The answer may surprise you.

By  Ernesto Reyes

I once had a student who used AI to generate several of his assignments. The first assignment in my class is an ethnography paper in which students discuss the culture they most identify with and the language of this community. It’s an assignment meant for my students to write about the things that are most important to them, so it was a bit surprising to see this student use AI to generate their work. At first, I told this student that he couldn’t use AI to write his entire essay or else I would have to fail his assignments. Other times, when I’ve met with students caught using AI unethically, they stop using it almost instantly.

However, what surprised me most was that this student continued to rely on it, even after my warning. It even got to a point where I was very close to filing an academic dishonesty report, but I was curious as to why he kept using AI to complete his work, despite knowing the consequences could include failing the course. When I asked him, he said that he wasn’t a “good writer” (something he had mentioned the first time we spoke) and that he had never written a paper longer than a page. He even went so far as to say that his high school “didn’t teach him anything.” As a result, he was very closed off, rarely spoke in class, didn’t participate in group discussions and was deeply insecure about submitting anything he had written himself.

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