ADAMS TWP — The use of artificial intelligence by students is a growing concern for teachers checking homework, Mars Area School District curriculum leaders shared at a school board meeting Tuesday, March 12.

Katy Kasten, who teaches eighth-grade language arts at Mars Area Middle School and is a curriculum leader for seventh through 12th grades, said AI use is an issue as students get older.

Kasten’s curriculum presentation discussed literacy tools and works of literature read in middle school through high school. During her presentation, she added that checking student assignments, as far as AI goes, “is a problem.”

“If I were to assign an essay … say my assignment was that (students) had to show character development,” Kasten said. “(Students) can actually type in what the assignment is, grade-level specific, and (the AI model) spits out a paper for them.”

“We need to do something,” she said. “We don’t want it to get to a point where writing outside of the classroom isn’t done.”

Board member Anthony DePretis asked whether teachers are able to detect if students use AI, like ChatGPT, to generate their answers.

Curriculum leaders present at the meeting, along with superintendent Mark Gross, said teachers have AI and plagiarism detection software, like Turnitin, in place.

“It’s something nationwide, too,” Gross said. “You see these programmers come up with all kinds of things to detect AI and as soon as it’s out there, someone else has created a program that completely annihilates it. So it’s a war — it’s a war between detection systems and AI creators.”

In the face of AI models being able to generate assignments and construct essays, Kasten said some middle school teachers are veering toward accepting handwritten, instead of typed, assignments. Still, she said, encouraging students to write by hand isn’t completely foolproof.

“Maybe with writing it down, (students) will absorb some of it,” board member Daniel Long said.

Erin Bridge, a middle school programming teacher and curriculum leader for seventh and eighth grades, said the proliferation of artificial intelligence could be an opportunity for educators.

“I’ve been to a training on how to determine whether students are using it, and then how to use it as a tool,” Bridges said. “I think that might be something that might be good to have for all of us.”

“We could look at it as an opportunity to learn how to use it, to better enhance what we’re (teaching) kids so that they can’t use AI to give it back to us,” said curriculum leader Jamie Waters.

“(AI) isn’t going away,” Kasten said.