With an exhale of breath and a cross of my fingers, I hit the dreaded blue rectangle in the bottom corner of my screen reading “submit.” As the bell rings, I feel a sense of relief, thinking back to my countless days of studying and reviewing. Yet under this sense of relief, a stronger feeling of resentment washes over me knowing that at least a quarter of my classmates will get a higher grade than me by using Artificial Intelligence [AI].
This year, Conejo Valley Unified School District’s [CVUSD] Mobile Device Policy went into place, prohibiting the use of devices during instruction. Although students have been told too many times to count “not to cheat” or “phones better be in backpacks,” I have never seen a classmate be punished for using their phone on a test or AI on an assignment, so why would they stop?
I am guilty of thinking about the impact each test could have on my future chances at college admissions. An “A” could turn into a “C” with just a few wrong circles penciled in, but a grade achieved using AI could effortlessly be maintained. So much pressure has been placed on the expectation of straight A’s that people are more scared to fail than they are to be caught cheating.
At the beginning of this school year, I received a 65 percent on a math test, even after studying. While I did not know this at the time, this event that I marked as a “failure” helped me learn more effective ways to understand difficult topics and ask for help. As I began attending office hours and asking questions, my grades rose along with my confidence, without the use of AI on any test.
While I understand the appeal of having all of your work done in a short click, in professions that require creative liberties and critical thinking, you cannot use AI to entirely do your work. Tedious paragraphs and assignments might seem unnecessary, but school is teaching us the fundamentals not only for how to write and solve problems, but also for how to think.
It may seem problematic at first, but I advise students to put aside their reliance on AI to challenge themselves to be wrong. Without mistakes, we will reach a plateau intellectually, reaching the same conclusions that so many have before. Maybe accidents are what our generation needs to uncover their talents.