Students at East Lansing High School are using artificial intelligence so much in their assignments that teachers are worried that their classes aren't learning the subject.
The use of AI has grown surprisingly well, especially in English classes, teachers and students say. There, the essays are troubled by anomalies such as overused words, excessive use of dashes, manufactured sources, and more that teachers have learned to catch.
Timothy Akers, AP language and composition teacher at Elhs, said he has seen an astonishing increase in AI use this year. He said this year, in one everyday essay assignment, he discovered that about half of the essays were fully generated.
AI platforms like ChatGPT are free and easy to access online. There, students can copy the prompt into the search box and generate the entire essay within seconds. Students can then provide further prompts to the AI program to further refine their “essays.”
Students can also paste mathematical equations and science questions onto the AI platform. Teachers can identify essays written by AI and answers for short answers, but it can be difficult to determine whether students are using AI to cheat on topics like mathematics and science that have a more uniform solution.
Akers worries that reliance on AI programs will negatively affect students' critical thinking and will struggle academically in the future.
“It hinders their ability to get involved in a deeper topic,” Akers said. “Problem-solving and analytical thinking go out the window.”
Julia Valla, one of the Akers students, agrees. She said that students using AI will “suffer in the long term and hurt them in the university and the workforce because they don't know how to write or complete tasks themselves.”
Over the years, East Lansing has embraced technology in its classrooms. The 2025-2026 academic year will cost $84,000 on Chromebooks, a type of laptop, according to Christian Pallasty, the district's director of technology and media services.
However, Chromebooks also allow students to access a large amount of information. This is increasingly being taken from AI.
Because AI is widely used in essay assignments, Akers decided to mark them for completion, as he didn't know how much the students wrote themselves, rather than giving grades.
“I have kids who want to be really good writers,” Akers said. “How can you justify giving worse grades than the children you generate? [their essay] On a computer? That's not fair. ”
His student, Vara said she wrote her essay without AI and felt disappointed that she couldn't get staged feedback for her work.
“I worked hard on the essays and cared about how I did and how I could improve. The whole situation was frustrating,” Vara said.
Akers devised ways to use information from the high school's information technology department and browser extensions to determine which students are cheating with AI.
Although they produced evidence to prove that AI is being used inappropriately, the district has not developed consequences of punishing students who commit fraud with AI.
“We were slow and the technology developed quickly,” Akers said. “I caught these children dead in their rights, but they didn't know what penalties they would apply for.”
To curb this misuse of AI, the school has begun drafting plans for the 2025-26 academic year. Kathy Kowalski, the district's media specialist, proposed an AI workgroup for teacher professional development sessions approved by administrators.
“Our main focus was like all faculty and students, coming up with some commonalities where we can talk about AI and be on the same page,” Kowalski said.
The workgroup acknowledges that all AI use is not harmful to students, and integrating AI into several challenges could even be helpful.
As a result, members of the group, such as Library Paraprofessional and Michigan virtual coordinator Katelyn Smith, proposed changes to the syllabus language to address schools' acceptable usage policies and AI. The group also devised that “key” teachers can use it to determine whether AI usage is acceptable. These proposed changes are still awaiting approval.
“That system is presented to the entire staff for feedback and revised at the management level,” Smith said. “The group teachers then began working on adapting their current lesson plans to the new system and showed how it would work.”
Part of the new plan is to use Magicschoolai, an AI program, at schools. English teacher Christine Day said that her class will help brainstorm ideas and edit assignments using AI tools.
“I was helping it refine the discussion at various steps along the way, but I made sure it wasn't doing work for my students [entirely]She said.
This result was clearly positive, according to Day.
“The students thought it was incredibly helpful,” Day said. “The papers I got were much cleaner and better written. [Due to this]I received papers that were much more clearly written by some students, but some of the things I got earlier this year were clearly not. ”
With such advantages, the goal is for the proposed system to be implemented in the fall. Although designed with high schools in mind, we hope that resources will encourage other schools in the district to adopt similar policies and continue to engage in AI fraud.
“We are not trying to take away our students from becoming an important tool for them, but we are trying to teach them to use them responsibly,” Day said. “It's a balanced act we're just trying to navigate.”
