Picture a Year 9 geography teacher marking homework on a Sunday evening. Every answer is complete, every diagram is labelled, and most of it arrived within an hour of being set. On Monday she runs a five-question recall quiz on the same topic, and half the answers come back blank. The likely culprit is artificial intelligence (AI). If that feels familiar, the newest research on AI and homework suggests you are not imagining it.
In short: two substantial studies now point the same way. When pupils use AI to produce their homework, the homework gets better while the learning underneath it gets worse. In a study of almost 27,000 secondary pupils in China, homework scores rose by 18 per cent after pupils started using AI, while their closed-book exam scores fell by 20 per cent within six months. England’s chief exams regulator made the same argument to school leaders on 16 October. A ban will not fix this, because nobody can police a kitchen table. Homework designed so the thinking cannot be skipped might.
Why AI and homework is suddenly urgent
On 8 October the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published its Bitesize Teen Summit survey. Survation asked more than 2,000 teenagers aged 13 to 18 about their lives, and for the first time a majority, 51 per cent, said they use AI specifically for homework or coursework. In 2023 the figure was 29 per cent. Among the teenagers who do not use generative AI, the main reason given was worry about accuracy and trust.
Eight days later Sir Ian Bauckham, chief regulator at Ofqual, gave a speech to the Confederation of School Trusts annual conference in Birmingham. He warned against “undiscriminating use of AI” and compared it with the way young people were given unrestricted access to smartphones. Outsourcing student thinking to AI, he said, “does not develop the human mind”. Tes covered the speech the same day.
“Where students use AI to shortcut learning, they achieve less well than those who go through the effortful process of thinking and learning for themselves.” Sir Ian Bauckham, Ofqual
Strong words. Is there evidence behind them? There is.
What the research shows
A homework boost and an exam penalty
The biggest new study is a discussion paper from the Centre for Economic Policy Research, published in June by Strömberg, Lei and Wu. They followed 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7 to 12 for 30 months, across nine subjects. The data combined monthly closed-book exams, entrance exams, homework scores and homework time.
After pupils adopted AI, their homework scores went up by 18 per cent and the time they spent on homework fell by 30 per cent. Their monthly exam scores dropped by 20 per cent within six months. Scores in the high-stakes entrance exams fell by 18 and 24 per cent, and the full penalty took about two years to appear. Losses were largest in social science subjects and especially large for younger students, high achievers and boys.
The detail I find most useful is about behaviour. The losses were concentrated among roughly 80 per cent of AI users whose pattern looked like outsourcing: homework finished exceptionally quickly with exceptionally high scores. Pupils who used AI but still spent about as long on homework as non-users saw only small losses. So the tool was not the problem. Skipping the effort was. One caution: this is a discussion paper and I have only been able to read the abstract, so treat the exact figures as provisional.
The crutch effect in a controlled trial
The Chinese data fits neatly with a randomised controlled trial published in 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bastani and colleagues worked with a high school in Turkey, where nearly 1,000 maths students took part in four 90-minute sessions. Some practised with a standard ChatGPT-style assistant. Others used a tutor version that teachers had loaded with hints and common mistakes, and which was told not to give answers. A control group had no AI.
During practice, grades rose by 48 per cent with the standard assistant and 127 per cent with the tutor. Then the AI was taken away for the exam. Students who had used the standard assistant scored 17 per cent lower than students who never had access, while the tutor group did about as well as the control group. Most students with the standard assistant simply asked it for the answer, even though it gave a correct answer only 51 per cent of the time. Worse, they did not think they had learned less, so pupils will not spot this for themselves.
What this means for setting homework
None of this means homework is broken. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) toolkit still rates homework as moderate impact for very low cost, worth around five additional months of progress in secondary schools, although it describes the evidence as very limited. Its advice has not changed: the quality of the task matters more than the quantity, homework linked to classwork works better, feedback raises the impact and pupils should know what the homework is for.
What has changed is that the finished product no longer proves the process happened. A polished paragraph used to suggest a pupil had wrestled with the ideas. Now it might only show they found the copy button.
The World Assessment Council’s AI in Learning Report 2026, published on 12 October, sums up the pattern as AI improving the work students hand in faster than what they learn. Its advice to teachers is to design tasks in which AI explains rather than produces. It is a review rather than new research, and it notes that only 20 of more than 800 school-age AI studies offered strong causal evidence. Still, its conclusion matches both studies above.
Five changes you could make this half term
- Make the next lesson the checkpoint. Open with a short closed-book question on the homework content, so homework becomes preparation and the real test happens in the room. Our piece on AI retrieval practice has ideas for quick low-stakes quizzes.
- Ask for thinking rather than a finished artefact: a plan, an annotated worked example showing where the pupil got stuck, or two questions they still have.
- If AI is allowed, say exactly how. Asking a chatbot to explain a step or quiz you is fine. Asking it to write the answer is not.
- Watch the time pattern. In the Chinese study, very fast completion with very high scores was the signal of outsourcing.
- Give feedback on homework in class, out loud, where pupils have to explain their own work.
Suppose a Year 10 science teacher usually sets “Write 300 words explaining how vaccines work.” A chatbot can produce that in seconds. Instead she sets: “Write two sentences in your own words on how vaccines work, and one question you still have. We will use them in Tuesday’s starter.” A pupil can still ask AI for an explanation at home. They just cannot avoid bringing their own understanding into the room.
What I would avoid
The tempting response is to fight harder with detection software and stern letters home. I would be careful. As we argued in AI cheating in schools, suspicion damages relationships and detectors are unreliable. A blanket ban at home is unenforceable, and it penalises the pupils who were using AI sensibly to get explanations. The Education Endowment Foundation also warns against using homework as a punishment, and it points out that homework clubs help pupils without a quiet place to work at home.
The deeper issue is one we covered in cognitive offloading and AI. Handing work to a tool is sometimes sensible. Handing over the very thinking the homework was meant to build is not.
My take
I do not think the answer is to stop setting homework, or to pretend AI is not on every pupil’s phone. The research suggests something more hopeful. Pupils who kept putting in the time did fine, and in the Turkish trial a tutor that refused to hand over answers removed most of the harm. That puts the design of the task back in teachers’ hands, which is where it belongs. If a piece of homework can be completed perfectly without any learning, it was probably a weak task before chatbots arrived. AI has just made that impossible to ignore.
Does using artificial intelligence for homework harm learning?
It depends on how pupils use it. In a study of 26,811 secondary pupils in China, using artificial intelligence (AI) raised homework scores by 18 per cent but cut closed-book exam scores by 20 per cent within six months. The losses were concentrated among pupils who finished homework very quickly with very high scores. Those who kept spending a similar amount of time on homework saw only small losses.
Should schools ban AI for homework?
A ban is hard to enforce at home and penalises pupils who use AI sensibly to get explanations. A better approach is to design homework so the thinking cannot be skipped, for example by checking understanding with a short closed-book question in the next lesson and telling pupils exactly how AI may be used.
How can teachers set homework that AI cannot simply complete?
Ask for thinking rather than a finished product: a plan, an annotated worked example or questions the pupil still has. Link the task to the next lesson, give feedback in class, and allow AI only to explain or quiz rather than to write answers. A maths trial in Turkey found that a tutor which gave hints instead of answers removed most of the harm.
How many pupils use AI for homework?
A survey by Survation for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Bitesize, published in October 2026, found that 51 per cent of more than 2,000 teenagers aged 13 to 18 use AI specifically for homework or coursework, up from 29 per cent in 2023.
Have you changed the way you set homework since pupils started using AI? I would love to know what has worked in your classroom, and what has backfired, so please tell me in the comments.
