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There’s a notion that college is supposed to be the best days of your life – and for some students, that really does ring true.

All that time to make new friends, live your best life, while studying subjects you love? What could be better?

However, it’s important to remember that it’s not this way for everyone, and outside pressures, confidence issues, and other struggles can hamper the student experience as well as making studying increasingly difficult.

With the rise of new technology like AI, which technically has the capacity to assist a struggling student with their work, it is easier and easier to give in to the temptation and risk the consequences of getting caught – despite the serious risks of this modern form of plagiarism putting their education in jeopardy.

That’s according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which aims to understand some of the many reasons for students turning to AI through their studies, and the real reasons are so far from the ‘lazy student’ caricature often passed around the media.

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Published in the journal Tech Trials, the study surveyed a total of 460 college students to gain an understanding of not only their AI use and the reasons behind it.

In total, 40.2% of the students claim to use AI ‘very frequently’, while 38.9% did so ‘occasionally’, meaning that almost 80% of US students are using AI for their work, even though professors and institutions often forbid it, and serious consequences are handed out to those found to be using AI in their graded work.

Why are these penalties in place? Well because your college work needs to be your work – not because professors are mean and need you to grind away all the time, but because the qualification you’ll eventually hold is evidence that you are skilled in your areas of expertise.

If you are getting high grades because of AI instead of your own work, there could be a serious gap in your knowledge that your professors and tutors are unable to address, so you’ll carry that with you, potentially for the rest of your life – and the consequences in your later, professional life could be dire. If, on the other hand, this gap in your knowledge is apparent from your work, this can be addressed with extra tuition or support, while you’re still in education.

All this to say, AI should be used sparingly if at all through the education process, and certainly not in graded work.

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However, the reality is that students are using AI, and the research from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte gave a clear view as to why.

For the majority of students, the researchers found, using AI was preferable to seeking help from a tutor or professor for one key reason: AI didn’t judge them.

Meanwhile, the anonymity afforded by AI meant that students didn’t feel like their reputation was being tarnished as they asked for help, showing the sad truth of a generation of students for whom asking for help is embarrassing and perceived as potentially detrimental to their grades and their self-confidence.

And with all the pressures on students to get the best qualifications, so they can get the best jobs, and succeed in an uncertain world with a fluctuating economy, it is no wonder that confidence is low and success seems like something that needs to be desperately sought – with potential long-term repercussions on their actual learning.

The easy answers of AI are at the heart of this, with the joy and rewards of learning diminishing as a result.

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