Artificial intelligence is making it increasingly difficult for teachers to know what their students have actually learned.
Google Docs and Gemini, together with Microsoft Word and Copilot, are transforming the way millions of American students complete homework and school assignments. In the process, they are undermining the ability of teachers to determine what their students have actually learned.
For more than a century, homework and examinations have answered the question, “What has this student learned?” Artificial intelligence is making that question impossible to answer.
Millions of students now do their homework in Google Docs. As soon as they begin writing, Gemini offers to help. Microsoft is moving in the same direction with Copilot in Word. The blank sheet of paper that once challenged students to think for themselves is rapidly becoming a page to print the work of an artificial intelligence system.
Teachers no longer know whose work they are grading. A paper written with the assistance of artificial intelligence tells the teacher almost nothing about the knowledge or ability of the student. A polished essay no longer demonstrates writing skill. A research paper no longer proves that the student conducted meaningful research. Homework may simply measure a student’s ability to use artificial intelligence rather than the student’s understanding of the subject.
Homework has been valuable because learning requires practice. Students learn by struggling with difficult problems, making mistakes, correcting those mistakes, and trying again. Artificial intelligence short-circuits that entire process. The student receives the answer without doing the intellectual work that produces genuine understanding. The teacher receives a completed assignment that bears little relationship to what the student actually knows.
Everyone loses. Public education loses its most important measuring stick.
This problem reaches far beyond homework.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the first teacher many students consult. Instead of opening a textbook, looking for original sources, or asking a parent or teacher for help, students increasingly ask artificial intelligence.
That creates a new danger. Students assume that an answer delivered instantly and confidently must be correct. Yet artificial intelligence can provide incomplete, inaccurate, or simply wrong answers and information. Independent thinking is being replaced by the habit of accepting whatever appears on the screen.
That may be the greatest educational loss of all.
If teachers can no longer determine what students have actually learned, grades lose their meaning. Academic transcripts become increasingly unreliable as measures of achievement. Colleges can no longer rely upon high school transcripts. Employers can no longer assume that academic achievement reflects real ability. The entire educational system depends upon the honest measurement of learning. Artificial intelligence is rapidly undermining that foundation.
The answer is not to wage an endless battle against ever more sophisticated methods of technological cheating.
The real lesson is to recognize that homework and traditional examinations were designed for an educational system in which every student was expected to produce his or her own work. That world is disappearing. As artificial intelligence becomes an ordinary part of everyday life, public education will have to abandon many of its traditional methods of measuring learning and replace them with something better.
But first, we must confront an even more fundamental question.
What happens when artificial intelligence no longer merely helps students complete their assignments, but becomes the teacher from whom they learn?
AI Is Undermining Public Education
June 25, 2026 | Schools
Artificial intelligence is making it increasingly difficult for teachers to know what their students have actually learned.
Google Docs and Gemini, together with Microsoft Word and Copilot, are transforming the way millions of American students complete homework and school assignments. In the process, they are undermining the ability of teachers to determine what their students have actually learned.
For more than a century, homework and examinations have answered the question, “What has this student learned?” Artificial intelligence is making that question impossible to answer.
Millions of students now do their homework in Google Docs. As soon as they begin writing, Gemini offers to help. Microsoft is moving in the same direction with Copilot in Word. The blank sheet of paper that once challenged students to think for themselves is rapidly becoming a page to print the work of an artificial intelligence system.
Teachers no longer know whose work they are grading. A paper written with the assistance of artificial intelligence tells the teacher almost nothing about the knowledge or ability of the student. A polished essay no longer demonstrates writing skill. A research paper no longer proves that the student conducted meaningful research. Homework may simply measure a student’s ability to use artificial intelligence rather than the student’s understanding of the subject.
Homework has been valuable because learning requires practice. Students learn by struggling with difficult problems, making mistakes, correcting those mistakes, and trying again. Artificial intelligence short-circuits that entire process. The student receives the answer without doing the intellectual work that produces genuine understanding. The teacher receives a completed assignment that bears little relationship to what the student actually knows.
Everyone loses. Public education loses its most important measuring stick.
This problem reaches far beyond homework.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the first teacher many students consult. Instead of opening a textbook, looking for original sources, or asking a parent or teacher for help, students increasingly ask artificial intelligence.
That creates a new danger. Students assume that an answer delivered instantly and confidently must be correct. Yet artificial intelligence can provide incomplete, inaccurate, or simply wrong answers and information. Independent thinking is being replaced by the habit of accepting whatever appears on the screen.
That may be the greatest educational loss of all.
If teachers can no longer determine what students have actually learned, grades lose their meaning. Academic transcripts become increasingly unreliable as measures of achievement. Colleges can no longer rely upon high school transcripts. Employers can no longer assume that academic achievement reflects real ability. The entire educational system depends upon the honest measurement of learning. Artificial intelligence is rapidly undermining that foundation.
The answer is not to wage an endless battle against ever more sophisticated methods of technological cheating.
The real lesson is to recognize that homework and traditional examinations were designed for an educational system in which every student was expected to produce his or her own work. That world is disappearing. As artificial intelligence becomes an ordinary part of everyday life, public education will have to abandon many of its traditional methods of measuring learning and replace them with something better.
But first, we must confront an even more fundamental question.
What happens when artificial intelligence no longer merely helps students complete their assignments, but becomes the teacher from whom they learn?