Researchers detect “cognitive surrender” in answering math word problems, with many students seemingly completing assignments faster while learning less from them, according to an article in The Hechinger Report.
This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.
To isolate AI’s effects, the researchers compared two kinds of math problems that differ in how easily students can outsource them to AI: word problems and graphing problems.
Word problems can be copied and pasted directly into AI chatbots for instant answers. Graphing problems are far more cumbersome. A student would need to upload a screenshot and still recreate the graph inside ALEKS using its tools.
After ChatGPT’s launch, student behavior and performance on the two types of problems began to diverge.
Beginning in early 2023, students started spending less time on word problems while continuing to spend about the same amount of time on graphing problems. The gap widened every quarter. By the end of the study period, near the end of 2025, average time spent on word problems had fallen 31 percent among high school students and 27 percent among college students — from about four minutes per word problem to less than three. Middle school students showed only a modest decline of 9 percent, and fifth graders showed essentially none.
Researchers believe those averages are pulled downward by some students who spend only seconds on word problems because they’re using AI to answer them.
But the more troubling finding is what happened to learning.
Many colleges allow incoming students to retake placement tests after practicing more math in ALEKS, giving them a chance to qualify for a higher-level course. Before ChatGPT, that practice generally paid off. After ChatGPT, students answered more word problems correctly during unsupervised practice sessions but performed substantially worse on those same kinds of problems when they later took a proctored placement test.
Historically, students answered about 80 percent of these word problems correctly on supervised placement tests. After ChatGPT’s introduction, that fell to about 60 percent — a roughly 25 percent reduction in the odds of answering a word problem correctly.
Performance on graphing problems, by contrast, did not decline.
Bottom of Form
The study cannot definitively prove that students were using AI. The researchers couldn’t see what else was happening on students’ screens outside of ALEKS. But the changes appeared only in problems that are easy to outsource to AI; disappeared under supervision; and grew steadily over nearly three years.
“What makes me nervous is that it’s not only about the word problems,” Rismanchian says. “This cognitive surrender might be going on in writing, science, everything.”
The paper, “Faster Completion, Less Learning,” was released in June 2026 and has not yet been peer reviewed. It doesn’t settle questions of how much students are using AI in their schoolwork, whether it’s harming learning and by how much. But it joins growing evidence that generative AI is causing students to skip the brain work that leads to learning, and that this “cognitive surrender” is becoming commonplace.
This doesn’t mean AI always undermines learning. Carefully designed AI tutors have improved student achievement in controlled experiments by asking questions, personalizing instruction and withholding answers until students reason their way through a problem. But using AI this way should increase the time students spend on a problem, Rismanchian says. The ALEKS data show the opposite.
Simply banning AI is not the answer, Rismanchian believes. He argues students need to value learning enough to resist the temptation to outsource it.
A recent RAND survey suggests many already recognize the threat to their brains. Students report worrying that AI is weakening their critical-thinking skills while more of them admit using it for schoolwork.
Students are not entirely to blame. Even as many professors have warned students not to use AI to complete classwork, universities themselves have embraced the technology, often giving students free access to premium chatbots.
“I think we need to communicate to students that you should value your learning,” Rismanchian says. “If ChatGPT does it for you, then you haven’t learned it.”
An international student, Rismanchian began using ChatGPT to help polish the English in his papers. The ideas were his own. But after several months, he noticed something unsettling.
“I realized that I cannot write anymore,” he says. “I was losing my writing abilities.”
So, he stopped using AI to write.
He still uses it to code.
The Hechinger Report
