by “The only thing I didn’t use chat(ChatGPT) for was the application,” one Herkimer County Community College student said with a laugh before heading to class.
AI tools like ChatGPT are becoming a normal part of college life. A lot of students are starting to use them when working on assignments, which has professors thinking more about things like academic honesty, how much students are actually learning, and what the future of education is going to look like.
Some students say AI is helpful for breaking through procrastination by coming up with ideas. Some use it to understand material that’s confusing and help them teach themselves new material.
But the problem does not lie there. The concern is with the others who admit it’s easy to rely on it too much and let it do most and in a lot of cases, all of the work. This is reflected in how students themselves talk about AI use on campus. Some describe it as something that has to be used for them but not used too openly.
“I rewrite everything because kids get caught left and right here,” one student said. “They threaten it at the beginning of the semester, but they don’t really talk about it after that,” they added. Others pointed to what they see as inconsistent expectations from professors on campus. “Any teachers who talk about AI here don’t even care if you use it,” another student said. “I’ve had a professor tell me to use AI.”
Some students are cautious about getting caught, others feel like the rules depend entirely on the class or the professor. Some classes are complete no-go’s for AI use, but out of the entire course load a fulltime student takes here, some of that is being filled by AI.
Because of how accessible these “tools” are now, professors are facing a new challenge of figuring out where the line is between getting help and crossing into plagiarism. One of the biggest concerns raised by faculty is not just whether students are using AI, but how it may be affecting what they actually learn. Robert Gassmann, a professor at Herkimer County Community College, explained that he first began noticing a shift in student work around 2022 when assignments started to feel overly similar.
“The responses started to actually become pretty like carbon copies of one another,” he said, describing reaction papers submitted in an online course. “People are asking, ‘write a reaction paper on the film Casablanca,’ and they’re all kind of coming out the same.”
While tools like Turnitin attempt to identify generated writing or plagiarism, it’s noted that they are not always reliable. Instead, he said to try to notice a lack of any personal perspective or other patterns that show up in AI generated text. His and many other people’s perspective on AI is evolving. In some cases, he encourages students to use things like ChatGPT to help find sources as long as they are still engaging with and understanding the material on a deeper level themselves. However, he warned that overreliance can come at a cost. “I think a lot of it is bland,” he said. “I think a lot of it is slop… and yeah, I think there is an absence of critical thinking.”
“It doesn’t appear that AI technology is going away anytime soon, and our educational systems will need to adapt and focus on using AI tools to augment—rather than replace—critical thinking skills among students,” said Gassmann.
These experiences highlight a growing disconnect. While some students and professors see it as immoral or straight-up cheating, some people see it as just getting a leg up. “You gotta do what you gotta do. My parents won’t like it if I fail out so I have to take every opportunity not to,” one student said.
At Herkimer County Community College, that perspective isn’t uncommon. As a community college, many students are juggling school with work, financial stress, and other responsibilities outside the classroom. For some, academic integrity becomes less of a moral issue and more of a practical one, doing whatever it takes to pass and move forward.
As AI becomes more integrated into daily life at Herkimer County Community College, the question is no longer whether students will use it, but how both students and educators adapt to it.
