AI is ramping on university campuses as professors and students turn to artificial intelligence

In a forum like I’ll rate my professorstudents complain about the excessive reliance on lectures on AI.

Some students argue that the use of AI in instructors reduces the value of education, especially when they pay high tuition fees to learn from human experts.

The average annual tuition cost for a four-year US institution is $17,709. If students study at a public four-year institution outside of state, this average cost is: Research Group Educational Data.

But others say it’s unfair that students will be punished for AI use while professors fly primarily under the radar.

One student at Northeastern University After discovering that her professor secretly uses AI tools to generate notes, she filed a formal complaint and requested a refund for her tuition fees.

The university professor said luck Using AI for class preparation and grading has become “broader”.

However, they say the problem is not the use of AI, but the tendency of teachers to hide only the reasons and methods of using technology.

Automated grading

One of the uses of AI has become the most controversial ones, is using technology to assess students.

Rob Anthony, part of the world department of Hult International Business School, luck Grading automation is becoming “increasingly popular” among professors.

“No one really likes ratings. There’s a lot of it. It takes a long time. You’re not being rewarded for it,” he said. “Students really care about their grades. The faculty doesn’t really care.”

The cutting, combined with a relatively loose institutional surveillance grading, led the teachers. Members are members to find faster ways to process student assessments.

“Whether or not there is AI, teachers often just want to find a very fast way out of their grades,” he said. “And I’ve hardly overlooked how you grade it.”

However, when more and more professors decide to let AI tools judge students’ work, Anthony is concerned about a homogenized grading system in which students get the same feedback from professors more and more.

“We see a lot of automated grading where all students get essentially the same feedback. It’s not tuned, it’s the same script,” he said.

A university teaching assistant and full-time student who asked to remain anonymous said luck They used ChatGpt to grade a large number of student papers.

The TA said the pressure to manage full-time research, work and student tasks forced them to look for a more efficient way to get through their workload.

“I had to evaluate something between 70 and 90 papers. That was a lot of it as a full-time student and as a full-time worker,” they said. “What I’m trying to do is go to ChatGpt. Give me a grading rubric and what I think is a good example of paper.”

While they said they reviewed and edited the bot’s output, they added that they felt the process was morally ambiguous.

“The moment I feel overworked and debilitated…I just use artificial intelligence grading, so I don’t read 90 papers,” they said. “But after the fact, I felt a bit off about it…it still had this kind of nasty feeling.”

They were particularly worried about how AI was making decisions that could impact the future of students’ academics.

“I’m using artificial intelligence to score someone’s paper,” they said. “And we really don’t know… how does that come up with these assessments, how does it come up with something grounded from ourselves?”

“Bots talking to bots”

Part of the frustration comes from students’ use of AI, the professor says.

“The voice that passes through your head is a teacher who says, ‘If they’re using it to write it, I’m not going to waste time reading.” I’ve seen a lot of bots talking to bots,” Anthony said.

Recent research suggests that almost all students use AI to support some degree of challenge.

According to a survey conducted earlier this year, UK Institute for Higher Education Policy, In 2025, almost all students (92%) now use AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024.

When ChatGpt was first released, many schools were either banned entirely or restricted the use of AI.

Students quickly found out that after it was released in late 2022, they were some of the early adopters of technology and could complete their essays and assignments in seconds.

The widespread use of technology has created distrust between students and teachers as professors struggled to identify and punish AI use in their work.

Today, many universities encourage students to use this technology despite the “good method.” Some students still seem confused or uninterested about where that line is.

The TAs who mainly taught intro classes and scored were luck “Around 20-30% of students used AI explicitly in writing papers.”

Some signs were obvious, like those who submitted papers that were not related to the topic. Others submitted works that read as less boring opinions than studies.

Instead of fines students for using AI directly, the TA said it did not criticize the use of AI, but instead docked the mark because it failed to include evidence or citation.

They added that the papers written by AI were marked favorably when automated grading was used.

They said when they submitted a student paper, clearly written in AI, to ChatGpt for rating, the bot rated it “really, really well.”

Lack of transparency

For Ron Martinez, the issue with the use of AI professors is lack of transparency.

He is a former UC Berkeley lecturer and current assistant professor of English at the Federal University of Parana (UFPR). luck He is upfront with his students about how, when and why he uses the technology.

“I think it’s really important for a professor to have an honest conversation with a student first. For example, tell them that they’re using AI to generate images of slides.

He suggests that you have to be in advance about using AI and explains how it will benefit students.

In a recent example of useful AI use, university lecturers began cross-referenceing his grading decisions using large-scale language models like ChatGPT as a kind of “double marker.”

“I started thinking, I wonder what a large language model would say about this work if I gave them the exact same standard as I use,” he said. “And a few times it flagged the student work I actually got… a higher mark than I gave.”

In some cases, AI feedback forced Martinez to reflect how unconscious bias formed his original assessment.

“For example, one of the students who never spoke about their ideas in class realized that they weren’t giving their students their legitimate credibility simply because I was biased,” he said. Martinez added that AI feedback has led to the multiple grades being adjusted, usually in the favor of students.

While some people are despairing that the widespread use of AI could overturn the entire concept of higher education, some professors have already begun to view the use of technology between students as positive.

Anthony said luck He felt that “this whole class was a waste of time” in early 2023, then “balancing it is more than hurting.”

“I thought this was just ruining education. We’re just stupid,” he said.

“Now it seems to be helping out more than balance and hurt… It certainly saves time, but students express themselves, come up with more interesting ideas, adjust and apply them.”

“There’s still temptation (to cheat)… But these students may find that they really need the skills we teach for the future,” he said.