My students are driving me crazy. Almost all the homework they turned in this semester was correct, but their average score on the monthly exam actually dropped a lot.

Could they be using AI to do it? I just read a report about professors at the University of Hong Kong who tracked more than 20,000 middle school students and found exactly this kind of situation.

Really? What exactly did the study say?

Students who asked AI to give them answers directly saw their homework scores rise by 18%, but within six months, their monthly exam scores fell by an average of 20%, and two years later, their high school entrance exam scores were down by as much as 24%.

That's serious! I thought they'd finally gotten the hang of things. But almost everyone uses AI now, so we can't completely ban it, can we?

The study said that if students only asked AI to explain how to solve a problem and still spent time working through it carefully themselves, there was basically no impact. The problem was directly copying and pasting answers. And the better a student's grades were, the greater the impact.

No wonder those top students in our class have been losing points on the big problems lately! Their parents probably don't even know they're using AI.

That's very possible. The report said half of parents didn't even know which AI their children were using. We definitely can't rely on the kids' self-discipline alone.

Looks like I'll have to hold a class meeting tomorrow and have a serious talk with the parents too. Simply banning AI won't work. We need to help the kids understand for themselves how much they lose by copying answers.