{"id":333,"date":"2026-06-15T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/?p=333"},"modified":"2026-06-15T14:06:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T18:06:25","slug":"the-problem-with-ai-in-the-classroom-is-not-ai-but-when-its-used","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/15\/the-problem-with-ai-in-the-classroom-is-not-ai-but-when-its-used\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem With AI in the Classroom is Not AI But When It’s Used"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Florida State University’s Dr. Mark McNees offers this commentary on how the problem with AI in the classroom is not the AI itself but when it’s used. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam<\/a>, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The loudest argument about AI in higher education is whether students should be allowed to use it at all. That is the wrong fight. Having spent the last year teaching with these tools and building one myself, I have become convinced the real question is not whether AI belongs in the classroom, but when in the learning process we let it in. Get the timing wrong, and the critics are correct: AI makes education worse. Get it right, and it does something teaching has always struggled to do at scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me start by giving the skeptics their due, because they are not wrong about what they are seeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of what’s sold as AI in education is built to speed up grading. The pitch is that an instructor can run a stack of submissions through a model and get scores back in minutes instead of weeks. I understand the appeal. Faculty grading turnaround is genuinely a problem, and deans hear about it at every faculty meeting. But speeding up grading after the deadline solves the wrong problem. By the time a grade comes back, the student has already moved on. The feedback arrives too late to act on, which means it teaches nothing. We have just automated the production of comments no one reads.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse, an AI that scores student work without understanding the assignment, the course, or what the instructor actually values will get it wrong in ways that erode trust. I have watched this happen in my own classroom. When I compared the early feedback to my own grading, the tool was systematically harsher than I was. It asked students for things the assignment never required. It could not tell the difference between an assignment that asks for a plan and one that asks for results, so it flagged students for not having data they were not expected to have yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

A handful of my students told me, in so many words, that an AI cannot understand the work that goes into an assignment and has no business judging it. They were responding to exactly this failure mode. When the feedback is poorly aligned with the course, and the AI is positioned as the authority, the objection is not stubbornness. It is accurate.<\/span><\/p>\n

So when people say AI grading is bad for students, I do not argue. A lot of it is. But the conclusion to draw is not that AI has no place in teaching. It is that we have been pointing it at the wrong moment in the learning cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is the moment I think it belongs in: before the deadline, not after.<\/span><\/p>\n

The behavior I most want to change in my students has nothing to do with AI. It is the deadline rush. Most students finish an assignment the day it is due and submit it without ever revising. There is no iteration, no second look, just getting it done. Academic procrastination is not a character flaw in a few students. It is the norm across most of higher education. And it is fatal to learning, because the research on feedback is unambiguous: feedback only works when the student can still act on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the gap I built my tool to close. Students submit a draft and get feedback in my voice, aligned to the same rubric I will use to grade, while there is still time to address it. The AI does not write anything for them, and it does not hand them answers. It points to where their reasoning is thin and asks them what is missing. Then they revise and try again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two design choices turned out to matter more than anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first is the two-attempt limit. Students get exactly two shots at feedback before the real submission, and not one more. This is deliberate. Unlimited tries turn the tool into a slot machine, where students keep pulling the lever and tweaking until the score ticks up, learning nothing. A hard limit forces them to treat the first attempt seriously and to make real revisions rather than cosmetic ones. One student told me the cap was the only reason he waited until he had a solid draft before submitting, because he knew he could not afford to waste a try. That is the behavior I was after.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second is voice. The feedback is configured around my own teaching, my rubrics, and the way I actually talk to students, so it reads like me rather than like a generic chatbot. This matters more than I expected. Students repeatedly described the feedback as sounding like sitting in class listening to me critique a presentation. When feedback sounds like it came from the person who will grade you, students take it seriously. When it sounds like it came from nowhere, they discount it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The early data from this semester are preliminary, and the numbers will shift as more students and faculty use the tool. But the pattern so far is clear, and it is the part I find most encouraging. Students who used the tool started their drafts earlier and revised more deliberately. They reported slowing down, going back through their work, and treating the feedback as a checklist rather than reading their assignment once and submitting it. The groups that revised tended to perform meaningfully better than those that did not. None of that is the AI doing the work. It is the AI creating a reason to do the work sooner, when there is still time for it to count.<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to be careful not to oversell this. The tool is in active beta, the calibration still needs work, and AI is not going to replace the part of teaching where an instructor sits with a student and helps them understand what the feedback means. If anything, my experience has made me more certain that faculty engagement is not optional. The AI is a structured first pass. The teaching still has to happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

But that is exactly the point. Used as a replacement for the instructor, AI in education deserves the skepticism it gets. Used as a way to give students feedback while they can still use it, it supports the kind of teaching we already know works and have never been able to deliver fast enough. The technology is not the question. The timing is. We should stop asking AI to grade faster after the deadline and start asking it to help students learn before it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Florida State University’s Dr. Mark McNees offers this commentary on how the problem with AI in the classroom is not the AI itself but when it’s used. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI. The loudest argument about AI in higher education is whether students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1447,"featured_media":334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[32,33,34],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Problem With AI in the Classroom Is Not AI but When it's Used<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"FSU's Dr. Mark McNees offers this commentary on how the problem with AI in the classroom is not the AI itself but when it's used.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/edtech\/2026\/06\/15\/the-problem-with-ai-in-the-classroom-is-not-ai-but-when-its-used\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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