Schools Are Catching Up to Student AI Use

Cheating cases, teacher training, policy deadlines, and new research all appeared this week. The pattern was clear. Students adopted AI before most schools had decided how learning should be evaluated in its presence.

What Happened This Week

On March 5 in Providence, an advanced mathematical economics class at Brown University sat for a take-home midterm.¹²

This week, in a public school building in Champaign or Trenton or Sioux Falls, a small room of K-12 teachers is spending five days with the AI tools their students have already been using for two years.³⁴

Last Tuesday, June 30, UNICEF's Innocenti office released a study of children and AI in ten countries.⁵⁶

On July 6, Maryland Matters ran a short piece that read at first like paperwork.⁷⁸

Three days ago, the Hechinger Report ran a Proof Points column with a bracing headline.⁹¹⁰

On Monday, Chancellor Kamar Samuels sent an email to the principals of the country's largest school system asking them to stop buying new software.¹¹¹²

On July 7, Chalkbeat's Newark bureau published a small piece with a very large question underneath.¹³¹⁴

What These Stories Have in Common

Moving an exam into a supervised room can protect one assessment, but it does not solve the larger problem. Students will continue using AI throughout the learning process, and schools need a way to understand that process.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

Schools should redesign assignments so that reasoning, revision, and explanation are part of what is submitted. Teachers should be able to see how AI was used and assess the student's independent understanding as well as the final work.

The system will catch up when it evaluates the thinking that AI has made harder to see.