For generations, schools have rewarded the correct answer, the polished essay and other finished products of learning. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) can effortlessly write the papers and produce the results that used to come only from high achievers, what does “high achievement” mean? And which student behaviors should be rewarded?
As someone who became a high achiever after years of low academic effort, my own school experiences remind me that it’s critical to consider how AI is affecting the full range of students in our classrooms — not only those who are struggling.
Throughout my first two years of high school, I was what I like to call an “academic minimalist.” I wasn’t trying to fail, but I also wasn’t chasing academic greatness either. I often thought, Why exhaust myself earning a 95 when the diplomas don’t come with a footnote explaining that I passed algebra with enthusiasm? I went to class, did enough to pass and went home. I did not build my identity around earning all A’s or being the student whose hand shot up first. School was something I needed to get through.
Then, during my junior year, something shifted. I sat in one of my English courses, with a teacher named Mr. Poska. He saw that I had a secret love for reading and writing, and I began to slowly blossom as a scholar in his class. He then suggested that I challenge myself and recommended I take his Advanced Placement (AP) English course, The Faustian Bargain in Literature. Intrigued, I enrolled.
The class centered on the Faustian legend, the centuries-old story of a person who bargains away something essential in exchange for knowledge, immortality, beauty, power or desire. For the first time during my high school career, I felt a sense of intrinsic motivation and internal desire to immerse myself and to push myself, which eventually spilled over into my other classes senior year.
We traced the legend across literature, researched its evolution and analyzed how different writers reinvented the same questions about ambition, temptation and consequence. I had to read closely, do substantial research, make connections between texts and defend interpretations that did not come packaged with one correct answer.
After taking this class, I fell in love with researching and discovering that a text could hold multiple meanings. For the first time, academic achievement wasn’t just something measured by my report card. Being a scholar became part of how I understood myself. Somewhere along the way, I transformed from “academic minimalist” into “high achiever.”
Once I entered college, I fell even more in love with learning when I decided to major in English and psychology. I continued on to earn a master’s degree in education, followed a decade later by a second master’s degree in leadership. By then, I strove for A’s in my classes, and a 4.0 GPA became a goal I had to hit. Being a high-achieving scholar became part of my identity.
A New Perspective
As AI transforms education, I find myself looking at my students and seeing reflections of my former self, particularly those who have built their identities around being high-achieving scholars.
Over my 13 years in education, I have come to recognize these students in my classes immediately. They want the 90, then ask what they can do to make it to a 95. They want extra credit when they already have an A. They revise and research beyond what I assigned.
For years, schools have rewarded these behaviors. We’ve told students that becoming strong writers, researchers, critical thinkers and independent learners would distinguish them. Then, we handed them technology that can produce a polished essay, summarize a 100-page reading, generate research questions, reorganize notes and offer a sophisticated analysis before they have finished typing the prompt.
That creates a strange existential question for a teenager whose confidence has been built around academic competence: If AI can do the one thing I am good at faster and more accurately than I can, what exactly am I good at and why am I even doing it?
When AI can effortlessly write the essays and synthesize the texts that once defined academic worth, the traditional definitions and metrics of high achievement begin to fracture, and these students begin to feel displaced.
AI forces educators to move beyond transactional grading and redefine authentic scholarship around human curiosity rather than automated perfection. As this technology continues to evolve and be a part of our classrooms, we have to work to discover how to cultivate genuine resilience and keep academic excellence at the forefront.
When Confidence Is Outsourced
I have started noticing traits among some of my academically stronger students that concern me more than an obvious AI-generated essay — hesitation, lack of self-trust, low confidence and apathy.
One student offers an insightful interpretation and then wants to check AI to make sure it is “right.” Another student has an original idea but trusts the polished version generated by AI more than their own language. Students who once approached assignments independently increasingly want technological confirmation before trusting their thinking. Students who used to respond first to complex questions now just shrug when I ask them a question and jump straight to AI for an answer.
As an educator, I find the irony unfolding painful to watch. Students who have spent years becoming capable begin outsourcing their thinking because they care more about being correct.
Students themselves seem to recognize some of this tension. In an August 2026 survey of U.S. teens by Common Sense Media, 70% reported using AI for schoolwork. Among teens who use AI, 38% said its availability leads them to generate fewer ideas of their own, while 39% said they feel they miss out on learning when they use AI to complete assignments.
This complicates the conversation about AI and achievement, shifting the focus away from struggling students to high-achieving scholars. It introduces a vital new narrative: A student does not have to be struggling academically to become cognitively dependent on technology, as efficiency and polished outputs quietly erode the productive struggle essential to true mastery.
In fact, perfectionism may create its own vulnerability. Research examining educational identity, achievement and perfectionism among adolescents found complicated reciprocal relationships between these factors, including potentially harmful connections between externally driven perfectionism and educational commitment. For high-achieving students whose academic identities are closely tied to measures of performance and achievement, AI may create an additional layer of pressure by producing seemingly flawless work in seconds.
As AI increasingly performs tasks that once required intellectual curiosity, persistence and independent thinking, students may begin questioning the value of their own academic contributions and the skills they have worked so hard to develop, potentially undermining the confidence and intellectual independence that have shaped their identities as high-achieving scholars. This leaves us, as educators, with an important question: When students no longer see their own intellectual efforts as essential to academic success, what happens to the motivation and scholarly identity that once drove them to excel?
For a student accustomed to producing excellent work, AI offers something seductive — fewer mistakes. But learning has never required perfection. Learning requires enough confidence to get it wrong before getting it right.
Honoring the Wrong Things
This brings me to an uncomfortable possibility: Perhaps AI is not only disrupting student achievement, but exposing how narrowly schools have defined it.
For generations, we have rewarded the polished essay, correct answer, immaculate notes, high GPA and completed product. AI is exceptionally good at producing products. So if the product is all we measure, AI will inevitably make it harder to identify human achievement.
In my previous EdSurge opinion piece, ‘Protecting Student Cognition in the Age of AI,’ I argued that educators need to preserve productive struggle because the thinking behind an assignment matters as much as the finished product. That becomes even more important for high-achieving students.
Instead of asking “How good is this essay?” I increasingly want to know: How did you arrive here? Show me the question that started your research. Show me your first claim and explain why you abandoned it. Tell me which source changed your thinking. Defend your conclusion when I challenge it. Explain where AI contributed and where you rejected its recommendation. Let me see you change your mind.
Those things are much harder to automate because they reveal intellectual ownership, the very thing we should be protecting.
Redefining High Achievement
This does not mean high-achieving students should avoid AI. They will enter colleges and workplaces where understanding how to use AI will itself be an important skill. Digital Promise’s AI literacy framework emphasizes not simply using AI, but understanding and evaluating it, with human judgment remaining central.
That gives schools an opportunity to expand rather than erase what high achievement means. Maybe tomorrow’s high-achieving scholar is not the student who produces the most flawless essay. Maybe it is the student who can produce an original argument, interrogate an AI-generated one, identify what both missed and explain why their final judgment is their own.
Maybe achievement should be measured through curiosity, intellectual resilience, ethical judgment, creativity, revision, self-advocacy and the confidence to say, “AI suggested this, but I disagree because ….”
School leaders also have a responsibility here. If teachers are independently deciding what AI use counts as learning, cheating or excellence, students are navigating a moving target that will look different in each classroom. Schools and districts need shared language about what human achievement looks like when AI is present and what evidence shows students still own their learning.
I want to encourage educators to consider whether, in this new age of AI, we should continue to reward polished, “perfect” products over original thinking and productive struggle. If we do nothing, we risk sending the message that efficiency and accuracy matter more than the human process of learning.
Today’s ‘Faustian Bargain’
I often think back to the Faustian Bargain in Literature class all those years ago, and it feels almost too fitting to remember that course now. AI has come to offer students an extraordinary bargain: speed, polish, information and accurate answers with less struggle. But education has to make sure students understand what should never be part of the exchange.
When I entered that AP English classroom in high school, I did not become a scholar because every paper I produced was perfect. I can assure you they weren’t. I became one because I discovered that I loved the process of thinking deeply enough to have something of my own to say.
Our high-achieving students deserve the opportunity to make that discovery too, and to keep the part of their identity that makes coming to school and striving for better worth it.