2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While the discussion of generative AI in education has been centered on academic integrity and uses in learning contexts from a teacher and administrator perspective, there is less work understanding students’ adoption, use, and perspectives on this new technology.

This paper reports on a survey of 371 US college students taking computing courses. We first asked what services are being used, how much they are paying for them, what they are using them for, and how long they have been using AI. We dig further into their use of AI tools in their schoolwork by asking about what subjects they use AI for, what they use AI for, and what causes them to not use it. Turning to their computing courses, we determine their use of AI, how useful they find AI tools, how they ensure academic integrity, and how they characterize their computing courses’ framing of the use of AI tools.

We found that the majority of students pay for GenAI tools despite readily available free versions. Students use GenAI tools primarily to understand jargon such as understanding teacher-written programming assignment prompts and developer-written compiler messages as opposed to potentially problematic uses such generating code. In fact, students’ main motivation to not use GenAI tools on graded assignments was they like to do their own work. Notably, students who were taught how AI works had significantly different views on AI tools impact on academic integrity concerns.

Computing students’ use of generative AI is growing, and thoughts on academic integrity are far from decided – but there does seem to be an opportunity to teach students the variety of ways it can be used effectively for programming tasks.