The Cogito Brief

Good morning,

AI is about to create one of the most uncomfortable questions in education.

How will students learn when the shortcut is always sitting right in front of them?

That’s a million-dollar question because I think students are facing a real problem every day. I graduated only a handful of years ago with my Bachelor’s degree in 2020 and Master’s degree in 2022, but even then, I saw this issue firsthand.

People (including my friends) were finding ways to outsource as much thinking and schoolwork as possible because they didn’t want to do the hard parts. It’s hard to blame them completely, but let’s dissect this trend.

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Why would you spend all day studying and preparing for an exam when you know it’s remote, multiple choice, and the answers are probably somewhere online?

Sure, some students will study and make the effort to learn, but many students would take the easier path, which makes sense. They are optimizing for efficiency instead of struggle.

And this doesn’t automatically make them lazy. It means students are responding to the system in front of them. If the system rewards the final answer more than the learning process, students will naturally find ways to get to that answer faster.

Take the email that I will send on Friday for example. You can have ChatGPT create a custom PowerPoint slideshow for you based on a simple prompt. If you can do half the work in a few minutes, it’s not crazy to want to use that tool all the time.

But that is where we draw a fine line.

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So much of education emphasizes good grades and being the best, as it should. Life is competitive, and you need to work hard if you want to be the best. So students are naturally going to take every reasonable advantage they can to chase that edge.

If there’s so much emphasis on good grades, honor roll, straight A’s, and class rank, then students are going to optimize for those things. However, optimizing for better grades puts real learning at risk.

When I was in school, I spent most of class jotting down notes and trying to capture the important things my teacher or professor said.

Now, students may spend more time figuring out how to use AI tools efficiently so they can complete assignments faster, prepare more quickly, and achieve better grades with less friction.

That can be helpful, but it can also become dangerous if the tool starts replacing the thinking instead of supporting it. At some point, we need to draw a line between using AI as support and depending on it to do the thinking for us.

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So where does that leave us?

I do not think schools can ban AI and pretend it does not exist. Students are going to use these tools either way. The real difference will be how they use them.

There is a big difference between asking AI to do the work for you and asking AI to help you understand the work better. That may be one of AI’s biggest long-term impacts: people slowly handing more of their decision-making over to machines.

That is the line schools, parents, and students will need to figure out. AI can be a shortcut that weakens learning, or it can be a tutor that helps students learn faster.

The students who benefit most will be the ones who know when to use it, when to question it, and when to think for themselves.

AI is not going away, and education will have to adjust. The goal should not be to stop students from using AI. The goal should be to make sure AI does not stop students from thinking.

Because getting the right answer is helpful, but understanding why it is right still matters.

Zack Wright

P.S. Big news dropping May 22.