It started with flashcards. My digital native, tech savvy son, who is doing GCSEs this year, worked out a few months ago that ChatGPT could create flashcards for him. Using content input by him, rather than retrieved – or hallucinated – AI can create flash cards in a fraction of the time it would take him to write them out.
When I helpfully pointed out that the writing is an important part of the process, he told me that not only will AI create the flashcards, it will create a revision plan, then use the cards to test him. It will then identify the areas he needs to focus on and consolidate that information for him to revise. In other words, revision has seriously moved on since I was doing my GCSEs.
Still, I had doubts. What if AI was feeding him wrong information? But – to be honest – I was mostly just grateful that he was engaging with the revision process at all. He is not a natural exam lover, and until very recently, showed very little interest in exam prep.
So over the weeks leading up to his mocks, I bit my tongue when I had the urge to offer my more analogue advice on revising and decided to just wait and see how things panned out. They were only mocks after all, so there’d be plenty of time to return to the olden days of flash cards.
But there was no need. He did way better in that set of exams than the last. In fact, he went up several grades in several subjects.
And it is not just flash cards. The other day, I came home to him setting up a video call. I assumed he was getting ready to play online with friends, but it turned out to be a half hour revision session with ChatGPT, which was quizzing him orally in detail on the Weimar republic. I listened as he answered questions being fired at him, then conversed about the answers. He’s also started using it to make podcasts about the Cold War, and some more niche aspects of the changing economic world.
To be clear: this new engagement with revision is a giant plot twist in our experience of exam prep thus far. And it is largely down to my son’s interest and engagement with technology. He has found his own way to harness that, to help him to complete the gargantuan task of learning multiple facts in nine different GCSE subjects well enough to sit exams in all of them. And in that process, he’s gone from reluctant to genuinely willing – enthusiastic, even.
I am sure that other parents will share my doubts. But perhaps we all need to be more open-minded.
Darren Coxon is a former head teacher and co-founder of Kompass Education, which helps schools and edtech companies to navigate the responsible and effective adoption of Artificial Intelligence. He is also a father of three children aged 18, nine, and six, and he views the use of AI to aid revision – for those kids who engage with it – as a positive development.
“As a teacher, the only thing I was interested in was how to nurture some sort of intrinsic motivation,” says Coxon. “If you can tap into that in a student and make them really want to do something it makes all the difference. What your son has done is work it out for himself. He found a tool that worked for him, and as a result he will feel a sense of ownership because he has found his way of doing things. The fact that he wants to revise like this is an amazing thing; something to be embraced and celebrated.”
His advice to sceptical parents is to step away from the fact that it is AI. “It’s easy to get too fixated on all the horror stories about people who overly rely on AI, and yes, of course there are genuine concerns to be mindful of – but if we think all AI is evil and ChatGPt is terrible, we will potentially alienate our kids, who will use them anyway. Our role as parents and educators is to support them and to accept that there might be other ways of doing things.”
Coxon, who has worked in education for 27 years, makes the point that the education system as a whole is dealing with a very different type of young person to a couple of decades ago. He attributes that partly to the advent of YouTube, which offered a new way for us to learn things without necessarily needing a teacher.
“Over the past 20 years or so, our kids have changed in what they expect and need,” he says. “My nine-year-old son loves gaming, is fascinated by Minecraft, and has an app to build games. When he gets stuck, he looks at YouTube because I can’t help and nor can his teachers. I’m sure that when he does GCSEs he’ll be revising using AI, having worked out the best way for him to learn.”
However Coxon acknowledges that AI might not appeal to everyone as a revision tool. “I showed my 18-year-old daughter, who was never that techy or interested in gaming, how to use it. She quite liked it but her response generally to AI is, ‘There is not really any room in my life for AI; I’ve got my books and teachers and I love studying with pen and paper.’
“But for those kids who are interested, if we enable them to use these tools I think we will see some remarkable things happening,” he says. “This is something that could be transformative.”
As GCSE households all over the land are locking in with a deep sigh to revision season, perhaps those kids who are not using AI to revise should seriously consider starting.
Five golden rules for AI revision from Darren Coxon
Do not use it to replace your thinking: Using it to make a timetable and to be a revising buddy by asking questions, creating flashcards, summarising information, and taking difficult concepts and making them easier to understand, is great. The danger comes around the coursework elements: if you use AI to write your essays for you, you can’t do that in an exam.It’s all about context: If you feed the right context into the AI at the beginning of the chat; for example a bunch of exam papers with mark schemes, your course notes, or a revision guide from the school, then you have shown the parameters to the AI, which pulls only from that context, which improves the output.Treat it as a diagnostic tool: students can complete an exam paper, then feed that into AI – you can scan with your phone and it can read handwriting. If you also feed in the mark scheme then AI will mark it for you and offer feedback; acting as a diagnostic tool to provide you with a whole new set of revision.Choose carefully: I have no affiliation with any platform, but whereas ChatGPT will pull from its training data, Google notebook language model only pulls from the information you upload to it and won’t stray outside. It also has an interactive podcast feature so you can have a conversation with AI voices using your notes. I think it is the best revision tool available. For help with writing, I use Claude, which is an incredible writer – much better than ChatGPT.Remember, you do still have to prepare for exams: An exam is not just testing your recall, it is looking at your understanding of how to structure and answer something correctly to get maximum marks. You have to play the game and understand the rules of the game, which means understanding how to articulate a question clearly. As well as revising online, practice by answering old exam questions using a paper and pen.
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