A physics graduate student at Oxford has documented a striking cultural shift in how her peers approach academic work, describing a transition from collaborative problem-solving to wholesale reliance on ChatGPT for coursework.
Writing on Substack, the student recounts her initial skepticism of AI tools. When she first tried ChatGPT as an undergraduate to ask about scattering amplitudes, it “replied with nonsense.” She dismissed the technology and moved on. However, by January 2025, while struggling with a quantum field theory problem during her master’s program, she reluctantly followed her classmates’ recommendation to use the chatbot—only to receive unhelpful answers again.
What struck her most was not the tool itself, but how it reshaped peer dynamics. She contrasts her current experience with a formative freshman year of collaborative learning. In a multivariable calculus class, she worked with two classmates who would debate solutions, explain reasoning, and challenge each other’s approaches. “I learned a lot in that class, and I partly owed it to my great collaborators,” she writes. By her sophomore year, however, this collaborative spirit had largely evaporated after a misunderstanding with a friend in an honors differential equations course led to accusations of plagiarism. She spent the remainder of her undergraduate career working in isolation.
At Oxford’s master’s program, the pattern worsened. According to the student’s account, classmates began casually stating “I just asked ChatGPT how to do it” during study sessions. She observed peers using the tool not only for homework but for dissertations and published research. The shift dismayed her: “Now, there was nothing beyond ‘Just ask ChatGPT.’” The problem sets, which she viewed as valuable exam preparation, lost their purpose when students bypassed them entirely.
By May 2025, facing pressure to complete four master’s courses in six weeks, the student found ChatGPT useful—but in a narrower way than her peers seemed to employ it. Rather than generating answers, she used it to rephrase difficult concepts from her notes. “Every time I got stuck or I couldn’t visualize a definition, I would just screenshot or copy the small section or sentence I did not understand and ChatGPT would re-explain it to me,” she explains.
Her account suggests that AI adoption may be changing not just how students complete assignments, but the interpersonal learning that traditionally accompanied them.
Key facts
- The student initially found ChatGPT unhelpful when attempting physics questions as an undergraduate
- By late 2024 and early 2025, her classmates at Oxford were using ChatGPT to complete homework assignments that were not graded
- The student contrasts her current experience with collaborative freshman-year learning, which she found significantly more educationally valuable
- She eventually used ChatGPT as a study tool to clarify concepts from her existing notes rather than to generate answers
- The shift toward ChatGPT use occurred alongside what she describes as a decline in collaborative problem-solving among her peers