GenAI & Classroom Dynamics: Mythbusters
Gen AI Killjoy sticker, designed by Hiba Abdallah, 2025
Myth: Using GenAI “just” for summarizing, brainstorming, outlining, and polishing does not interfere with the learning process
When students use GenAI to do these apparently basic tasks, they circumvent the learning process, alienating themselves from the world of ideas, and making it more difficult for themselves to build cognitive skills. When students rely on GenAI to do this work, they are stealing from themselves: the practice of figuring out what are the most important ideas of a piece of research (summarizing), which then makes it difficult to come up with their own ideas (brainstorming), organize those ideas in a way that will make sense to others (outlining), and edit/polish our own work in subsequent drafts so that it makes more sense to others and more effectively reflects our ideas. When we outsource this work to GenAI, we take away our own experiences of learning, of developing and reshaping our ideas, and we lose the chance to laugh at ourselves and learn from our mistakes.
Myth: Using GenAI reduces students’ anxiety
The opposite is true! When students use GenAI to generate summaries of readings, to brainstorm ideas, to develop their assignments, to “polish” their writing, and/or to automatically translate course materials or assignments, they create more anxiety for themselves because they are not able to back-up their work with their own knowledges. This creates a culture of reduced confidence and increased insecurity and panic because students are continuously handing in work that they don’t understand! Stressful!
Additionally, the existence of easy answers through GenAI creates a culture of anxiety in which students believe that they should always have the right answer, that there is only one right answer to any question, and that writing is easy, fast, and comes out polished the first time around.
What we know is that the only way to reduce student anxiety is to increase participation, hands-on learning, process-based learning, and a culture in which students show their work through multiple drafts, research annotations, and accountable collaboration and peer review. Educational confidence and security comes through working through our insecurities and coming to understand things that we did not previously know!
Myth: Using GenAI “just” for translating makes learning more efficient and means that students are still generating their own ideas and writing “in their own words”
When students use automated translation tools to do full text translations of course materials (ie: research articles, books and book chapters, and so on), they lose the opportunity to learn how the authors’ word choice, syntax, sentence and paragraph structure are central to the construction of their ideas. This practice also means that students will not be able to respond to questions or to engage meaningfully in in-class discussion because they will never have encountered these ideas in English. This also tends to mean that, throughout their degrees students will need to constantly be translating what their instructors are saying, even when instructors are giving important instructions, which leads to very inefficient in-class experiences because students are forced to translate back-and-forth, which makes engaged discussion in the language of instruction (English) impossible!
When students use GenAI to translate their entire assignment and submit a translated copy of their own ideas, it means that the instructor or TA is reading words that the student doesn’t understand, or is not able to use in conversation; when instructors ask students about their ideas, and students are not able to respond using the words that they used in their submitted assignments, this creates an academic integrity problem for both faculty and students. While these tools may quickly generate translations so that students can take courses in a language that they are learning, it just as quickly can generate academic integrity problems that can slow down or end a student’s university experience altogether.
All undergraduate students, whether they grew up speaking English or not, are in the process of learning new words, full vocabulary sets and syntax, and new ways of using language in written and oral forms! This is an essential part of the undergraduate learning experience; to miss out on learning a new language for new ideas is to miss out on actually experiencing your own education. Rather than using automated translation tools, we encourage students to try translating words and phrases individually using a dictionary and/or a thesaurus, and developing collective vocabulary lists with your classmates so that you can collaboratively practice how to use the new language that is required for each course, and cumulatively for the academic discipline(s) that you are entering over the course of your degree.
Further Reading…