Should Kids Use ChatGPT for Homework?

There is a line, and it is worth drawing it explicitly with your child rather than leaving them to guess, because the guessing is where the trouble comes from.

The principle

Homework exists to make a child practise something. Anything that increases the practice is fine. Anything that removes it defeats the purpose, however good the finished work looks.

Notice this has nothing to do with whether it counts as cheating. A child can stay within every school rule and still have skipped the thing the exercise was for.

Fine

• Explaining a concept they did not follow in class, in a different way
• Testing them on material they have revised
• Checking a finished answer, after they have produced it
• Explaining why their own working is wrong, once they have shown it
• Giving them prompts to react to when they cannot start
• Defining words in a text they are reading

Not fine

• Writing any part of what is submitted
• Producing the answer to the set question
• Summarising a text they were meant to read
• Doing the arithmetic they are learning to do
• Translating a passage they were meant to translate
• Generating ideas that are then handed in as their own thinking

The grey area, honestly

Structuring an essay. Improving sentences they wrote. Fixing their code after they have tried. These genuinely sit in between, and the answer depends on what is being assessed.

If the exercise is about structure, then getting structure from a machine skips it. If the exercise is about the history and the structure is incidental, it is closer to using a spellchecker.

Worth deciding case by case, out loud, with the child. The deciding is itself the useful part.

The one check that works

Explain it to me without the screen.

Make it routine rather than suspicious, and it does two jobs at once. It reveals whether the understanding is there, and it forces retrieval, which is one of the better-established ways of making something stick. A child who knows this happens tends to use the tool differently in the first place.

What to say to a child who is already doing it

Not an accusation. The more effective conversation is about the trade: you can hand in better work this term and know less at the end of it, and the bill arrives in an exam hall or the first time somebody asks you to do it unaided.

Most children find that argument reasonable, partly because it treats them as capable of weighing something rather than as caught.

And the part parents avoid

If homework is so dull, so long or so far beyond them that the only sane response is to shortcut it, that is worth knowing and worth raising with the school. Sometimes the tool is not the problem; it is the thing revealing one.