Students frequently use artificial intelligence for schoolwork but get offended if their professors do. 86% of American university students utilize AI, from essay outlines to grammar checking.
University students across the country, including Baruch College students, say they primarily use AI for brainstorming, outlining, organizing and summarizing. With the tool often open as one of their most-used browser tabs, students acknowledge it would be hypocritical to criticize professors for using AI when they rely on it so heavily.
However, students feel disrespected when a professor relies solely on AI to grade or give feedback, especially after they have committed significant time and genuine intellectual effort into the work they submitted.
Just as people most instantly think of “Heinz” when they hear “ketchup,” or “Google” when they think of searching something online, students associate AI with ChatGPT. Baruch College students were asked how they would feel if they wrote a paper for a class without the use of ChatGPT, but then received ChatGPT-generated feedback from their professors.
“I would feel disrespected if a professor did that because I put in all that work to do something organically, so I would expect my teacher to treat it with the same level of respect to read through it and formulate their own opinions,” Baruch student Jesse Kabongo said.
“I would be offended if my feedback was not coming from an actual person because AI is a lot pickier with things that professors aren’t even looking for,” Baruch psychology student athlete Grace Osuch said. “I feel like professors know what they are specifically looking for, but the AI will just pick out things like bad grammar, so AI is more generalized feedback as professors know what to look at.”
“I wouldn’t be terribly offended, but it depends on the class,” Yasmine Agdali, vice president of legislative affairs at Undergraduate Student Government, explained.
“If I am passionate about the class or it is a class towards my major then yes, I would feel offended but probably not if it was an elective.”
Many believe that there is a significant difference between students using AI to assist with their work and professors using AI to grade.
In a time when simply being a student is hardly enough to have an opportunity in such a challenging job market, the work done outside of class often provides students with the most effective career opportunities. Students rely on AI to have the time to compete with such high expectations of an overflowing resume.
“A lot of times, students use ChatGPT because of the constant time crunch we are under, and Baruch students have so much outside of their classes such as work and extracurriculars. Yes, it may sound hypocritical if students can use AI and not professors, but students also shouldn’t use it as a foundational piece of thought,” Agdali explained. “I find it more justified if students use it rather than professors using it for their job, because students are just trying to make small tasks easier.”
Students are offended if they receive AI feedback from their professors because it undermines all of the hard work they put into it.
The essays that students submit to their professors are art and deserve to be treated with respect to acknowledge the efforts that went into them.
If professors use AI to evaluate work without human insight, students’ creativity, thoughts and efforts are undermined along with students’ investment in their education.
