MoWest professor and students give take on AI usage
Kyle Schmidt
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (News-Press NOW) — The ever-growing artificial intelligence industry has been gaining traction in schools.
According to Campus Technology, a study from Quizlet shows AI usage from high school and college students/teachers jumped from 66% in 2024 to 85% in 2025.
“We are kind of with AI where we were when we got the first computers… we’re teaching people how to adapt to the technology,” Professor of English Dr. Kaye Adkins said. “At some point, we are going to have a breakthrough that will be like the breakthrough with the screens and graphic interfaces we have now.”
University policy at MoWest allows professors to decide if they want to use AI or ban it in their class. All use of AI must follow the academic honesty policy.
Dr. Adkins said some professors said the college will not use it at all, but she is currently in her classes.
“I ask for transparency, I ask students if they use it to tell me what they’ve used, the tool, how they used it,” Dr. Adkins said. “I asked them to give me the prompts and some results and what they thought about it.”
She said the class is using AI during the revision stage.
Dr. Adkins set up a guidelines checklist for students to out into AI and check that they have met the requirements for the assignment.
Dr. Adkins found from a UC Davis study that writing teachers originally thought to use it for brainstorming and planning. The study, attributed to an ACS Publication, said one of the concerns for AI is that it will replace critical thinking.
“I kind of compare it to learning music, you have to know the basics in order to improvise,” Dr. Adkins said. “If you’re going to evaluate whether or not something is well-written, you have to know what good writing looks like and if students don’t have experience knowing what good writing looks like and don’t understand how to evaluate that, they can’t then evaluate the output from AI.”
Sophomore at MoWest, Ja’Marea Thompson stays away from AI.
“I feel like it could just track our phone usage,” Thompson said. “If you say something in front of TikTok, now all of a sudden it’s all over your for you page. I feel like that loops in with AI, it gives an invite, an open door to all your personal things.”
Senior Sebastian Gutierrez said he uses AI for fitness goals more than anything else.
“Workout plans, nutrition, what I should eat in a day,” Gutierrez said. “If I just input calories and stuff like that, I want to hear.”
Other notes Dr. Adkins made were that AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, are not good for research, and AI is generally not good at writing.
She said she has “a good ear” and can tell when AI wrote a prompt.
“My emphasis in teaching is teaching clear, accurate, readable prose,” She said. “That’s not what AI produces most of the time.”