The devices are winning. Grades are covering for it.
Three-quarters of high school students say they misuse technology during class every day. A quarter say they’ve used AI to help them during a quiz or a test, an activity that’s supposed to measure what a student actually knows.
Those numbers come from a new Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey of just over 2,000 current and recent high schoolers.
The report is worth more than passing attention because the findings aren’t coming from watchdog researchers or worried parents. They’re coming from students, describing their own classrooms.
The picture the survey builds isn’t really about phones, or even about AI on its own. It’s about how those two things interact with school-issued devices and with grading policy to erase whatever used to keep them in check.
Two-thirds of students say YouTube is freely accessible on their school laptop. Nearly half say they’ve used AI to solve math problems outright, more than a third to summarize a book so they don’t have to read it, and a quarter to help during an exam.
Sixty-two percent of students spend the majority of their class time on a school-issued device. The more time students spend on those devices, the more likely they are to believe missing class won’t hurt their grade.
Meanwhile, the guardrails that might offset all of this are thin. Twenty-nine percent of students say they get partial credit for assignments they never turned in. Most say they can retake a test at least once if they don’t like their score.
All this taken together makes this more than just another AI story. It becomes a story about trust in the K-12 public education system.
