When Professors Use AI: Navigating Pitfalls and Empowering Students

This story is from the 2026 March print edition of The Bark.

Student Studying while listening to music. Photo by. Macie Groth

With the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence(AI) over the past few years, it isn’t surprising that it has quickly found its way into an academic setting. Students have been using AI to study, provide solutions to problems,  write papers, and much more. This leads to the question of professors using AI — specifically, professors here at UMD.

After talking with several students and professors here at UMD, there is a very mixed opinion on how to use AI in the classroom, or even use it at all. Some students had never encountered AI in any of their courses, which matched with certain professors who are completely against any use of AI. Other students noted a small presence of AI, but nothing that was overtaking the course, which seemed to be a consensus among most professors as well. 

One way professors at UMD are using AI in their courses is by instructing students to ask generative AI programs to provide feedback on assignments or exams. The process is simple: put the questions you got wrong into ChatGPT or Google Gemini, and it will explain the correct answers. LSBE students specifically reported feeling hesitant at first, but found that it provided a quick way to get an explanation of concepts that they didn’t understand.

Along with assignments and exams, one professor noted using AI to provide feedback on essays as well. To do this, students put either their whole essay or a specific paragraph into an AI program and give it specific prompts to provide feedback. These prompts can vary based on the context of the essay, but usually fall between the lines of “how can I make the thesis stronger?” “Does this paragraph provide enough context on the topic?”, etc. AI, in this instance, sort of acts as a peer reviewer for the student.

AI is slowly creeping its way into the classroom through the use of professors. This poses the question: what are the setbacks of AI use in the classroom, and at what point does it become unethical or detrimental to learning? This question is still in the process of being answered, with new AI advancements happening every day and professors changing their use of AI just as quickly.

One area of concern comes from the use of AI in writing classes. When students are allowed to use AI in their brainstorming process or any part of the writing process, they tend to use AI as a crutch and struggle without it. This can be attributed to the fact that when AI is used, the concept for writing is already pre-built, rather than a student actively engaging in deep, effortful thinking to build the concept. This leads to a lesser understanding of the topic. 

An additional concern of AI use within courses is the lack of student-professor relationships. This can happen when students are encouraged to go to AI for explanation or feedback rather than the professor of the course. This can make student-professor interaction less, therefore weakening the relationship between the professor and their students, as the student feels they are not able or do not need to go to the professor for help like this.

Talking to students, however, this does not seem to be a concern at the moment. Students who had their professors instruct them to use AI for help and feedback feel more comfortable and prepared to talk to the professor due to an increased level of context on the topic. 

It is clear that there are both pros and cons of professors using AI within the classroom. AI can be a very beneficial tool for learning, but when abused can cause issues. The issue now is professors safely introducing AI tools and guidelines to students without them being abused. 

Every year, the University of Minnesota sends out a presentation to all of the professors across all campuses explaining new AI advancements and how they can be integrated into classrooms if professors choose to do so. This is a good start, so professors can reliably learn about their choices when considering AI use within their courses — the issue is translating this over to students. Students expressed concern about the fact that these presentations do not include any student input.

A couple of students suggested having an AI introduction course to teach students the basics of using AI to their advantage in an academic setting. MIS 3235, also known as Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence in Business, is just that. The only problem is that this course is reserved for LSBE majors or MIS minors only, leaving everyone else out of the loop. Creating a more general AI Fundamentals in Academics class would be able to cater to more students here at UMD. 

It is, for now, up to the university and professors to decide how to implement AI into courses. AI is just starting to creep its way into the classroom setting, and it is safe to say that it will become more prevalent each year. Only time will tell if and how this increase will be beneficial or not.