How do students actually use AI learning assistants? A new research paper by IU International University of Applied Sciences provides the first robust answers to this question. For the study "Using AI-based Learning Assistants in Higher Education: A Large-Scale Descriptive Analysis," the research team led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kristina Schaaff, Dr. Valerie Hekkel and Quintus Stierstorfer analyzed anonymized usage data from approximately 77,000 IU online students who were using the Learning Companion Syntea at the time of the study.
How do students actually use AI learning assistants? A new research paper by IU International University of Applied Sciences provides the first robust answers to this question. For the study "Using AI-based Learning Assistants in Higher Education: A Large-Scale Descriptive Analysis," the research team led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Kristina Schaaff, Dr. Valerie Hekkel and Quintus Stierstorfer analyzed anonymized usage data from approximately 77,000 IU online students who were using the Learning Companion Syntea at the time of the study.
The Jason Arday scandal is just the latest symptom of a much bigger problem in UK universities: collapsing standards, poor scholarship and a system that has let it happen, says Dr David McGrogan.
Temporary anxiety can often surface before the first day of school. Sometimes, that can help kids get in the right mindset for a big day. But when anxiety becomes a constant feature of children's and teenagers' days, that stress doesn't switch off when they leave the classroom or finish an exam. It can become the body's norm, staying with learners long after graduation.
A scientific paper reads as a clean progression from question to result. And yet, research almost never happens that way. Experiments fail, conversations redirect projects, and none of it survives into print. When the founders of a field retire, their tacit knowledge goes with them, and nothing records that it existed.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced in-person classroom instruction to go virtual, students suddenly needed their own laptops or tablets to interact with teachers and complete assignments.
Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?
Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.
Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.
“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”
The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.
Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)
Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”
An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared. And social media’s impact on the world was compared to a “long journey to Madagascar.”
Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.)
“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.
He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.
“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”
The EHRC has released new trans schools guidance on how to comply with the Equality Act. But from changing rooms to pronoun use it puts children at risk, says Caroline Ffiske.
For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing jobseekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.
But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.
For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.
A separate survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that undergraduate enrollment in another IT degree, computer and information sciences and support services, dropped by a precipitous 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025.
Light said that the dropoff could be related to AI, and not necessarily a direct result of AI taking over coding jobs.
“The decline could reflect changes in the education production function as generative AI alters how students complete coursework, changes in students’ expectations about the returns to Computer Science skills, responses to labor market conditions that themselves partly reflect AI adoption, broader weakness in the technology labor market unrelated to AI, or other contemporaneous shifts in student demand,” Light wrote, per BI.
“Therefore, I treat the enrollment patterns as descriptive evidence rather than as an estimate of the causal effect of ChatGPT or AI exposure on student demand,” he concluded.
There’s probably nuance under the hood. When The Washington Post dived into the National Student Clearinghouse data earlier this year, its analysis suggested that some of those disappearing computer science enrollments are being funneled into related disciplines instead, like data analytics and data science.
One report found that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Whether AI meaningfully replaced those jobs or was simply used as a scapegoat by employers to gloss over other reasons for the cuts, though, is a matter of ongoing debate.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in classroom practice in Hong Kong, following the Education Bureau's release of the Blueprint for Digital Education Development in Primary and Secondary Schools and its commitment to supporting innovative technology in schools.
Anyone who has spent time on a college campus lately has probably heard laments from faculty about their students' reading habits, or rather, nonreading habits. Such complaints are more than unfounded nostalgia for a bygone age.
An academic at the Australian National University has accused it of a “hysterical” response to students using AI to cheat, as tertiary institutions rush to shore up the credibility of assessments.
But a colleague warned Australia is in danger of “shipping our national intellectual capability” to companies in California and China if educational rigour is not restored.
Studies published in prestigious academic journals receive more attention from scholars and media outlets, shaping public discourse and potentially accelerating academic careers. While the path to publication is often murky, a new analysis of more than 110,000 papers submitted to Science and Science Advances—two leading journals published by the world's largest general science association—reveals that Western scientists, larger teams, top-ranked universities and select regions have slight advantages in acceptance rates.
Generative AI chatbots capable of writing emails and computer code, translating, organizing a trip or coming up with gift ideas are now readily available, prompting some to ask whether human brainpower could suffer for lack of use.
Last week, the U.S. software company Turnitin revealed 53.6% of Australian tertiary education submissions run through its system used some form of AI in the period from October 2025–April 2026. The company, whose plagiarism-detection technology is widely used in universities, also reported 10% of these submissions contained more than 80% AI-written content.
Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.
On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.
An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students.
“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.
Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans.
It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.
It’s far from a sweeping AI ban, however. The school still wants to prepare students for an AI-driven world, with the goal of steering them “toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it,” clinical professor Mark Templeton, who serves on Chicago Law’s AI Committee, said in a statement.
University figures, in fact, go to great pains to make clear they’re not shutting the door on AI completely.
“If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that’s great,” said William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, in the statement. “That’s not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that’s what we’re trying to lean into.”
Chicago Law’s AI crackdown could also be seen as a response to the poor example set by the professionals in the practice. Countless lawyers have been admonished by judges after submitting court filings riddled with clear AI hallucinations, from references to made-up case law to mis-attributed quotes.
It is important that teachers and students are aware of and understand the major shortcomings of technology, state Norwegian researchers who have studied the use of AI in the classroom.
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