I am a straight-A graduate student with mixed feelings on AI tools. Many people use AI to replace their own efforts in an academic setting. But you can use AI to assist your learning, add efficiency to research, and improve your studies.
Most of these tips are more for learning content than for help with homework. Thankfully, you can find many AI tools for homework help as well.
Many library search tools, likely included in your university's tuition, are powerful. But you need to approach them on their terms, using filters and carefully crafting search terms. Using ChatGPT, you can search using more natural language to find the same articles. Then, after you’ve found a few key articles, you can go back to your university’s search method, find the articles, and have a better basis for further research.
Whether you use ChatGPT via Copilot on Windows, Bing, the app, or the web, it does a surprisingly good job at finding relevant research. For example, I'll ask GPT4o to provide scholarly articles or market research on a topic, such as the café industry in the United States.
As well as finding sources—which you can see with source links on web or quote symbols on the text on the desktop app—ChatGPT also summarizes the key points of these sources and provides some foundation for further research.
You can customize your ChatGPT prompt for similar research while receiving different kinds of results. Using the same example, you can narrow down the results to articles that discuss café attendance by generation and have ChatGPT summarize each article before synthesizing the information:
This prompt ended up lacking links, but you can find the original articles using their article titles. Regardless, ChatGPT’s recent improved integration with search engines makes it incredibly useful for more in-depth research. Be careful with any facts ChatGPT provides, as this is one of many AI pitfalls for students who overly rely on it.
OpenAI has widened access to GPT4o, and the free tier now lets you upload documents to ChatGPT. Similarly, Google’s Gemini-powered AI study tool, NotebookLM, is completely free and lets you upload up to 50 source files. Regardless of uploads, you still have the option to copy and paste text from a document or website into either tool.
Whichever tool you use, AI is incredibly powerful at summarizing text. Many academic programs require a ton of reading and, while I still highly recommend doing the actual reading, AI tools can provide helpful summaries for reference.
My process for tackling lengthy assigned reading is usually as follows:
In this way, you’re still reading, processing, and understanding the material. However, by preparing yourself with the key points using an AI summary, you’re primed to notice them when reading the article in its full context.
I use NotebookLM on almost every research project that requires sifting through multiple sources, synthesizing information, and attributing sources. Among the many useful tools NotebookLM provides, its standout research feature is its excellent source annotations.
This is particularly useful if you’re writing a research paper with many sources, whether they’re documents you upload or URLs you provide. Ask a question on that topic, and NotebookLM will provide an answer that synthesizes the original sources, with citations to exact quotes in each source for each piece of information.
When a research paper uses many sources, it can be difficult to keep track of what information comes from which source. Using NotebookLM, I can ask a question, find the source of that information, then quote the actual source.
The same goes for reviewing notes for a class. Using NotebookLM, I often upload a haphazard collection of notes, provide a prompt (e.g. “Summarize chapters 1 through 5, emphasizing key points for study”), and then let NotebookLM handle the synthesis of it all. Doing this yourself will generally improve your memory of the materials, but the NotebookLM approach is much faster.
AI is great at enhancing your research and note-taking, but it can also help you to study for exams. Whether you’re using NotebookLM or ChatGPT, if you can upload notes, your class’s lecture slides, or even passages from your textbook as a source of information, you can use these as a basis for study materials.
For example, when studying for a finance exam last semester, I uploaded all of my notes in one document to ChatGPT and then prompted it to create study questions. I knew the exam would have multiple-choice, true-false, fill-in-the-blank, and free-response questions, so for each chapter of content the exam covered, I asked for study questions. Here's an example of a practice quiz in NotebookLM:
I ended up leading a group study session, going over around 100 questions generated by AI, and making a set of questions for each chapter of content. Some of the answers it listed were dubious, but part of the value of this study format is seeing if you understand your class materials well enough to scrutinize ChatGPT or NotebookLM's output, too.
By testing myself with AI tools and reviewing my notes, I earned one of the highest grades in the class on that final exam. AI didn’t help me while I was taking the test, but it certainly helped me prepare.
This is just one of many ways you can use AI to help you, as many AI apps can help you study your class materials and manage your student schedule.
Notice that no recommendation I’ve given involves replacing your own original thoughts and submissions with AI tools. If you’re paying for an education, you are cheating yourself out of it if you use AI to do everything for you—long-term learning often correlates with the effort you put in to learn!
That said, AI can help you find direction in your research, speed up reading, synthesize information, and create study resources so that your learning effort can become more efficient.
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