Ace
Short answer: use AI to make you think, never to think for you. Have it quiz you on your own notes, check your explanations, and space out your practice. Avoid letting it solve your problems, write your summaries or answer questions you haven't attempted. In a large study of high-school students, those who practised with an unrestricted chatbot did better during practice but worse on the exam once the AI was taken away.
Does studying with AI actually work?
It depends entirely on how it's used, and two recent studies show both sides.
The warning. Bastani and colleagues (2025) ran a field experiment with nearly a thousand high-school maths students. One group practised with a standard chatbot, another with a version designed to give hints instead of answers, and a third with no AI. With the standard chatbot, practice scores rose sharply, but on the exam, taken without AI, those students scored about 17% lower than students who never had it. The researchers' explanation: students used it as a crutch. The hint-only version avoided most of that harm.
The promise. Kestin and colleagues (2025) compared a carefully designed AI tutor with an in-class active learning session in a Harvard physics course. Students using the AI tutor learned significantly more in less time. That tutor was built to guide students step by step and make them do the work.
The lesson is the same in both: AI helps when it keeps you doing the retrieval and reasoning. It hurts when it does them for you.
6 ways AI helps you study
1. Make it quiz you on your own material
Testing yourself is one of the most effective study techniques known (Dunlosky et al., 2013). AI makes it easy to get questions on exactly what your course covers, so you practise instead of re-reading. Give it your notes, not just a topic, so the questions match your syllabus. Our guide to getting ChatGPT to quiz you has prompts that work.
2. Answer before you see anything
Ask for one question at a time and don't let it show the answer until you've committed to yours. The effort of recalling is what builds memory; reading a correct answer feels like learning but isn't.
3. Explain it back, and ask what you got wrong
Write your own explanation of a concept, then ask the AI to point out gaps or errors. This turns it into a critic of your thinking, which keeps you in charge of the learning.
4. Ask for hints, not solutions
Stuck on a problem? Ask for the next step only, or a question that would point you in the right direction. This is close to how the hint-only tutor in the Bastani study worked, and it's what protected students' exam scores.
5. Check its answers against your notes
Chatbots can state wrong facts with total confidence. Before you learn anything from an AI, check it against your lecture slides or textbook. Read can you trust AI study answers? for a quick way to do it.
6. Use it to space your practice
Come back to the same material after one day, three days and a week, with fresh questions each time. Spacing is the other technique with the strongest evidence behind it; see our spaced repetition schedule.
3 ways AI quietly hurts your studying
1. Letting it do your problem sets
If the AI solves it, your practice score goes up and your exam score goes down. The exam asks you to do what the AI was doing.
2. Reading its summaries instead of your material
A neat summary is still re-reading, just shorter, and it may leave out exactly what your lecturer emphasises or slip in details from elsewhere. Use summaries to orient yourself, then practise on the real material.
3. Trusting answers you can't trace
If you can't see where an answer comes from in your course material, you can't know it's what your exam expects. Mistakes you rehearse become mistakes you remember.
A tool built around those rules
We built Ace around this research. You upload your own lecture PDF, slides or YouTube lecture, and Ace turns it into questions you have to answer: multiple choice, putting steps in order, typing the answer, labelling a diagram from your own file, and simulations for formula topics. Every answer is checked against your material, and the sentence it comes from is shown under the answer, so you can verify it. It doesn't summarise or solve for you; it makes you practise. You can also duel a friend on the same questions.
Frequently asked questions
Is it bad to use AI for studying?
Not in itself. Research suggests it hurts when it replaces your thinking (solving problems, writing answers) and helps when it makes you think (quizzing, hints, feedback on your explanations).
What is the best way to use ChatGPT to study?
Paste in your own notes and ask it to quiz you one question at a time, without showing answers until you've replied. Then check anything you're unsure of against your notes. See how to use ChatGPT to revise.
Can AI replace a tutor?
A well-designed AI tutor can help a lot, as the Harvard physics study found, but the ones that worked were built to guide rather than tell. A general chatbot used for answers is not the same thing.
Will my exam be harder if I studied with AI?
Only if you practised with the AI doing the work. If you practised answering on your own, with AI asking the questions and checking you, you've practised exactly what the exam asks.
Sources
- Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakcı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(26), e2422633122.
- Kestin, G., Miller, K., Klales, A., Milbourne, T., & Ponti, G. (2025). AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. Scientific Reports, 15, 17458.
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
