At the beginning of this school year, school authorities and administrators decided to ban a widely used tool for students: Grammarly. The AI features of this app do more than just correct grammatical errors; they can also draft responses to questions and help rewrite passages. The ban upset many people, but others believe that it would be good for students.
Grammarly was a widely used writing tool that many students relied on to catch grammatical errors. However, some will argue that this was making students reliant on an app and unable to write independently. Several students who have used Grammarly in the past also have differing opinions about the prohibition of the app.
A fellow student, who used Grammarly last year, provided their opinion on how the school administration responded to knowledge of the app’s AI features. They said, “I think they [the school] took away a really important tool. I think, instead of taking away a problem and finding a solution, they just took it away because it’s AI. I think of it as the same as a calculator: It’s a tool to learn, and taking it away holds students back. Sometimes, when you’re typing, you don’t catch errors, but Grammarly does, and it saved a lot of people’s grades from little mistakes that could have easily been prevented. I think that, instead of teaching kids how to properly use it, they just took it away.”
This is definitely an interesting perspective. While many argue against the use of AI in schools entirely, some believe that being taught how to use it responsibly and ethically is better than banning it outright and forcing students to learn what it is and its potential dangers on their own.
However, even some students who used to use Grammarly when it was available think that they are better off without it. One 8th grader, Yegammai M, thinks that, while her writing has been affected by the lack of Grammarly, she prefers not having it over having it instantly correct her work.
She commented, “I tend to miss adding commas, and there are some spelling mistakes, but I know whatever I do wrong, I can fix it later. Well, my writing is still good quality, and it actually takes less time, because Grammarly flags every error, and it takes time to go back and fix. I still have to correct my own mistakes, but I think that it’s better because my writing is actually mine.” Yegammai also mentioned that when she was writing, Grammarly would sometimes change phrases of her writing to make it sound ‘better’, but this made the writing less individual.
Another perspective to consider is that of teachers. When asked if she had noticed any tangible difference in students’ writing since Grammarly was taken away, she replied, “Even when students did have access to Grammarly, I regularly encountered spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. As the Journalism teacher, I always dedicated extra effort to editing students’ articles. Since we’ve banned the use of Grammarly earlier this school year, I honestly have not noticed a significant difference in the number or type of errors. I am still spending the same amount of time editing as I did prior to losing Grammarly, so I’m not convinced that it has made much of a difference.”
This insight may point to the fact that not all students used Grammarly in the work they did. However, even those who did had mixed feelings about the app since its prohibition. Overall, the tool was certainly useful, but using it did impact students’ ability to work independently and correct their own mistakes.
