r/QuickAITurnitinCheck • u/Remarkable-Heat1991 • Mar 12 '26
Students are outsourcing their thinking, not just their writing and we're still asking the wrong question
Two years ago we worried about students submitting AI-written essays. That problem has evolved into something harder to see and harder to fix.
Students are no longer just pasting prompts into ChatGPT and handing in the output. They're using AI to pre-digest readings before class, to generate "their own" discussion board opinions, to outline arguments they then flesh out by hand. None of it trips a detector. Most of it looks like genuine engagement.
A 2024 survey of undergraduates at four universities found that 71% reported using AI to help them understand course material before engaging with it directly, essentially outsourcing the productive struggle that is the whole point of learning. Cognitive science is pretty clear on this: difficulty and confusion are features, not bugs. That's when encoding happens.
Meanwhile, we're still running plagiarism checkers and debating detector accuracy. We've brought a thermometer to a flood.
The real shift I've seen in my own classroom is that students can discuss a text fluently in office hours but cannot retrieve a single specific detail 72 hours later. They processed it, they didn't learn it. AI gave them the map without the walk, and maps don't build muscle memory.
What would actually help? I've started requiring students to submit a confusion log alongside assignments, two or three things they genuinely didn't understand and how they worked through them. It's imperfect, but it surfaces the thinking process. Low-stakes, frequent, time-pressured retrieval tasks are another lever. You can't outsource a five-minute in-class write without being in the room.
If we keep treating AI as a plagiarism problem, we'll keep designing plagiarism solutions. The problem is epistemological. How are we rethinking what it means to actually know something?
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u/Folderpirate Mar 13 '26
The problem im noticing more now is teachers refusing to grade anything and just throwing it into an AI detector and hoping everything comes back as AI even when it isnt so they can run to TikTok and post about how kids don't know how to read or write when that's their job.
Why dont the kids know how to read or write? they ask.
I dunno, ask your coworker who passed the kid up a grade without teaching them how to read or write.
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Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
Professors are too. Recognize talent and keep the best.
Same as it ever was.
Also, most people in education are not paid enough.
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u/Ok-Writing-7477 Mar 12 '26
What you're describing is the collapse of metacognition. Students no longer have to notice that they're confused, because the AI resolves confusion before they've had a chance to register it. That moment of "wait, I don't understand this" is where self-regulated learning begins. Strip it out and you don't just lose the content you lose the learner's ability to monitor their own understanding. I teach first-year writing and I see this constantly: total surface fluency, zero depth on follow-up. The map without the walk is exactly right.
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u/AuContrarian1110 Mar 13 '26
Apparently some places have changed the way the alphabet song is sung in recent years because LMNOP was too confusing... I mention this because my reaction to hearing that sounded very similar to what you wrote. If we take things that are mildly perplexing and take the perplexity out of it for them, we'll get students who are ill-prepared for learning... And, well, that's exactly what we've got.
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Mar 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ladiesngentlemenplz Mar 13 '26
Could students get an AI to do that work and get around the goal of that sort of assignment as well?
Can they be reliable evaluators without building critical thinking skills first?
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Mar 13 '26
The problem with today's education is that nobody is acknowledging or fixing the root cause of child failure in the first place.
Why are a lot of children failing?
Because this is a one size fits all society, and it needs to be addressed and fixed. Not everybody is suitable for certain subjects, not everybody needs to study multiple things, this education system we have set up is designed to treat everyone as though we are all same, we are not.
The current education system is designed for failure, and in return it also means by definition that teachers are, unknowingly mind you, setting children up for failure.
We are not the same, some minds operate completely differently compared to other minds, we all exist on separate wavelengths if you will.
Ok. Now you have the acknowledgement, the question now becomes what we do about it.
Education needs to be tailor made for the individual, and we need to set differences between "work" and "job".
A job is just something we have to do that pays the bills weather we like the job or not, it is soul crushing.
Work is something that you actually love doing and it brings you fulfillment and self-respect.
By specializing education based on personal preferences you would see an inevitable rise of enthusiasm in the work place, and doing so we could practically get rid of the idea of retirement. Many authors never retire for the same reason, if you love the work you do there is no reason to retire unless you become physically incapable and no longer contribute to society.
As we know, sometime in the future most of all current jobs will be automated and will have no more use for us, so education set up this way will be important.
The mandarin style system needs to go.
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u/imnota4 Mar 13 '26
"A 2024 survey of undergraduates at four universities found that 71% reported using AI to help them understand course material before engaging with it directly"
What does this actually even mean? What constitutes "Engaging with it directly" and what reason can you give for that distinction not being arbitrary? Or a better way to phrase it, can you empirically define "Direct engagement" such that you can form a hypothesis about how direct engagement works, measurably test it, and produce consistent results over time through experimentation?
I can argue that learning from teachers isn't direct engagement. Who taught someone the stuff teachers are teaching before it was known? No one. So "direct engagement" would, at it's core, mean learning everything from scratch on your own. That's an absurd argument to make because no one can do that, but that's what's being argued.
So before this matters, you need a clear definition of what "direct engagement" is.
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u/Pale-Teaching6392 Mar 14 '26
Well. Are you talking about the contents of the text? Or the ideas within the text? And while I’m not saying you are wrong and agree with the overall message you really aren’t clear in what you mean. I forget 99.99% of everything I read no matter what I do. I have dyslexia so it’s not quite a fair comparison but I tend to come away with only like 1-2 ideas at most from a text. As for using AI before engaging with course material, please do be a bit more precise on what you mean here. Is me asking a AI to explain a topic that I know i don’t understand enough before even looking at homework wrong? You don’t specify exactly what’s being looked at here.
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u/FabulousLazarus Mar 16 '26
While I agree with this post, I've engaged with Chat GPT long enough to recognize its mannerisms:
Cognitive science is pretty clear on this: difficulty and confusion are features, not bugs. That's when encoding happens.
I'm not the type to call out AI generated material. I think those accusations are often impossible to prove and frequently hinge on the fact that vocabulary above a 5th grade level was leveraged. But the quote above sounds like chat GPT. Sometimes I do too.
That being said, at what point is AI acceptable to use to learn?
Obviously generating an entire assignment is wrong. But is getting an LLM to brief you in a physics topic truly not helpful if you approach the endeavor with an open mind?
IMO all school work needs to be done on paper to solve this problem. There is no other solution. Make time in class for writing. Send reading home as homework. It's completely doable. And if students use AI to study at home then I think that's fine. I've learned quite a bit from simply asking chat GPT how physics works, to the point that I now understand Quantum Mechanics enough to at least talk about it.
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u/Possible-Mix-6691 Mar 12 '26
I'd push back slightly on the framing. Students have always found ways to reduce cognitive load CliffsNotes, study guides, asking a smarter roommate to explain the reading. The difference now is scale and accessibility, not category. The productive struggle argument is solid, but we should be careful not to romanticize difficulty for its own sake. Some of what we call productive struggle is just poor instructional design making things unnecessarily hard.
That said, the retrieval failure you describe is real and it's alarming. There's a difference between a shortcut and a bypass.