// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Students who use AI generally score worse at school
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But AI use combined with training to assess its results can give test scores a boost.
But AI use combined with training to assess its results can give test scores a boost.
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Students who use AI to help them study tend to perform worse at school than those who don’t, according to data from a global OECD educational report. The situation is more complex than it sounds though, with certain types of AI use giving learners a slight boost, especially among students taught to critically assess how well the AI tools perform.
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) takes data from countries around the world every few years. This year’s study, based on data collected in 2025, is the first to be carried out since AI use went truly mainstream. It tests 15-year-old students in science, math, and reading, and draws from over 760,000 students in 91 countries.
After adjusting for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed those who do in science. How stark the difference is varies though: Students who used AI for specific tasks like summarizing texts they were meant to read, or drafting writing assignments, performed relatively worse, while those who used it for preliminary research or more broadly to “help me learn” saw less of a performance drop.
Frequency of use has an impact too: Those who only used AI once or twice a year and those who used it daily tended to perform the worst, with better results for monthly or weekly AI users.