“Should parents and teachers be afraid of the use of AI in the classroom, or should it be used as a tool for improved learning,” asks political columnist and former high school teacher MICHAEL MOORE.

There are two sides to the artificial intelligence (AI) debate in education as there are in the community. 

However, the debate is intensified with school students as they will be the ones living with AI throughout their lives.

Should parents and teachers be afraid of the use of AI in the classroom, or should it be used as a tool for improved learning? More importantly, can it be used effectively to enhance education?

A report in the Sydney Morning Herald by Christopher Harris pointed out that in 2025 evidence indicated “the use of AI driving a sustained and elevated rate of misconduct in year 12 assessments”. 

In that year more than 1000 cases of cheating in HSC school-based tasks were recorded. It is a worrying statistic.

As a response, NSW Education Minister Prue Car has written to her state Education Standards Authority (NESA) to ask for a “moratorium” on take-home assessment tasks. She considers this “an interim measure as part of a broader review on the impact of AI on learning”.

The ACT Education Directorate has indicated that it is holding a watching brief on NSW.

Vilde Bjørgo is a one-time Rotary Exchange Student, who studied at Burgmann Anglican School in Gungahlin and is now a teacher in her home country of Norway. She completed a masters’ degree with her dissertation focused specifically on this topic. Her insights provide a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities provided by AI in the classroom.

Her fundamental point is “using AI as a tool for learning is not necessarily the same thing as using AI when learning is being assessed”.

She argues that “AI has become such a significant part of society that it needs to be integrated into education as well. After all, one of the purposes of education is to prepare students to participate in society and working life, where AI will increasingly be part of everyday life”.

Ms Bjørgo goes on to argue in the Norwegian case that “AI cannot be used effectively to support learning without a certain level of prior knowledge. If students lack the knowledge needed to critically evaluate what AI produces, it is very easy to trust it blindly and simply copy its answers”. This applies equally in Australia.

Her major concern is that if students “don’t really engage with the material themselves, they are likely to learn very little”. This is the very anathema of the education that we would like to see for our children who ought to be challenged to think, to explore and to understand.

“However, when AI is used more as a sparring partner”, she argues “and the student has enough knowledge to recognise mistakes or delusions” they will be in a position to “question what it produces”. She adds “research suggests that it can have a positive impact on learning. The challenge is that, at the moment, this kind of use tends to be much easier for stronger students”.

A teacher’s responsibility goes well beyond the stronger students, and this is where there are significant challenges for teachers.

In response to Minister Car, Ms Bjørgo explains that she can understand why the minister wants to move away from take-home assessments. After all, the purpose is to ensure that students actually develop the knowledge and skills they will need later. This is even more important “when the work is being used to assess their competence and award grades”.

Of course, it is not so simple. The flipside is, as she explains, if reducing take-home assessments also means reducing students’ opportunities to learn how to use AI, schools will need to compensate by explicitly teaching students how to use AI effectively and critically.

Drawing a comparison with Norway, “practices vary considerably between counties and schools”. At her own school, they have embarked on “teaching students how to use AI and actively encourage its use in certain learning situations”. 

There is a caveat, “when we need to assess a student’s actual competence, we generally don’t allow them to use it”. And emphasised the difference between using AI as a tool for learning in contrast to using AI when learning is being assessed.

We can extrapolate from other places, rather than just copying what they do. Considering her experience with the education system in the ACT and in Norway, there may be some learnings for educators in Canberra.

Michael Moore is a former member of the ACT Legislative Assembly and an independent minister for health. He was a high school teacher from 1972 until 1989.

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