feel as if they understand the material. Even if the chatbot explains the process of getting to the answer, a student who reviews that process without being involved in it will not effectively learn how to complete that process on their own. 

Effective learning is process-oriented, not result-oriented. It starts with exposure to new information, but that is only one step; learning involves active participation, deep thought & struggle to understand, memory retrieval, and decision-making. All of these aspects substantial to the learning process are eliminated by an AI chatbot that will give the solution to an algebra problem or explain the definition of a vocabulary word without the student’s involvement in that process. 

Should students use AI as a personal tutor? No—a real tutor or teacher who explains the steps to solve a problem can directly engage with the student so that they are involved in the learning process. 

DON’T Use AI to Replace Your Imagination

Independent thought is crucial in developing problem-solving skills, so AI should not be used to substitute a student’s imagination and creativity. Students should use any opportunity they can to grow their creative capabilities and come up with ideas on their own. Even when a student has a weak idea, it’s important that they learn how to amend and/or develop it into a stronger one.

The effort involved in finding ideas, developing them, and experimenting with solutions is necessary for students to develop the problem-solving skills they need throughout their education and life. 

Should Students use AI to Brainstorm?

Coming up with the right idea can be a time-consuming process, but it is a fundamental aspect of creation. The process of brainstorming results in original approaches that deepen understanding of the subject matter. Even if a student uses AI to “bounce ideas off of”, interaction with AI during brainstorming has been shown to narrow diversity of ideas, steering them towards ideas that have already been established or discussed by others. Because AI draws from a vast pool of data that already exists, all of its ideas come from other people’s publications.

If you’re assigned an essay on a work of literature and you use AI-generated ideas, even if you write the essay itself, your thesis and argumentation will be reliant on others’ ideas or common interpretations. Instead, if you brainstorm the thesis of the essay yourself, the process of writing will prompt you to directly engage with the text, draw conclusions based on your unique thoughts, and even make unexpected connections that people have not made in the past. You will have a unique and thoughtful essay, a better understanding of the literature (and a personal connection to it), and improved reading comprehension & writing skills.

While AI can be useful at different points of a problem-solving process, the bulk of creativity and imagination involved should be on the student’s plate. 

DON’T Use AI Without Fact-Checking

AI is a tool to aid people’s workflows and shouldn’t be relied on as an ultimate source of truth. Most LLMs state that there may be mistakes in the output they give, and AI are known to hallucinate ideas, giving users realistic-sounding information that is entirely false. Any information that comes from AI should be fact-checked—every AI user, especially students, must ensure that each claim they get from an AI is backed up by a reputable source. 

AI Dos: How Should Students Use AI in Learning?

AI is a tool that can help extend a student’s abilities or enhance their learning, best used to supplement the work a student is already performing. It can be valuable when it gives them enough leverage to make something, test it, revise it, and understand it more deeply.

AI is appropriate when used…

  • to model or visualize concepts.
  • to give real-world examples of phenomenon.
  • to troubleshoot issues with technology or processes.
  • to prototype a concept of a physical structure before creating it.
  • to extend a project once it’s largely completed.
  • to help improve visual demonstrations/presentations.

AI can help students build things that are outside of their technical ability. For instance, a student interested in better understanding financial math concepts can use AI to help them build a small, bare-bones “banking” app to demonstrate budgeting, loans, investing, etc. This can also familiarize them with the theory behind coding, which they can continue to develop as a valuable skill. Further, AI tools can help further extend students’ existing skills and creativity. Say a student is working on a PowerPoint presentation, and they feel like their visuals are boring and “flat”. They can use AI to find ways to make it more visually appealing and even more interactive.

Another example is using AI to visualize something without the use of specialized modeling software—this can be exceptionally useful when a student is trying to comprehend concepts in math and science, especially geometry and physics. For instance, they can create an interactive model of how gravity works with objects of different masses in space. 

The goal is not to have AI do the work for students, especially not homework and assignments or creative work involving problem-solving. AI can be thought of as a way to discover technical solutions that students cannot find on their own.

Schools, Educators, and Parents—Setting AI Guidelines

Because it is easy for AI to be used as a shortcut to bypass the learning process, educators and adults should teach students why and when AI is not okay, as well as in what ways AI can be beneficial. 

Schools need to be intentional about the kinds of tasks where AI is permitted. Teachers should design assignments that require students to think critically, make decisions, and demonstrate their understanding. 

The best use cases of AI use in schools are intentional and project-based. Students are given a real challenge, a clear goal, and access to AI as one of the tools they may use to solve it. The assignment should require them to make decisions, explain their process, defend their choices, and reflect on what they learned. In that structure, students retain their agency in the problem-solving process while AI remains a tool to help them work effectively.

AI Tools in Piqosity’s Online Courses

So, should students use AI? Only in ways that don’t disrupt the learning process. While students can engage with AI chatbots directly to implement ways to enhance their learning, AI tools developed by learning platforms like Piqosity take their self-studying to another level.

Piqosity offers an abundance of resources that help students excel in online after-school learning on their digital device, with test-prep courses like the SAT, ACT, and ISEE, and full-length ELA and Math courses for grades 5-11. The features offered in each course are designed to make learning and studying straightforward, interactive, and personalized to each student’s needs, and our AI features do just that.

PVT Corgi 2

Piqosity Virtual Tutor (PVT) is an AI-Driven virtual tutor that helps students effectively work through one of Piqosity’s courses, including:

  • Goal setting
  • A personalized course outline
  • PVT session modules that guide a student through a 1:1 tutorial, and
  • Intelligent Remediation that maps a student’s learning gaps in mathematics.

All Piqosity courses for standardized tests that include writing or essay portions also have AI-grading for practice essays, giving students an evaluation of their writing in alignment with the exam’s rubric.

There are more AI features under development to accompany the many other features that make Piqosity courses so effective, including:

  • Hundreds of adaptive practice questions
  • Dozens of concept review lessons
  • 100+ reading passages (in ELA courses)
  • 1000+ practice questions (in math courses)
  • 10+ practice tests (in test prep courses)
  • Tutorial lessons with videos
  • Strength & weakness analysis
  • Gamified practice
  • Dynamic question difficulty
  • Score reports & score predictions
  • …and more!

Joining Piqosity is completely FREE (no credit card information required, no sneaky “free” trials). Start off with our mini diagnostic test to get a baseline score, and set realistic goals for success. You can continue to use many of Piqosity’s unique features and valuable resources as part of our FREE Community package. But, if you’re ready for the next step, you can choose among several competitively-priced test prep or course-based packages. We currently offer:

Online Test Prep Courses 

Full-Length ELA Courses:

Full-Length Math Courses:

When you sign up for Piqosity, you have access to our materials for 365 days. So, no matter how many times you take a test (such as the SAT) or how long you struggle in a specific class, you will have the resources of Piqosity on your side.

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