In academia today, many professors and teachers face the gargantuan question of how to deal with AI in the classroom. Many students use it, often unethically, to replace their own efforts. However, instead of replacing hard work, it can serve as an effective tutor—one that helps clarify complex ideas, break down dense topics, and refine study techniques.
Use AI to Review Your Work and Explain Mistakes
Often, you might take a quiz or exam, get a grade, and have little to no explanation as to why something is wrong. Similarly, you might have a high-stakes homework assignment that you performed to the best of your ability and need a second opinion—depending on your school’s policy toward AI usage on homework.
In either of these cases, AI can check your completed work and diagnose where you’re right and how you might’ve made mistakes where knowing your grade alone may not help much. In the case of paper-based assignments, ChatGPT can generally parse and understand photos fairly well. Regardless of how you upload the problem to check, your prompt should provide some context.
For example, below I took a photo of a math problem and used the prompt:
I am taking a course on managerial accounting. I selected B for the attached question. Could you explain why my answer is wrong and D is correct?
ChatGPT is surprisingly capable of solving math problems, as well as more qualitative issues. While its solutions occasionally make mistakes, it generally provides more than adequate insight to check work, especially if you already know what the correct answer should be.
Provide Tailored Explanations for Concepts
In addition to checking your work for correctness, you can ask for heavily customized explanations of complicated concepts. Prompts such as below can provide context for your level of understanding of a topic and the type of explanation that would be most helpful:
Act as if you are an understanding university professor simply explaining [concept] to a student who struggles to understand it. Be detailed.
Additionally, you can provide reference materials for the AI, such as copy-pasting an article or uploading a PDF. Here are more example prompts:
- “Explain [concept] as if I were 5. Use the text below as an additional reference.”
- “Act as if you are a peer mentor to a university student and explain [concept]. Use the attached document as reference.”
- “If I want to learn [concept] as quickly as possible, what study plan would you recommend?”
AI tools like ChatGPT are already useful for parsing research and notes, but their tutoring potential cannot be understated.
Review Your Writing
While tools like Grammarly provide real-time feedback, they often require an additional subscription. ChatGPT, on the other hand, allows for post-writing revisions without any extra cost. For example, you can use a prompt like below to review your writing to the extent ChatGPT can.
Act as if you are an English Writing PhD and provide constructive criticism on the writing below, with clear explanations.
You can tailor the prompt further to provide feedback based on different roles. Instead of an English Writing PhD, you might want a professional content writer or a lab report specialist’s help. You can even explore how perspectives differ by asking, “How would a content writer’s criticism differ from an English PhD’s for this writing?” I’ll use the first draft of this article as an example—I actually ended up implementing a few suggestions, but I won’t tell you where!
This can be an iterative process, getting feedback from multiple perspectives on multiple drafts. You might also prefer tools like Google’s NotebookLM for research-heavy writing. However, the goal should ultimately be to improve your own writing skills, as it’s important to be able to critically evaluate what AI suggests.
AI Isn’t Perfect
In all of these areas, AI remains imperfect and mistake-prone. With math problems, depending on complexity, it still frequently makes mistakes. Regarding writing, I consider ChatGPT’s writing to be highly generic, and its suggestions may neutralize your unique voice. In my testing with math problems, it came up with the wrong answer for multiple choice problems around 5-10% of the time. A human tutor remains useful still, too. Furthermore, using these tools to assist in studying can tempt you to fully replace your own effort.
In academics, your own learning and growth are paramount. AI can help you study and clarify confusion, but your own effort is a much better indicator of success than your AI usage! The key to using AI to enhance learning is to use it for the purpose of learning: ask for explanations, and learn from its suggestions for your mistakes.
