The book report is now a thing of the past. Take-home tests and essays are becoming obsolete.

Student use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become so prevalent, high school and college educators said, that to assign writing outside of the classroom is like asking students to cheat.

"The cheating is off the charts. It's the worst I've seen in my entire career," said Casey Cuny, who has taught English for 23 years. "Anything you send home, you have to assume is being AI-ed."

The question now is how schools can adapt. As AI technology rapidly improves and becomes more entwined with daily life, it is transforming how students learn and study and how teachers teach.

"We have to ask ourselves, what is cheating?" said Cuny, a 2024 recipient of California's Teacher of the Year award. "Because I think the lines are getting blurred."

Cuny's students at Valencia High School in southern California now do most writing in class. He monitors student laptop screens from his desktop, using software that lets him "lock down" their screens or block access to certain sites. He's also integrating AI into his lessons and teaching students how to use AI as a study aid "to get kids learning with AI instead of cheating with AI."

Students are uncertain when AI usage is out of bounds

College sophomore Lily Brown, a psychology major at an East Coast liberal arts school, relies on ChatGPT to help outline essays because she struggles putting the pieces together herself. ChatGPT also helped her through a freshman philosophy class, where assigned reading "felt like a different language" until she read AI summaries of the texts.

"Sometimes I feel bad using ChatGPT to summarize reading, because I wonder, is this cheating? Is helping me form outlines cheating? If I write an essay in my own words and ask how to improve it, or when it starts to edit my essay, is that cheating?"

Her class syllabi said things like, "Don't use AI to write essays and to form thoughts," she says, but that leaves a lot of grey area. Students say they often shy away from asking teachers for clarity because admitting to any AI use could flag them as a cheater.

Schools are introducing guidelines, gradually

Many schools initially banned use of AI after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. But views on the role of AI in education have shifted dramatically. The term "AI literacy" has become a buzzword of the back-to-school season, with a focus on how to balance the strengths of AI with its risks and challenges.

The University of California, Berkeley, emailed all faculty new AI guidance that instructs them to "include a clear statement on their syllabus about course expectations" around AI use.

Enforcing academic integrity policies has become more complicated since the use of AI is hard to spot and even harder to prove, said Rebekah Fitzsimmons, chair of the AI faculty advising committee at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.