HEPI, a UK higher ed thinktank, released the results from their 2025 survey of AI use by students. There’s a lot in the report, so here’s a few quick highlights.
The big headline is that basically all students are using genAI:
In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. The main uses of GenAI are explaining concepts, summarising articles and suggesting research ideas, but a significant number of students – 18% – have included AI-generated text directly in their work.
Students are noticing more hallucinations, which to me indicates that literacy around AI and its strengths/weakness has improved:
The other take away is that institutions are behind the curve. Students want their Universities to provide services for them, and they are generally not getting it:
As a Google Workplace site, Google are of course helping us with this. Or not! They’ve got an offer that gives their AI bundle for free to all UK students but it is only applicable to personal accounts not Workplace ones.
So all our students can get cutting edge AI, but not in any way that we have visibility over.
The combined impact of this on education is massive, and there’s a strong negative aspect as well. LLMs can be an excellent tool to learn but they are an even better tool to avoid learning. The Teachers Are Not Ok in 404 Media has extensive quotes from both school and university staff. Here’s one from HE:
I think generative AI is incredibly destructive to our teaching of university students. We ask them to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas. That’s all in service of our goal to help train them to be critical citizens. GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you
Even as someone who thinks genAI is massively useful, I’m concerned that we haven’t started to reckon with its impact on education.