Homework is facing an existential crisis. Has AI made it pointless?

Homework has long been a topic of debate, but in 2025 it is facing an existential crisis: Has artificial intelligence and its instant answers made it pointless or even counterproductive?

Research released this month suggests that AI has become fully embedded in how students respond to homework and other assignments.

The percentage of high school students who report using generative AI for schoolwork is growing, increasing from an already high 79% to 84% between January and May of this year, according to surveys conducted by College Board, the nonprofit that manages much of the nation’s standardized tests, including the SAT.

That means increasing numbers of students are assigning their own homework to AI — even if it puts learning at peril. AI can solve a math problem and also show the work step by step. It can summarize and analyze a reading passage. It can write an entire essay, in ways increasingly difficult to spot.

Inglewood high school English teacher Alyssa Bolden learned from one of her students that AI could customize an essay by incorporating the student’s notes from Bolden’s lectures as well as her unique evaluation rubric.

AI has given her an overpowering reason to consider homework pointless.

“They’re not doing it,” she said of students and homework. “They’re not doing it.”

Alyssa Bolden, an English teacher at City Honors International Preparatory High School in Inglewood, has students write essays in class by hand to limit their use of AI. She does not assign homework.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Other teachers, however, continue to assign homework, which introduces a new tension in the learning relationship, said 10th-grader Aaliyah Herron, 15, who is one of Bolden’s students at City Honors International Preparatory High School. In other classes, she finds herself having to prove her innocence given the quality of her work.

She avoids AI to eliminate any possibility that she could be accused of using it improperly: “My essays will get marked as AI for no reason — even though I haven’t used AI for any single paper in my life.”

Fundamentally, AI complicates a preexisting problem: Often, instructors have put too little thought into homework, said Mollie Galloway, associate professor at the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

“It’s always been important to think about how to create assignments that are meaningful and deepen learning, and the increasing use of AI makes this more true than ever,” Galloway said.

The old and new homework debate

Many educators remain resolutely old-school on homework, with views similar to those of Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the California-based Pacific Research Institute.

“Imagine receiving math instruction for just an hour a day,” Izumi said. “Can all math learning stick in a student’s brain in that hour? Without homework, many students will not develop the knowledge base necessary for academic success.”

In Izumi’s view, students aren’t getting enough homework. “Besides skills and knowledge, homework teaches students discipline, organization, time management, responsibility, and accountability.”

Students line up at La Tijera Academy of Excellence in Inglewood.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

There is research supporting this view. Multiple studies have found that students who did their homework were more likely to manage tasks and time well.

But Izumi also has raised the alarm that pervasive AI use could counteract the benefits of homework by enabling cut-and-paste laziness.

Aaliyah said such concerns are legitimate.

“A lot of my classmates, in math … they don’t really care about how they do it. They just want to get it done,” she said. “So then when they get tested on it” — without access to AI — “they won’t really know what to do.”

Emilio Torres, Aaliyah’s classmate, said such an experience “might wake them up for like one lesson, but they easily relapse on AI and do it again, and the cycle just repeats itself.”

He uses AI selectively. He will, for example, ask AI to create study questions for him to research.

“AI is definitely a handy tool to do certain things,” said Emilio, who is 15. “I discipline myself to not rely on it.”

Part of the pre-AI debate centered on the amount of homework — with many educators settling on 10 minutes a day multiplied by grade level. So, for example, a student in 12th grade could expect to receive 120 minutes per day of homework.

More is not necessarily better, according to Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

“Middle school students that regularly completed two hours of homework did not perform better in school than those that averaged only one hour,” it concluded in a 2020 review of research.

Although teacher opinions on homework are wide-ranging, many researchers thought they were beginning to reach some additional conclusions, including that homework appears to have no measurable academic benefit for elementary school students, some advantages for middle schoolers and more measurable effects in high school.

Students wait for a celebration of high test scores at La Tijera Academy of Excellence.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

How one teacher is revamping homework

Fourth-grade Sherman Oaks teacher Libby Rosenbaum tries to apply the research findings — and her students are, so far, too young to be greatly affected by AI.

“Homework should not affect a student’s academic content grade,” Rosenbaum said. “Grades should be based on mastery of standards. Homework isn’t a standard.

“Giving a class full of kids a 20-problem math assignment isn’t productive,” she said. “The kids who struggle with the concept likely won’t suddenly understand it at home, and it can unnecessarily put a strain on the relationship between parent and child. The kids who do understand it don’t need 20 problems.”

Instead, she sets out a weekly menu of mostly nonacademic choices, in 15-20 minute blocks: quality time with a loved one, time spent organizing something at home or teaching someone else a skill. The tasks are assigned on Monday and due Friday.

“This homework procedure provides the benefits of homework: time management, work ethic and responsibility, with the added benefit of boosting whole child well-roundedness and time off screens,” Rosenbaum said. “We work a rigorous day during the school day. They need sports, rest, social time, family time, and other life experiences outside of the school day.

“The only exceptions to this policy are when students choose to not work productively during the school day and need to take home work to finish,” she added, “or need additional review on their spelling words. Reading is always required, but it should be incorporated into a bedtime routine.”

Middle school history teacher Pilar Cuevas speaks to students in her class at La Tijera Academy of Excellence. Cuevas has her students handwrite notes and other assignments in a format that makes it more difficult for them to use AI on homework assignments.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Getting homework right

Aryn Kennedy, whose daughter attends Armstrong Middle School in the San Fernando Valley, recalls that “so many nights we spent an hour completing tedious, poorly designed math worksheets” on topics her daughter already understood.

But she also sees some positives.

“Doing math problems at home helps reinforce the lessons from school since they don’t have time to work through every iteration in class. Reading long texts at home is also beneficial to allow more class time for discussion.”

Middle school history teacher Pilar Cuevas, at Inglewood’s La Tijera Academy of Excellence, relies significantly on homework and blocks AI on school-issued computers. The homework questions and answers must be written by hand — making the use of AI harder. Her faculty colleagues rely on a similar system, which she credits in part for a recent rise in test scores.

Seventh-graders Rylee Tucker, 12, and Phelps Mauricio, 12, eat snow cones together during a celebration of high test scores at La Tijera Academy of Excellence.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Some experts have noted that homework has the negative potential to widen the gaps between students from different economic and family support backgrounds — and that’s why Inglewood instructor Bolden first moved away from homework.

Family resources and support, student attitudes and beliefs about their own academic abilities are “associated with homework completion,” wrote education professor Joyce L. Epstein, in an analysis of homework research.

Epstein, who is based at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, said in an email that the design of homework remains key.

In middle and high school, “some students stop doing homework that is not interesting to them, or too hard, too easy, etc.,” she said.

And that was before AI made homework avoidance easier.

Homework needs to be meaningful, given that it can increase student stress and can get in the way of positive interactions with family members and peers, valuable extracurricular activities and even sleep, experts said.

Epstein cited findings that about 80% of students, teachers and parents said that homework is important or very important for increasing learning and success in school. But the same survey reported that up to one-third of students, teachers and parents rated the quality of some homework assignments as fair, poor, uninteresting or just busy work.

“Increasingly, educators and researchers agree that students do not need more homework, but do need better homework,” Epstein said. “With more interesting, creative assignments, more students will complete their homework.”