When students entered Tsinghua University in Beijing this year, one of the first representatives they met wasn’t a person. Admission letters to the prestigious institution came with an invitation code to an artificial-intelligence agent. The bot is designed to answer students’ questions about courses, clubs and life on campus.
At Ohio State University in Columbus, students this year will take compulsory AI classes as part of an initiative to ensure that all of them are ‘AI fluent’ by the time they graduate. And at the University of Sydney, Australia, students will take traditional, in-person tests to prove that they have learnt the required skills and not outsourced them to AI.
Cc: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03340-w
All this is part of a sea change sweeping through campuses as universities and students scramble to adapt to the use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. These tools can, within seconds, analyse complex information, answer questions and generate polished essays — some of the exact skills that universities have conventionally taught. Eighty-six per cent of university students were regularly using AI in their studies in 2024, according to one global survey1 — and some polls show even more. “We are seeing students become power users of these tools,” says Marc Watkins, a researcher who specializes in AI and education at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
To some, AI presents an exciting opportunity to improve education and prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Universities such as Tsinghua and Ohio State are already weaving AI into their teaching — and some studies hint that AI-powered tools can help students to learn. A randomized controlled trial2 involving physics undergraduates at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggested that those who used a custom-built AI tutor learnt more in less time than did students who were taught by humans alone.
But many education specialists are deeply concerned about the explosion of AI on campuses: they fear that AI tools are impeding learning because they’re so new that teachers and students are struggling to use them well. Faculty members also worry that students are using AI to short-cut their way through assignments and tests, and some research3 hints that offloading mental work in this way can stifle independent, critical thought.
