More A's, More Fails: What AI Is Really Doing to Student Performance

About this episode

What happens when AI helps students earn more A grades, and also contributes to more failures when it's taken away?

In this episode, Ray and Dan explore new research on AI's impact on student performance, assessment integrity, and learning. They discuss studies linking AI to rising grades, the risks of over-reliance on AI, and growing evidence that AI tutors may support learning better than general-purpose chatbots.

The conversation also covers AI detectors, AI humanisers, teacher workload, Microsoft's latest Copilot updates, and a new tool for measuring the environmental footprint of AI use.

AI in Education Research Papers

• Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80x8d3qd ps WSJ wrote an article on this https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/a-grades-are-suddenly-everywhere-since-the-arrival-of-chatgpt-845baae7
• Failing grades soar as professors see greater AI usage, dwindling math skills in UC Berkeley computer science classes https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-usage-dwindling-math-skills-in-uc-berkeley/article_16fad0bf-02cb-4b8c-8d88-888ffd9f8608.html
• Building AI Companions that Prioritise Learning over Performance https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04816
• Effective Personalized AI Tutors via LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6423358
• Law Professors prefer AI over peer answers https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/salinas_et_al.pdf
• Fixing teachers' problems? exploring teachers' repair and maintenance work around generative AI technologies https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01596306.2026.2657793\
• Dramaturgies of Deception: AI Humanizers and the Performance of Legitimacy in Higher Education Assessment https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02649
• Homogenizing effect of large language models (LLMs) on creative diversity: An empirical comparison of human and ChatGPT writing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294988212500091X
• AI Detectors Fail Diverse Student Populations: A Mathematical Framing of Structural Detection Limits <a href= "https://arxiv.org/abs/