As I noted last week, students often use AI to cheat. A Fordham Institute paper, “High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction,” discloses that 48% of students use AI to solve math problems, 36% use it to summarize books or texts to avoid reading them, 29% use it to write the first drafts of their essays or reports, and 26% use it for help during quizzes and tests.
When asked to respond to statements about AI’s effects on school, 58% of students agree that it has made homework meaningless, and 57% agree that it lets students get good grades without doing real work. (As a former teacher, I can tell you that homework was problematic before AI came along. When students turned in homework, I was never sure whether they had done it or whether a parent, a sibling, or the next-door neighbor had.)
Most recently, the AI problem surfaced when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released findings from the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global measure of educational achievement that assesses the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old students.
Overall, the results show that the United States ranks 13th in reading and science and 27th in math. Reading scores fell by 14 points since the last test in 2022. It’s not just the U.S. that’s moving in the wrong direction. The decline is part of a broader global trend, with the OECD average across 23 countries down 16 points.
The OECD data pointed to an obvious culprit behind this alarming trend—students who regularly use AI scored significantly worse on the tests than those who don’t.
OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann commented, “In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results. We’re also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer.”
To combat this disturbing trend, K-12 schools need to take in-person assessments more seriously. This could include administering more frequent tests and giving them greater weight in final grades. Students might still use AI to complete homework or other assignments, but such work should not count toward their final grades.
Neetu Arnold, policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, agrees, noting that schools should administer state exams two or three times a year rather than only one test at the end of the school year. “A handful of states, including Florida, Montana, and Virginia, have made this shift, and many more are considering it. These assessment models are said to provide schools with real-time feedback to inform teaching and interventions and to help parents know whether their kids are learning in school.”
Colleges should also adopt a different approach to assessing students. Take-home exams should be eliminated. Instead, schools should administer in-class evaluations, such as blue-book essays, oral exams, and chalkboard demonstrations. Papers completed outside class are too valuable to abandon entirely, but a clear policy prohibiting AI use and imposing serious consequences can reduce cheating.
In fact, some colleges are beginning to take steps to counteract the harmful effects of student AI abuse.
According to Walt Hunter, a humanities professor at Case Western Reserve University, blue book sales have surged at his school. He says, “The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline.”
Charles Mitchell, CEO of the Open Discourse Coalition and a college professor at Bucknell University, takes it one step further, banning all technology in his classroom. On the first day of class, he sets a simple rule: No technology whatsoever. He bans not only AI but also computers and cellphones.
At first, he writes, students are in shock. “Soon, however, they begin to develop two skills important for civic participation—and impossible when technology enters the classroom. The first is pursuing deep understanding. When you use AI to summarize a reading assignment—or even when you read it on a screen—you engage only on the surface. Your eyes glaze over. The temptation to scroll rears up. But when you read a book and write your reflections, you wrestle with real ideas.”
University of Chicago president Paul Alivisatos writes that his school is developing a new, AI-adapted core curriculum. “Campuswide work on this topic began in the fall of 2024, with the creation of an interdisciplinary faculty working group to consider reforms. The report of this working group provides a simple, principled framework that will guide our changes to the curriculum and classrooms. The first goal is that our students should learn, during their time with us, to be ethical, skeptical, and ambitious about the role of AI in their education and their lives. The second is that all students at UChicago should learn to think both with and without machines.”
Importantly, Alivisatos adds that learning to use AI should be integral to learning how to think, and this idea is increasingly spreading across the university. “Earlier this summer, our law school announced that first-year students will be required to learn to write and reason without technology in the classroom or the use of AI. This will be followed by deliberate and thoughtful integration of AI tools and methods in years two and three.”
AI’s time has come, and there is no turning back. When automobiles replaced horses as a means of travel, many people were unhappy for a variety of reasons: safety hazards, the threat to the horse-and-buggy industry, etc., but you couldn’t uninvent cars. We did, however, impose limits: setting a minimum driving age, enforcing speed limits, requiring insurance, banning drinking and driving, and establishing the Department of Motor Vehicles, which serves many functions.
The same is true for AI. It isn’t going away, so we must have a serious discussion about how to address its reality—especially as it relates to children—and do so immediately. The nation’s future is at stake.
Larry Sand is former president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.
