Lane Tech’s Academic Integrity Policy prohibits students from using AI in the completion of any assignment, unless pre-approved by an educator. The guidelines on AI usage for educators themselves, however, are a little less clear.
Chemistry teacher Patrick Davey said that professional development on the subject has been limited on the CPS and schoolwide level due to the fact that AI is still such a novel technology.
However, Davey said that “I do research outside of school that associates with AI and incorporating it into education, and companies associated with Stanford University, UIUC… they’ve got a lot of systems in place that are built to be helpful to both students and teachers.”
Following this model, AP Environmental Science teacher Arthur Wawrzyczek said he has personally been weighing the benefits and potential risks of using some of these AI systems to grade assignments in his own classes.
“The first decision you have to make as a teacher when incorporating something new into the classroom is, is it going to benefit my students’ learning, right?” Wawrzyczek said. “Secondary to that is, how much time is it going to save me?” Indeed, one of the main benefits of using AI for grading is that AI can deliver feedback at a much faster rate and for a larger number of assignments than teachers feasibly can.
The Lane Tech Academic Integrity Policy already lists the usage of AI for the purpose of “confirming their understanding of a complex text, or checking their writing for grammar and tone” as one of the potential exceptions in which the usage of AI by students could be acceptable.
Accordingly, Wawrzyczek has provided students with the option to use AI to generate feedback on their own practice FRQs in the past. However, Wawrzyczek continues to read through and grade each assignment himself, recognizing that AI is unreliable and has the potential to “hallucinate.”
As Davey said, “Students seem to think of [AI] as like another search engine. It’s not, it’s generative text. It works like a really advanced version of the same thing that knows what you’re going to say next when you’re auto texting on your phone. So it can do things like generate answers that aren’t correct. It can make up resources that don’t exist.”
As with any utilization of AI, ethical considerations apply, but Wawrzyczek brings up additional concerns where students’ well being and protection is involved. “Not every AI company is super transparent about how they utilize the input data you give it,” Wawrzyczek said. “So what’s the ethics behind feeding it 100-something student responses? How are they using that information? Is it somehow traceable back to the school?”
Continuing, Wawrzyczek said, “And also just the fairness aspect of it, right? Here we are saying you as students are not allowed to use AI for these assignments and these responses, but I’m going to go ahead and use it anyway, even though I told you not to. Granted, you can work around that.”
Keeping his students informed on and actively involved in creating the classroom AI usage policy is one such way Wawrzyczek has managed to do this.
“It’s very important for me that my students know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. The most important opinion in the room is probably the students,” Wawrzyczek said. “Do they feel like it’s acceptable for us to assess them in this manner? And surprisingly, when I asked my students, most of them were.”
Davey said that another of his concerns is that AI use for grading will create a disconnect between students and their teachers.
“Teachers or students that rely on it too heavily are going to just find themselves in kind of like this weird hole where either you’re identifying student work as being AI generated when it’s not, or you’re going to rely too heavily on it for grading,” Davey said. “Then you kind of lose the initiative to give that kind of more personalized feedback on homework tests, especially things like lab reports or major essays, something that requires a more intimate knowledge of the student, who the person is and what they need to help to gain their growth and knowledge.”
Aquaponics teacher Brianna Bryson said that “The more technology we get, we lose some of that, like, human connection, and I feel like AI really widens that gap in teaching.”
For this reason, Bryson said she doesn’t believe AI should be used in classrooms at all.
“We should be using our brains to learn and teach and communicate,” Bryson said. “I’m sure AI has a place. I don’t think it’s here.”
Whether teachers use them or not, there are already a multitude of AI tools at their disposal. Wawrzyczek said that he has tested ChatGPT5, Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and CoGrader, which he said is “one of those programs that will integrate directly into Google Classroom,” in order to keep up with developments.
“AI is going to be the future of education,” Wawrzyczek said. “So at this point, we’re in a position where we either have to adapt or be left behind. I haven’t quite figured out how it’s going to be used yet, but at this point, it’s an inevitability. And I think it would serve us to be ahead of the curve rather than struggling to catch up when it’s surpassed whatever its capabilities are now.”
