Artificial intelligence and How It Influences Students’ Work Ethics
Claim
AI models, such as ChatGPT and Bard, often downgrade the work ethics of high school and college students as more students cheat on their work,letting AI do most of their work while they just copy from it. This leads to fewer students trying their best on their work and a downgrade in students’ work ethic as they develop a tendency to rely on AI to do most of the work for them.
Introduction
On a late Sunday evening, the tired student sits at his desk. Looking at the 10 assignments due that night, the student feels hopeless. At that moment, he remembers that he had come across this new thing called ChatGPT. Immediately, he searches it up, and finds out he can get his english essays completed in seconds. He puts in all his questions as prompts and completes all his 10 assignments within an hour, which would have taken him much longer, if he had not come across ChatGPT. He thinks to himself, ‘Ah, now I can just use ChatGPT to complete all my assignments fast daily’, instead of actually trying to learn the content and doing the assignments himself, and just using artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is up and coming right now, and advancements are occurring at astonishing rates. At its best, “AI could improve medical diagnosis, identify potential national security threats more quickly, and solve crimes.”(“Artificial Intelligence’s use and rapid growth”).It can also be used to produce engaging education tailored to students’ needs. However,there are also significant concerns about “education, intellectual property, and privacy.”(Artificial Intelligence’s use and rapid growth). Many say that it undermines a student’s work ethic and reduces their motivation to work hard as AI can do anything you ask it to. Students can just ask AI to do their homework and it provides them all the answers. There are many concerns regarding cheating which makes sense. That is why I have taken up the task of looking for solutions for the problems to put AI to good use in students’ education.
AI can be a very useful and resourceful tool to help make students’ education more engaging. Their progress can be tracked and more emphasis can be laid on topics they are struggling with. However, a major problem is that a lot of students take advantage of AI and cheat on their assignments. ChatGPT and other AI can produce complete essays with a prompt and a click of a button, which clearly shows how easy it is to misuse this tool. Although some people may be using AI only to understand difficult topics, understand errors in their work etc, the problem of cheating has caused many high schools and colleges to ban the use of AI on any assignments or work. “The lure of efficiency can make it hard to resist relying on AI to polish a writing assignment or do much of the writing for you” (Baron), clearly shows how students would find it difficult to resist using AI to improve their work as it is so efficient, and from improvement it can quickly go to making AI do most of the writing work for the

students. If one wishes to improve their writing work using the tool, they would ask the AI model for improvements but would also make sure to understand the improvements it suggests to be able to implement the changes themselves without using AI next time. “BestColleges has surveyed 1,000 current undergraduate and graduate students to hear their perspectives on AI in higher education. Results show that 56% of college students have used AI on assignments or exams”(Nam), clearly indicating how students themselves have accepted these claims. AI is often overused and students often succumb to the lure of efficiency,which leaves high schools and colleges no choice but to ban the use of AI, as in some cases, the work seems so authentic that it is hard to detect the difference between a human and a machine’s work. “Turnitin, a big educational software company, said that the AI-cheating detector it has been running on more than 38 million student essays since April has more of a reliability problem than it initially suggested”(qtd.in Fowler), which clearly highlights how AI cheating detectors are not always reliable and detecting cheating can be difficult.
However, in order to overcome this ban of artificial intelligence use in high schools and colleges, several steps need to be taken. These steps must provide assurance to these educational institutions that use of AI won’t harm students' education, integrity and motivation. We need to make sure that the advantages of AI use for education outweigh the risks and disadvantages. Perhaps, one of the most significant advantages would be how “An AI system can observe how a student proceeds through an assigned task, how much time they take and whether they are successful. If the student is struggling, the system can offer help; if the student is succeeding, the system can present more difficult tasks to keep the activity challenging”(O’Byrne). This is a very useful way to implement AI into education, as it does not seem risky and is scalable. For example, an app can be created to slowly track students’ progress on an assignment, which if successful, can be expanded to track a course, adding more courses, and eventually track students’ complete school work ethics This would keep them on track, provide motivation and create a study plan tailored to students’ needs. I also believe AI can help teachers create more engaging lessons by looking at a student’s interests, which can be analysed through data collected by AI, and when students complete the assignments, teachers can spot their weaknesses and topics they struggle by using above analysis so that they can better aid them in those particular topics and bridge the gaps in their knowledge.
As AI grows at astonishing rates and changes jobs, education and more, education assessment needs to be discussed. “Educational assessment focuses on how an educator knows whether a student is learning what is being taught. Traditional assessments – essays, multiple-choice tests, short-answer questions – are little changed from a century ago. Artificial intelligence has the potential to change that by identifying patterns in learning that may not be apparent to individual teachers or administrators. For instance, the language-learning company Duolingo uses AI and machine learning to create and score tests of English proficiency for universities, companies and government agencies. The tests start with a series of standard questions, but based on how the student performs, the system will select harder or easier questions to more

quickly identify a student's exact abilities and weaknesses.”(O’Byrne).As cited above, I believe AI can be used to revolutionise assessments in a similar format. For example, the digital SAT is adaptive, as performance in the first module of questions determines how hard or easy the second module will be. If someone does not do too well on the first module, the second module changes and turns out easier compared to someone who does extremely well on the first module and gets a harder second module. I believe that if the test is adaptive,the test should become slightly more difficult if the student performs well in a set of standard questions, and if the student performs below average on the standard questions, the test should give easier questions to the student to keep them going. Revolutionising assessments to make them less daunting and more doable for students would be a way to get students to stay more motivated and put their best effort into preparation as some may just give up looking at how hard the test is going to be. The changes in difficulty should not be drastic, so making it too easy or too difficult would defeat the purpose of fairly challenging the student and assessing them.These adaptive assessments can be made using AI, as it can track and learn how a student performs on different sections and accordingly provide upcoming questions.
Many students may not be very fluent in a certain language, for example, someone who does not know English may find it difficult to communicate in countries such as the UK,USA, Australia,etc where English is the most commonly spoken language. “AI can make translation more accessible for people who need to communicate across languages or cultures”(Nymbl). It can be used to create learning platforms which help students study and complete their assignments and work by translating the content to their language. It can also have the ability to only translate some of the harder words, while easier, more commonly used vocabulary can remain in the language they are not fluent in, in order to push the students to get better at this language. While doing the assignment, the software can randomly quiz the student with a question asking for a translation of a word. By actively recalling the meaning of the word, students would be able to learn more of the language and it would reinforce the meaning in their mind. AI would help the student by being an efficient language translator and a medium for the student to complete their tasks without being held back by a language barrier and a possible way to further improve in understanding and communicating in a language a student is not familiar with.
An important issue we must address is grading of assignments. As stated before, cheating is one of the biggest concerns when we consider using AI as an educational tool. In a recent study ... , it was “found that 50 essays generated using ChatGPT produced sophisticated texts that were able to evade the traditional plagiarism check software”(Volante, DeLuca and Klinger). This highlights the need for change in how grading of assignments takes place, as not all AI produced work can be detected on plagiarism software. AI can do all of the work very efficiently. Hence, it ultimately would lead to students being less motivated to do their work as they can get it done quickly through AI. To prevent AI from undermining a student’s work ethic, we can change the way grading takes place. Students should be asked to cite wherever they use AI on the assignments. If all the work is obtained from AI, students should be questioned on the same to understand possible reasons , as some students may be

experiencing difficulty with a topic. This would not be as brutal as getting an immediate 0 on the assignment, but would be encouraging the student to try again without using as much AI. For students whose reason is simply laziness as ]just wanted to be done with the assignment without actually doing any of the work, they should be again reminded that AI is only to be used when needed and not to be used all the time.. The ability to use it should not be treated as a belonging, but as a grant to them, just like a driver’s licence. The ability to use AI on further assignments can be taken away for a time period until the students improve their work ethic and actually try their best on the assignments.Work still produced using AI after instructions to not use AI should simply not be graded. The effort has to be there, even if all of their answers are wrong. Such penalties ensure that the student tries their best on their work and gives educational institutions guarantee that the work ethic and effort of students while working would not be jeopardised due to the use of AI in their work.
Conclusion
Although many view AI as a way to make cheating easier and ruin students’ education and integrity, I believe AI has potential to revolutionise education.If we make changes to the way students are graded, build platforms which use AI to help produce more engaging education,produce more adaptive assessments with the help of AI etc, we would be able to reshape education step by step. This is just the beginning, and as AI advances, the potential will continue to grow, and it will be worth it if more research is conducted to find more ways to put AI to good use as it would just lead to more improvements and faster advancement. Hence, if everyone cooperates, and ethics and rules are followed, AI can be used to change education in a positive way which would benefit everyone.

Works Cited
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Fowler, Geoffrey. "Detecting AI May Be Impossible. That's a Big Problem for Teachers." The Washington Post, 2 June 2023,
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Volante, Louis, et al. "ChatGPT and Cheating: 5 Ways to Change How Students Are Graded." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Farmington Hills, MI, Gale, 2024. Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EPJINB240201225/OVIC?u=lom_accessmich&sid=bookmar k-OVIC&xid=2adbb886. Accessed 21 Apr. 2024. Originally published in The Conversation, Conversation, 2023.