Opening their laptops, any Lakesider will recognize the familiar chart pinned to the syllabus of every Canvas course: the class AI policy, typed out in red, green, and yellow letters. With the rise of AI over the past five years, about “two-thirds of high school teachers and college instructors [have been] rethinking their assignments in response to concerns that students will cheat using ChatGPT,” according to an EducationWeek study. Institutions have adapted quickly; now, beneath every assignment, teachers must type in those colored labels to signal the amount of AI customary for homework or a unit project. And, in some Lakeside classes, they’ve elected the safest option possible to ward off potential use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude: assigning homework on pencil and paper.
By passing out paper homework, some hope to reduce the risk of students copying and pasting answers into an AI’s input box. Lakeside students across the school may have noticed that science essays must now be handwritten, quick-writes in Humanities classes have been replaced by pencilled paragraphs in a notebook or a worksheet, and American Studies, Divided Self, English 9, Physics, Geometry and Programming, and World History courses have all visibly switched to paper versus online material over the past year.
The Math and English departments are arguably the most affected by students using AI to cheat on questions — a Pew Research Center poll found that 35-40% of students across the United States often use chatbots to either solve mathematics problems or review their writing. “Students would ask me lots of questions pre-AI, and post-AI, they’d ask their AI math questions,” explains Libby Zorn, a Geometry and Programming II teacher who must balance assigning students homework both online and on paper. “It’s been a kind of fun problem as a teacher to think about [ … ] In a computer science class, it used to be easy to just assign a coding activity that would cover all the learning objectives, but now I’m looking for ways for students to demonstrate those concepts without having to code.” Ms. Zorn assigns paper homework even for programming, which examines her students’ ability to solve conceptual problems without relying on tools like AI. “AI is really good at instantly producing the result, [but] even if it does a good job of explaining its ‘thinking’, the learning process requires coming up with all of the steps along the way yourself,” she adds.
To prevent students from using AI, English teachers have adopted a department-wide pencil-and-paper shift; although there is no official policy in place, Abby Cacho, English department head, notes that she has seen and encouraged these shifts throughout English courses. “My intentional return to paper as a teacher is grounded in my hopes of ensuring students have necessary skills such as note-taking and process writing coupled with the hope that technology is an asset, not the default,” she explains. The English department has been easing a switch into in-hand materials since the start of the 2025-2026 school year, when a physical-text policy was implemented. Now, Abby states that “While there is no English department policy requiring teachers to use paper, there has been greater interest across English classes in creating moments when students are not dependent on their laptops to participate in classroom activities.”
Lakesider students have mixed opinions on this. “I feel like there are pros and cons to doing stuff on paper,” says Keira G. ‘30. “The pros are that my teacher can see my work and I don’t [necessarily] have to have the perfect answer to move on. But the cons are that I don’t know what the right answer might be until class.” Some take a definitive stance — one respondent in the Tatler poll stated, “I think Lakeside should teach students how to use AI properly instead of trying to stop [all] use of it.” Of 66 pollers in the Tatler Poll, only seventeen said that they used AI often (placing themselves above a 3 on a 1-5 scale).
Studies by institutions from Scientific American to the National Library of Health show that taking notes in pencil-and-paper helps develop a better memory that comes in hand when taking tests. Still, many students still find that studying with Quizlet or typing notes in a Google Doc can be easier and neater. Tools like these can also be used for generating flashcards, writing practice questions, and explaining concepts, becoming an inextricable part of the learning process. As Ms. Zorn says, “I don’t want to wholesale reject the idea of using [AI] for schoolwork, but [it] can too easily replace all the necessary steps our brains need to do in order to learn something. [ … ] I would say: when using it for learning, proceed with caution.”