You probably use AI. For your 10:10 a.m. seminar with the strict AI policy, you might think it’s OK. You might even get away with it. Maybe you completed those Canvas modules on academic integrity after submitting one too many em dashes, but nothing is stopping you. You are just like everyone else— AI use has become routine, but most people still don’t utilize it to its full potential.
To their detriment, many students still use AI as an academic crutch. I interviewed Professor Delchamps from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department on this matter. When it comes to using AI, he is a firm believer that “you can study however you want.” His AI-use policy is lenient, because “once it comes to an exam setting, if you can do it, you did it.” Professor Delchamps’ philosophy should be far more popular. Students should be able to use AI to make themselves more capable for exams and upgrade their education. Hundreds, if not thousands, of AI products are readily available: some free, some paid and some absolute bull. AI has the potential to refine the work of any person in any study. I want to tell you how you can use it to make yourself, not just the grammar on your discussion post, better.
First, pick one or two AI tools. Choose from any of the big three: ChatGPT, Claude (my
personal choice), or Copilot. These are all you need, because any third tool you use probably has the same functionality. Free models are more than sufficient for any schoolwork.
Level one of using AI well is prompt engineering. If you say “Solve,” “Write,” or upload a
screenshot, congrats, you’re using AI! Unfortunately, it takes more than that to pass exams or get your Ivy league degree. Prompts should be detailed: guide your AI and tell it what you need, whether it’s a subject expert, a writing workshop on your outline, a debate partner or an Organic Chemistry Tutor style walkthrough.
Level two uses context. I prefer Claude for most of my AI help, because I can set up projects and then outline what I need any chat to do: get PDF files of lecture slides, chapters of my textbook, past problem sets with solutions, citation guides or anything else that might be relevant. Make sure that you can highlight the text from the PDF — if it is flattened, the AI won’t do the work to extract the text on most large files. Now when you do work for a class, you can open a new chat in the project. Your response will be in the format you want, reference the right information and explain concepts in your professor’s words.
Level three is a bit more niche: Model Context Protocol, a standard developed over the last year by Anthropic, the company who designed Claude. In the least technical terms, it connects the rest of your life to your AI desktop app. You can link your profiles for LinkedIn, Instagram, Canvas, G-Suite, Robinhood and countless other services. Your prompts can now include scheduling cold emails to recruiters, reorganizing your document folders or prioritizing the stack of procrastinated assignments based on the late policies from your syllabi. If you are a CS major or tech-savvy enough, you can set this manually. But if you choose peace, then there is a wonderful thing called YouTube, where there is a sleuth of new videos on any of the topics I mentioned.
You might already do all of this — in which case, thank you for reading this far. You may have gone to a high school where you didn’t really need AI to help with your schoolwork, and I hope that I have given you some tips to get you through your next hell week. There are some very important honorable mentions: Prompting ChatGPT for grammar help on a cold email or a hyperspecific Google search, while antithetical to all of my writing up to this point, is extremely convenient. Play a game of Episode with ChatGPT when you get bored in the library. If that feels intangible, tell it the entire falling out story of your freshman year friend group. Confirm whether you were in the right. You probably aren’t, but you can prompt Chat to only validate your side if you aren’t ready to hear that. We use AI for so much productivity; we forget how good of a distraction it can be.
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Zak Kheder '26 is an Opinion Columnist studying Electrical & Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering. RenAIssance Man explores questions of intellectualism and what it means to be a student in the age of information and technology. He can be reached at zkheder@cornellsun.com.
