On Monday 26th February, I was kindly invited to speak on a panel at the UCAS Teachers and Advisers conference about AI. The audience was staff who work with young people looking to enter higher education. We talked about HEPI’s recent report on students’ use of AI, and what it means for school-age pupils – about which plenty has already been written on the HEPI website.
We were given the opportunity to ask the audience about their attitudes to AI and, on the principle of never turning down a good research opportunity, I took up the offer. Using live polling technology Slido, we asked five questions relating to AI use.
This blog discusses the results. Participants were given around 20-30 seconds to answer and each question received about 200 responses. The polling does not meet the rigorous standards of typical HEPI research – respondents might give a different answer in a busy conference hall than they might in private, for example. But the results are a useful indication of how attitudes and behaviours toward AI are forming among those who support students to enter higher education.
The first question asked how much teachers and advisers had themselves used ‘generative’ AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini (previously Bard). We found a wide mix – including 30% who had never used the tools before and 37% who used them quite frequently.
