This article is one of the winning submissions from the New York Post Scholars Contest, presented by Command Education.
It’s 3:30 p.m., and a high school student sits at his desk, staring down the rubric for an essay due tomorrow that he hasn’t started. He contemplates staying up all night to research, outline, write and edit the essay, risking a mediocre grade because he was in a rush. It occurs to him that, with ChatGPT, he could be done (or well on his way) in an hour. In 2025, students at Hunter College High School (HCHS), like high schools all over the country, confront this temptation every day. Just a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable for a high school student to use a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to complete their homework. But with the advent of large-language models like ChatGPT in 2022, AI tools have become commonplace at HCHS.
As of January 2025, 26% of US high school students use ChatGPT for their schoolwork, up 100% since December 2023, according to Pew Research. According to a survey of 47 middle and high schoolers, conducted by What’s What, the student newspaper, more than double the national average—or 72.3% of survey respondents—say they had used ChatGPT at least once in the past month, with 36.1% having used it at least three times. The average HCHS student used AI approximately four times per month.
HCHS is an academically rigorous school in New York City with a high standard for assignments. Students often feel extreme pressures to succeed: in addition to a gruelling course load, many passionately pursue extracurriculars and internships. Using AI is appealing to students because it saves them time and energy. Many students are willing to risk the chance of getting caught under the school’s zero-tolerance cheating policies if it means they can sleep more or spend more time on another assignment.
Since its 2022 release, HCHS students have found myriad ways to use ChatGPT—both those allowed and those not—to make their lives easier. Some of the most common, permitted uses include finding primary sources, summarizing long documents, checking work, and asking AI to quiz them before tests. “I think that’s what it’s good for, really, doing the little things that take unreasonably long so you can get on with your life,” says sophomore Madelyn. But, “the tricky part is knowing when to stop.” The most common use for ChatGPT is generating ideas that the students then narrow down or flesh out.
Use of ChatGPT skyrocketed in 2024, in proportion to its increasing usefulness over the course of the year. OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, allowed the chatbot to access past chats, and web searches, so that the AI was not limited to its training data, but could also access information on the internet in real time. As a result, more students have found ways to use ChatGPT productively.
“People have figured out how to use ChatGPT better,” explains Madelyn. “There are still people who think they’re gonna get away with turning in heavily AI-written papers, but a lot of people have found how to use it as a tool to cut down homework time or for a jumping off point.” She estimates approximately 70% of her friends use it regularly.
Some students see ChatGPT usage as a bridge to building key skills. One HCHS junior comments that “ChatGPT is not going away anytime soon, so we might as well learn how to use it to augment our learning, rather than detract from it.” As more professionals use AI for everything from writing emails to writing code, becoming familiar with the tools in high school is increasingly important.
In addition to ChatGPT, students also use other AI tools, like QuillBot, Perplexity, and Mathaway to proofread essays or help with homework. One junior explains that they had a hard time using traditional tools, like JSTOR, or EBSCOHost, to find sources for their term paper due to its niche topic, so AI provides them with “a great jumping off point to find primary and secondary sources that I think make [AI] a really useful social studies source.”
Madelyn describes the way students discuss AI as a kind of ubiquitous vice in pursuit of higher grades, almost like not sleeping enough. “You pull up to school like ‘yeah, I got three hours of sleep last night I can’t even’ and it’s kinda normal. We all know it’s not great but we laugh it off, and there’s a bit of camaraderie, because the other person has probably had those days, too.” In the same way, other students seem to understand and relate to their peers who admit to using AI for assignments.
Teachers and administrators have engineered their AI-related messaging to discourage usage in all cases: The HCHS student handbook now reads, “Students [will] not use AI-generated content in any way on assignments or examinations, as detailed above, unless an instructor for a given course specifically authorizes their use.” And the punishments are severe, ranging from failing the assignment to expulsion. The English Department Academic Integrity Policy does not authorize “any use of AI for the work of our classes.” Teacher Kimberly Airoldi explains that in English classes, automating any part of the process with AI was explicitly counter to her department’s goals of teaching writing skills.
Many students who use ChatGPT to generate content that they pass off as their own, in violation of the student handbook, believe that they usually get away with it. Although most major assignments are checked through Turnitin, a commonly used plagiarism and AI-detection tool, minor assignments are rarely checked. Even Turnitin admits they can’t detect 100% of AI use, and tools like HIX Bypass exist to get around Turnitin. False positives, Airoldi explains, are common when using an AI detector, which is why teachers need to manually check each flagged essay.
But teachers know a lot more about AI use than students think. Eighth grader Dalia observes that nearly all of her class knew which students were using AI. “Our teachers aren’t stupid,” Dalia says. “If every single person in our class knows people are using AI, then I’m sure the teacher does, too.”
When asked how likely they were, on a scale of one to five, to use ChatGPT/AI in completing their assignments, 37% of HCHS students rated themselves as a three or above, with 45.7% of students considered themselves to be at a one. Among students who did not use ChatGPT, the most common reasons were unreliability and fear of being caught. “I’ve never used it because I’m too scared,” says one senior.
Students are “surrounded” by adults using AI, says Airoldi. But, she explains, the distinction is that students are still learning and building skills, and “if you use AI, you don’t get that part. You get a paper, yeah, but you don’t get the learning part.” Additionally, students are “surrounded by this messaging that AI can make your writing better,” a fundamental misconception pushed by tech companies, says Airoldi. On the contrary, AI writing lacks the nuance and subtext she aims to teach.
The emphasis on the supposed value of AI has not only changed the work that Airoldi’s students use AI for, it has also changed the way they write themselves. Even when they are not using AI to generate ideas or write text for them, students are also “replicating the language and the approach of AI” in their work. This has led to more robotic essays that sound like they are AI-generated, even when they are not.
Sophomore Penelope warns against idealizing the power of AI. “I don’t think it can do a better job than me if I put just a little bit of effort in,” she explains, and in implementing her ideas, “I don’t think it would go in the right direction.” Though some treat AI tools as the equivalent of a peer or collaborator, Penelope doesn’t think ChatGPT is “who I would collaborate with.”
Even though the rules seem clear, it’s hard to tell when ethical usage veers into plagiarism or cheating. For instance, one might use an AI tool to understand what is happening in their English class, only to reference those same ideas to write an essay that is not entirely their own. Sophomore Tal thinks the best option may just be not to trust AI at all: “I’d rather just struggle through the work and figure it out myself.”
A 10th-grader at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, Schonfeld dreams of being a foreign correspondent one day.