Homework is synonymous with high school, but students’ views on it are generally unfavorable; yet, it is usually considered an essential aspect of learning. However, as cheating becomes easier and harder to detect, many educators may reconsider the role homework has in the education system.
West Ranch Senior Elijah Kopp explained the homework he gets for his classes: “In math, we get math worksheets and textbook problems, and same for science. For English, I get essays, readings, notes, and sometimes worksheets, same for history.” The primary reason homework is assigned is to help students learn the subject more effectively through repetition and independent study. Freshman Kirsten Chloe Concepcion attests to this claim, “As much as people hate homework, I feel like it does help people learn because repetitive actions make you remember better.” Repetition is the traditional and primary manner in which most individuals learn new subjects, allowing their minds to use the skills learnt during class.
Homework, as Junior Aahan Gurav puts it, “kind of tests your thinking and how much you know the subject. In a lot of my classes, homework is worth a lot of points.” Homework thus serves a dual purpose: one to help students learn, and two, to evaluate their understanding by grading them. This is understandable, as most educators need ways to assess the students’ knowledge of the material taught in class and to ensure students do not forget. Homework as a regular assessment may also deter students from being idle till the day of the test, and instead encourage active learning.
However, the role of homework in education is being challenged due to the expansion of digital tools. The first sign that homework was growing obsolete was with the rise of the internet. Worksheets, for instance, rely on students to solve problems honestly using the resources provided to them. With the internet, students can generally find the answers to said questions with relative ease.
But what may cause the end of assignments done at home is the rise of artificial intelligence. AP U.S. History and Modern Civilization Teacher, Ms. Barr, comments that when she was in high school, “It was never an option to just find your answers online and use that to do the homework in place of the person doing it. If we use the internet, it was like, okay, we had some research to do, and it was guided, so it was a helpful tool, but it wasn’t done as a replacement for the thinking.” Now that students have access to artificial intelligence, cheating on homework has become far easier. With AI, homework changes from a test of understanding to a test of how fast one can copy and paste the answers.
Many teachers have thus resorted to changing the homework’s role in the classroom. Some may make homework ungraded or even cut homework out completely. “Assigned homework is not a necessary part of my AP government class” AP Government Teacher Mr. Von Busch explained. “The expectation is that the things we talk about in class are usually just a starting point. And then students are expected to research things on their own time.” This approach allows students greater flexibility and to “focus more on learning content versus worrying about how many points are going into the grade book.”
Other teachers take a similar approach, with grades taking a backseat, but homework still being used as a source of learning. Ms. Barr, for example, tells us she assumes that students are going to use AI to complete homework, and thus is very selective about the homework she assigns to bar students from using AI. For instance, she explains that homework in her class often takes the form of “a study guide to prepare them for a test,” or “notes on a required section of the reading so you have kind of first background knowledge of it and now we’re going to do like a second learning of the material in class.” This solution motivates students to learn rather than cheat as, without grades or points on the line and assignments graded for completion rather than accuracy, it is much more rewarding to get preparation for a test than five points on the homework section of the gradebook.
Similarly, AP Computer Science Principles Teacher and Baseball Coach Burrill takes a different approach, blending homework and classwork instead. He describes his structure by saying that students “take the notes, and you do some of the initial learning outside of class, and then you have more practice time in class.” Within the classroom, notes from a textbook are the bulk of the learning, and in-class discussions or assignments take students more in-depth into the curriculum. This learning method allows for the background knowledge taken from notes at home to be built upon and strengthened during class, instead of quickly learning everything during class and being expected to apply it to assignments outside of class.
Other teachers have a blended approach, preferring to give students class time to complete homework, effectively making it classwork. Mr. Stanich, who offers regular class time to complete assignments, informs us that practicing at home, in class or in both environments must happen. As he puts it, doing the work during class makes it “easier to monitor the conditions under which students are working. It’s easier to prevent AI and cheating. And they have a resource, like myself or their peers, that they can get help quickly.” This solution is also effective in countering the causes that are pushing homework to become outdated. In addition to maintaining the benefits of homework, this approach can give students more freedom outside the classroom to allocate their time as necessary.
Homework, while once having an unchanging role in the classroom, has had a changing role, from being a cornerstone of learning to other roles. Whether artificial intelligence largely eliminates homework in the long run is still to be seen. Currently, in West Ranch, homework has taken a back seat overall but is here to stay.
