A math teacher at La Vista High School in Fullerton, California, Al Rabanera, has stopped sending home problems that can be lifted into AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, instead building lessons around student interests and replacing rote problem sets with poster projects and in-class design challenges. Nationwide, teachers are rethinking or abandoning homework as evidence mounts that students outsourcing assignments to AI are surrendering the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick. A study led by Sina Rismanchian of the University of California, Irvine, analyzed 3.2 million student math problems on the ALEKS platform and found that after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, high school students spent 31% less time on word problems compared with graph-based problems, while college students showed a 27% decline. Under proctored conditions with no AI access, the copy-paste behavior vanished, and the odds of correctly answering AI-susceptible word problems fell by 25% in the post-ChatGPT years. The College Board reported that the percentage of high school students using AI tools for schoolwork grew from 79% in January 2025 to 84% in May 2025.