[Music] this was me two decades ago as a student but these [Music] [Applause] days according to a 2024 survey conducted in the US 26% of teens aged 13 to 17 use the AI chatbot Chat GPT for their schoolwork a twofold spike from 2023 [Music] is anyone doing their own homework [Music] [Applause] anymore there is no similar study done in Singapore which is why Talking Point has launched a nationwide survey we reached out to students aged 15 to 25 from secondary schools all the way to institutes of higher learning with AI chatbots literally at their fingertips I want to find out if our students are actually doing their homework and what the consequences are if they're letting AI take over [Music] [Music] before I can find out what students are using AI for I need to know what kind of AI tools they have at their disposal so I'm tapping on this expert hey friend what are the best AI tools for English homework one chat GPT that's me one self recommend oneself Grammarly Quillbot word tune deepel right Google bard what about math photomath desmos symbol lab Microsoft math solver science wolf from alpha con academy buddy labster the pocket lab history and social studies perplexity AI Google Scholar Chat GPT can't you do everything self great question while I chat GPT can certainly help with a wide variety of tasks other AI tools often specialize in specific tasks that I might not handle as perfectly or efficiently in certain situations some AI tools like Photomath or Wolf from Alpha are specifically designed to handle complex mathematical calculations so there's clearly a wealth of AI tools that students can tap on for their homework but how much are these tools actually being used the results of talking point survey are in all of the respondents in our survey said that they use AI for their homework and 84% of the youngest learners those currently in secondary school use AI for their homework at least once a week which is why I've recruited these secondary school students they're clueing me in on how deeply AI is shaping their grades so this assignment was to write about a time that you regretted did you write it all yourself um no so here was mainly where I used AI for i recall cautiously stepping on the wet blade so long grass a lot of synonyms and writing a more indepth answer beforehand what I wrote was I stepped onto the long muddy grass but I felt like it's not the way I wanted to sound so using AI I would say make this more in depth Yeah it's definitely more descriptive right exactly usually I use AI to help generate points for my English composition if I feel I'm really stuck I would just get CHBT to list out some ideas just to get the brain juices flowing and how would you do that so for example this assignment people can only be happy if they feel they are treated fairly do you agree first I'll analyze the question it's an argumentative question you agree or you disagree so let's say I agree with the question i'll ask Chad GPT to give me a list of reasons that people only feel happy when they are treated fairly it seems like you don't write everything on your own but do you feel like there's any wrong in using AI for homework no I do use it for mother tang which is Malay so it's sort of similar to how I use for both English and geography but it's how our teacher has actually taught us to do it so So your teachers know that you use AI for homework of course yeah they are encouraging us to use AI so they are telling us how to do it and how we should go about using it so usually I'll pick out the ones that I feel is easiest to elaborate on and then write the composition my English teacher she often encourages us to generate ideas for composition okay and put it in point form because she wants us to really think with the points that are being generated and then elaborate from there so it's still essentially our own work how do you use AI for your homework so I use AI to generate answers for my homework when I don't really like want to waste my time or waste my effort on it okay so we actually do this one your Chinese homework yeah actually asking us to fill in the blanks which is I would say pretty simple but uh I also have a lot of this blanks which I do not want to waste my time on this answers okay so it's about efficiency which which one can we want to do this quickly so we'll screenshot this and then we'll put it into chat GBT upload the file here and then give me answers please please yes here are the correct answers to fill in oh it knows so let's move on to math we have this worksheet right here i find math quite hard so like I don't even really bother i'm going to take a photo of it now i'm going to send it okay so when you do get your answers you actually put it on yeah okay do your teachers know that you use AI for homework yeah they they know they know for Chinese there was this one time a guy like used AI to generate a open-ended passage the answers to the question the teacher was like you know I can see that this is AI how do they know there's already like AI detectors are there any rules that the teachers or school implement when using AI actually they don't give any rules there's no strict rules against it more of just slight discouragement against using it entirely for your answers let's say someone copies from AI wholesale any instances where someone was caught i've heard of teachers trying to take their students response and putting it into AI hey was this me in AI but caught I wouldn't say caught they do give us a heads up uh hey I hope you're not using it to give you answers but using it to help you um build on your answers our school is not really too uptight about it well definitely not copying wholesale the teachers will be able to tell i'll say yes because most people they have a specific writing style the teachers can definitely notice the discrepancies do you feel like you learn something by using an AI tool i do feel that I learned something because it gives me a different perspective which HGP does get very good points i definitely would not have thought of before in terms of content my English compensation marks has definitely improved i'd say I'm doing a lot better English i've come to learn to be more descriptive thinking in ways I never would have thought of before do you think you learn anything from using AI for your homework no not really like it doesn't really help me with my studies but it helps me like get it done it may not come as a surprise that our kids are using AI to help them with their assignments but what surprised me is that teachers know about it and they do let the kids use such tools though they advise against relying on it entirely ai tools became more mainstream in the last decade have our schools developed clear protocols for their use jonathan Sim has been leading the charge to embrace proper AI use in schools i have been speaking to some secondary school students about their use of AI in their homework and I'm honestly quite surprised at how much AI they use for their work so I want to understand is there any sort of guidelines put in place for teachers on how they get their students to use AI to my knowledge there isn't any very strong clear guidance across the board part of it has to do with the sentiment on the ground with the teachers it's actually a big broad spectrum like on one end you have some teachers who are very excited they want to encourage their students to use AI on the other end of the spectrum you also have some who are like don't know how to deal with it let's just pretend it doesn't exist and then there are some small minority who are like ah AI is bad you know and they're going on a beach hunt yeah what sort of guidance do you think is important minimally we should make clear how much AI should be used i discovered this thing called the AI assessment skill it's done by a couple of academics outside of Singapore it helps to clarify all these ambiguities and gray areas about AI use so what this does is that we tell the students that for this particular assignment how much or how little AI you can use there are five levels at the lowest level we can say no AI why because we want the students to acquire something very very basic something very fundamental so they have to do it themselves so if the AI helps in any way they're not going to learn that at the second level we have AI assisted idea generation and structuring so we can say okay maybe you want to write about this thing but oh you know you're not too familiar with the subject so we can use this to expand your horizons so this would be when the teachers tell the students to use AI to brainstorm ideas for their composition yes that's right we tell the student okay after you have talked to the AI to get all these ideas you write the essay but then you also share the conversation that you have with the AI so that we can see the evidence all right the next level that we have is AI assisted editing you know if our focus is not on developing grammar but rather on writing in a certain style then we can say okay you can use the AI to assist you in the editing so that you can concentrate on uh how do you format how do you structure the report the next level is this thing that we call AI task completion human evaluation so they use the AI to complete something but the main learning objective is to exercise the evaluative judgment how do you judge the work is it good is it bad where do you want improvements to be made so would this be when they use AI to rewrite certain lines so that it's more poetic or to expand their vocabulary yes so this exercise actually helps the students to start to develop an eye on what is like good communication good writing poetry what's what's a touching analogy or something that they can use they also learn from what the AI is generating that's right and of course the last level is full AI we can say okay you can use any and every AI tool uh at your disposal so you know full creativity really just go and have fun with it this will teach them mastery and also to develop the eye what is good AI used to put together that wonderful package or presentation okay is this already implemented in secondary schools for example well I know some secondary schools that are using it but this is not something that's put across the board at the moment minimally we should make clear how much AI should be used and we should also be clear with our students what they can achieve by doing the assignment because one thing AI has done is that it has actually taken away a lot of the motivation for learning you know so what's the point in doing this what's the point in learning this right I could take the shortcut you know we actually met this student who showed us how she can very easily just snap and upload her assignment to generate answers so it feels to me like AI was doing her homework for her she wasn't doing any work at all did she get caught according to her the teachers can also sort of have a sense on whether they they do use AI or not and her teacher does run their homework through an AI detector well there's no good measure that's out there there are some people who say "Oh I can look at this piece of writing and I can tell who use an AI." And there are also you know all these AI detection tools that claim to be 99% accurate but actually truth be told uh they're all very very valuable and prone to mistakes don't just take it from me why don't you maybe get an AI written sample and a human written sample and put it to the test okay challenge accepted [Music] [Music] i'm putting AI detectors to the sword this is a typical composition question for secondary four students i roped in my producer who's chilling at home to attempt the question with nothing but AI meanwhile I'm responding to the same question with nothing but my brain juice time to assess our work for AI use all right Jonathan hello you have our compositions i worked very hard on mine while my producer Den didn't do any work he just used AI for his completely he was basically the lazy student ah I see all right so let's see what you can detect okay so we're going to use two different uh AI detectors they are very popular and wellknown let's start with the first one by Dean i think it will be quite obvious that he used AI there we go 74% here ai generated and then if we put in through another AI detector 0% AI that is a lie he didn't do anything how is that possible but that's a big difference though 74 and 0% that's how unreliable it is do you want to see how your work comes out yes okay i feel like mine will be quite obvious that it's written by a human just based on how I wrote it so we start first with GPT0 all right and it comes up to 100% AI generated what are you sure you didn't use AI i Jonathan I promise you he saw me write it i promise you I was writing it all by myself i put a lot of work into this well let's see how it turns out on the the other AI detector 0% wait I'm so confused so who do I trust so I think the the biggest concern is really trust between the teacher and the student imagine a student writes like us and it gets constantly flagged it's not just one teacher saying "Hey do you use AI?" But let's say five teachers that say "Hey I think you use AI." That's going to affect the student and the students motivation to learn exactly it hurts your confidence it doesn't make you feel like your effort was appreciated do teachers understand that these tools are unreliable no we still have a problem where many teachers are still asking "How can we detect how can we detect?" But the the truth of the matter is we can't okay so the AI detection tools don't work does that mean that teachers have to try and detect AI themselves one thing that we do as educators is we do have a sense maybe something is not right like you know the the students writing quality uh has been like this and then suddenly wow then we can have a conversation with the student you know and say what led you to write it like this but other than that you know we very fable we can't we can't in fact if if if you like I have a little uh quiz i have here three writing samples at least one is written by a human and at least one is written by an AI can you tell i want to say A is written by a human b and C are AI so final answer drum roll yes drum roll it turns out that A is AI b is also AI okay c is actually written by a human i am just like the platform i am no better oh okay so uh rather than than than waste a lot of time and effort playing this cat and mouse game with all these AI advancements we need to really rethink how we engage our students motivate them to want to learn with us and also how to use the AI not to replace but to enhance the learning process the learning process it has two critical components the [Music] first formative assessments like homework these are spread throughout a period of study to help students learn practice and master a subject matter the second summitative assessments such as exams these are dished out at the end of the period of study to evaluate if a student has learned and how [Music] much according to this study conducted more than a decade ago over the course of 15 years any amount of time a student spent on homework would have a positive effect on their exam results that was before AI chatbots entered the market now that students are turning to AI to assist with their homework will it affect their grades i'm setting up an experiment these secondary four students are my subjects step one a homework assignment i've given them three social studies questions designed for secondary four students they need to carry out research to craft their answers to the questions they're allowed to use any AI tool they want in any way they desire to complete the assignment how's it going it's going good you are so calm and collected i love it it's the end of step one how challenging did you find the assignment i think it was quite easy it was all right it was quite easy do you remember anything that you wrote um um not really little bit what did you learn did you learn anything from doing this assignment i don't remember anything i just wrote step two a closed book test to see if they retain and apply anything they learned from their homework i'm closing the book on my experiment pens down now to send these off for marking helping me grade the papers is Leah Tan she's a specialist in humanities for secondary school students all right let's take a look at the results of the experiment okay we'll start with the assignment first let's see how they did [Music] oh is that it [Music] all right let's take a look at the results of the experiment actually Wayang and F didn't do very well ah okay but Claire got full marks full marks yes wow claire what I noticed is that she would also be reading understanding the way that she structured her points she developed her ideas it's very systematic and it's very obvious that she exercised discernment with regards to how she's processing the information on the other hand we see Wang's work here and you'll notice that he didn't fully answer the question so perhaps understanding was not perfect okay and for Faith I could see that that she might have felt too anxious about the time limit and she couldn't deliver she neglected the other two sections it's interesting that you said that their test answers were not fully developed because after the research assignment I asked them if they learned anything at all and they were struggling to remember it's pretty obvious here that ultimately having the child use AI with discernment to really really understand the information rather than just vomiting it out it's important and not have it become a crutch in our intellect and in terms of our cognitive processes yeah I like to know just how AI might interact or interfere with our brains during homework lee Lin has spent the past nine years studying what might be going on in our minds when we are learning students i'm showing him how our three subjects used AI for their homework one of the thing that I noticed about how the students were using Jenny here is that at least Claire seemed to demonstrate a little bit more intentional thought when she saw all the output that was given by Jennai she didn't just take it all she read through and decided on hey this point seems to be the most important and asked Jai to continue elaborating on a particular point the two students on the other hand seem to look at all the output and seem to come to the conclusion like everything seems to be important and just took it as it is and elaborated on everything at the same time i think the difference between them is demonstrating evaluative judgment like Claire seemed to exhibit whereas we're two students so why is it important one of the points of education is for us to learn to develop this ability to actually judge whether work in that particular domain is actually good quality work or not that's what we call evaluative judgments learn how to think with AI and not just let AI think for them this is easy to say but it's quite hard to do because students are time staffed letting AI think for you uh is the easiest pathway of least resistance right some of the students said that their homework is difficult so they're using AI to eliminate the hard part that's precisely the point right learning is difficult and challenging psychologists call this whole idea productive struggle think about our brain like a muscle if you're doing a exercise and an exercise uh that is too light for you you're using for example the weight of a pencil you can do lots of reps but that probably not going to have much of an effect what you want is to have uh a good amount of weight that will cause you to struggle somewhat and the right frequency as well i think one of the big issues at this moment of time is if the students are just using AI and going around this difficulty when they do that they're able to produce an output that as far as the teacher can tell shows that they actually understood the material and this is harmful for everybody m the student feels that I need to pretend all the time that I know right and what happens is now they have to go back to relying on AI to produce work which then perpetuates this illusion and his teacher is also operating under an illusion like I'm doing such a great job all my students are all learning so well at some point uh the illusion is going to break right and that creates unfortunately huge amounts of stress and anxiety for the individual student besides the illusion of learning some AI tools are also known to project the illusion of fact according to an open AI technical report released in April 2025 newer models of chat GPT are more prone to hallucinations compared to older models but just how much will these tools trip up on secondary school [Music] subjects i'm running them through the ringer all right so I'm looking for a set of books called 10year series which had all the past OLE papers and this is what I used to prep for my O levels okay I need to breathe because I'm getting a bit of PTSD from being all around the 10ear [Music] series okay I'm ready let's go study i'll be feeding questions from these books to the top AI tool recommended by chat GPT for each subject starting with chat GPT itself for English math physics and chemistry with wolfre and finally history and social studies using perplexity we are done now to find out if putting all these questions through a machine will give me top marks i've asked these educators to assess the quality of my work well not quite mine but they don't know that yet [Music] i'm about to discover my grades hi Una i'm done with your papers okay let's go how did I do for my papers let's start with math first it's actually not bad you got 62 out of 90 b3 i got a B3 yep i used to get an A so this is not what I expected so there are many careless mistakes okay there are some formulas that you have used wrongly this one you have got the front part of it correct but it's not really written with the correct formula and that's why you actually derive the wrong answer i think there was a lack of understanding how to derive the height of the this question you forgot to put a negative or positive in front of the actual numerical value okay as well as you have to show your working yeah because in the exam if you get the right answer but you do not have a working they can actually mark you wrong for that okay all right so maybe we move on to chemistry how did I do so you've got 45.5 out of 75 so that's a B4 this is all wrong why is that this is completely wrong the solutions given uh the actual compound is wrong it did not even heat close to the mark you're missing a lot of the key words so you can see this you have to be very specific as to how much concentration of the acid yeah and for this one you have to tell me what kind of energy it has to be and when you talk about collisions you have to describe to me how is this collision like this part is actually missing a lot of details this diagram that you have showed is different from the ideal setup but even so you can see that this part it doesn't have a stopper okay which means that the gas that's produced will be able to just flow out to the atmosphere and if you look at this question I don't see any working at all yeah so let's move on how did I do for my physics [Music] [Music] how did I do for my physics nf really how how is that possible so in physics again just like in chemistry it is also looking out for certain keywords i don't see any of the key words in this for the drawing of diagrams the arrows are all pointed wrongly and even the working I think the formula used is wrong here okay I see a lack of working as well that's a lot of wrong answers so tell me how did I fare for my English it was a D7 [Music] that's not too good maybe it was because you didn't really capture what the questions wanted okay history C6 only okay well your answers were completely perfectly logical right they didn't capture the idea of having cross referencing which is a skill that the examiners really want okay let's take a look at social studies then what is my grade social studies um unfortunately it was also a C6 oh yeah once again for questions like these cross referencing is a must in order to even pass the question we're lacking in concrete examples you need to really elaborate and quote i do have to tell you something though yes I used AI for all of them okay oh okay was AI at all these are the grades that I scored for these subjects when I gave AI free [Music] reign with AI so prone to mistakes I'll need to look for some remedies and safeguards against them which is what Danish Lowski offers his students as a generative AI lecturer i scanned a bunch of Olevel exam papers into AI tools and I got the worst results of my life how did you even use AI to solve any of these papers what did you do i snapped a photo of the questions uploaded it and then just copied whatever responses were generated okay so there's a few things that could have gone wrong when you were snapping it with your phone if you were a little shaky uh a lot of the words the numbers the diagrams could have been very blur so the AI might not even know what it was looking at another thing is that if you were just telling AI to solve it it didn't expect or know that you needed those workings as well it just thought you needed the answer and just gave it to you and the most important part you also didn't kind of double check what those answers were before copying it over right so that's also a very important step because AI is not perfect it will definitely hallucinate a little bit so it is a bit of our job to make sure that whatever it gives we kind of double check or try to get it to explain how we got the answer so we know that it really can be the correct answer how would I go about that then so one thing we can do is instead of trying to scan all these things for example this math question is just English with the numbers right we can just type this so we just make sure that we got all the numbers correct and we don't introduce any mistakes from the start then we need to be as explicit with the instructions as possible telling the AI what you need it to do and giving it as much information as possible m there are different frameworks that all fall under something we call prompt engineering so for math questions I adopted the craft framework it stands for context response action format and target if we were to look at wolf so setting the context for the question I actually mentioned that oh this is a question from an ole paper the response I'm also asking for is to give me the workings step by step and not skipping anything the format i wanted to number each step so I can see the logical flow and so I'm thinking to a spoiler just to hide the answers for me so I can try and figure it out first before I see the final answer the target I define myself as a 16-year-old student because if you're explaining this to a college level student you could use even bigger words if you're explaining this to a primary level student right then you'd have to use simpler terms and of course the action is to solve it and then give me uh how those different values would look like and then I can go through and then finally see whether or not these final answers are correct right but I see here in your paper those answers are wrong those are my wrong answers so if we try this exact same prompt to chat GPT so 911 2733 yeah this is very important because this is how you do crosschecking mhm can we do a diagram try out this question with the graph we're attempting to use craft again i'm asking it to check with me whether it understands the diagram before we proceed with actually answering the question particularly for this question because you didn't have it working we are reminding the AI to do that as well right so let's give it a go now we're making sure we understand that the connection is correct we actually have to do the work yeah right to read the graph myself okay so it's attempting to think that maybe we'll need to calculate the area under the graph so then the final answer would be a to b is 4.94 m but the answer key is saying that the distance over A to B is 8.0 m is there a reason why your answer is different so it explains why the previous answer was incorrect and then here's the final working so we did read a little bit off right yeah it also has challenged us on whether we read our own graph correctly yeah which we did not so it's on us okay as a student you do learn you're part of the process you're not you're not just relying on correct the AI chatbot all right let's move on to English same framework as the one we used for math no not really so instead I use trace it's a different framework why do we have to use trace for English and craft for math it's not that you'd have to use any of the frameworks specifically for a subject it's more of like understanding which framework would make sense for the subject traced it adds in that diversity and inclusion part the bias checking that we need you can't really be very biased in math right math is going to still give you an absolute answer at the end of the day if we're choosing something argumentative we have to actually start debating about certain points so we're trying to make sure that we don't have any biases by accident how would we engineer a prompt for an argumentative question social media does more harm than good right do we agree we have a task the next part would then be the request after that would be the constraints so from here we also need to give chutity some examples maybe your personal opinions do you or do you not agree can you explain a bit why I think this actually is work so you see right you actually are doing a bit of the work you are doing a bit of the thinking and of course checking if there are any gender cultural biases before I final output okay just reading it feels like it hit every point and I don't even have to get it to write the full essay i can just stop here and then write it based off the evidence ultimately the students need to be motivated to want to even use AI in this manner because at the end of the day the AI can only help the student as much as the student wants to help themselves yeah we can teach students how they can unlock AI's full potential to enhance their learning journey but we also need to steer them away from taking the easy way out previously Jonathan told me that AI has taken away the motivation for learning he's showing me how we can use AI to bring it back how do we make sure that instead of just copying and pasting and not learning anything from their work the students are actually using skills so that they do learn something from it one of the difficulties with learning is actually having that motivation if you really want to spark that genuine interest we need them to see the connections on things that they care about chat GPT and the you know the other AI tools you don't always have to use it as an answer generator it's a way for us to discover connections that you know previously we found it hard to discover i remember as a student right I don't understand the point of learning simultaneous equations one thing we can do is to say something like this in our prompts you know as as a student I don't see the point of learning simultaneous equations uh I love anime and I don't see how these two are remotely relevant show me why I should care and be interested and just like this you know the AI can actually help me discover connections that I may not have seen trying to make it more relatable more relatable yeah yeah one thing that I know many teachers are doing here in Singapore is uh to to get students excited by generating images make their words come alive for example the writing class we want the students to use rich descriptions to learn more more words we can do something like create an image about a cat a prompt like this isn't going to get us very far right so so we can encourage the students don't just say create image about a cat what is the cat doing what's happening in the background the fluffy ginger cat taking a stroll in the the streets of uh of Singapore okay oh hello so cute okay I can see why that is quite exciting yeah so so so that reaction that you have right students also will will have this and and it excites them to want to to write more add more to the scene ginger cat taking a stroll in the streets of Singapore looking for food and a home and a home a Okay all right and then It just okay not exactly what I had in mind but you this is good this is a a good learning opportunity okay notice how prom earlier there's ambiguity looking for food and a home really didn't understand the home thing right we didn't give our context clearly so what more can I say we get them to articulate in this steps right then then they become more reflective and intentional about what elements go into here and not not just leaving to random chance does it help them retain the information what they see what they write yes because then they're they're actually thinking about what goes into it and you know that that really enriches their communicative abilities their language abilities we don't have to restrict ourselves to only chat GPT there are other tools like uh Google notebook LM as an educator you can prepare resource materials that your students can upload okay so here's a sample organic chemistry create a new notebook upload sources based on the materials that you have you can make a study guide you can do an FAQ yes that's right see over here deep dive conversation oh yes yeah you can generate a podcast with two AI voices are talking to each other like an actual podcast yeah you can use a customized feature to tell the AI to focus on specific sections ready 35 minutes you send over that PDF unit of an introduction chemistry student version.pds right and our mission today basically is to pull out the really important stuff the interesting nuggets from this intro make it understandable maybe even uh exciting it sounds so real it's so conversational yes even down to the uh and the okay and the like chiming in together genius actually again we must always remember AI may not be accurate so one thing we can do to challenge the learners is don't just accept that this is 100% but question is there anything wrong with the answers compare the reading and this this gets them thinking it can even be an activity where we tell the students make songs about what we learned as summaries so not just podcast but music as well how about like something historical okay okay make yourself about three key takeaways about Singapore's history hip hop hip-hop and then recreate Lion City Chronicles here's the lyrics oh from the jungle to the hustle again you know wearing the teacher hat we can tell the students any issues with the lyrics how can we make this song more accurate more precise yet poetic you're right even as I was reading through the lyrics when they said Raffle saw the land and laid the design like how much was him and how much were you know other people if I were a student and I had these tools I would want to learn every day i think even if it's not during school time I would want to just play around with these tools and see what else I can come up with it's very exciting to me but the teacher is the one that that needs to drive it if the teacher is very passionate about using AI for learning that passion actually spreads and as they are learning the subject they're also learning new AI skills new AI competencies it's clear that AI is here to stay but instead of using AI to replace our brains we can turn it into a productive study buddy with the following steps one don't just blindly snap upload copy and paste you don't want to end up being fed falsehoods two give yourself space to think for yourself and evaluate the responses that AI generates most importantly make sure to check in with your teachers about how you should be using AI for each homework assignment that way you'll be growing with AI instead of being left behind by machines [Music]