Half an Hour with Twenty Students Who Aren't Studying Tech
I ran an AI session for Class 11 students at L.S. Raheja College. What they told me about how they actually use AI was more useful than anything I brought to teach them.
At noon this week I spent half an hour with fifteen to twenty Class 11 students at L.S. Raheja College, Santa Cruz, talking about AI in education.
Most of them are not studying computer science. That was the whole point of going.
Why a room of non-technical students is the interesting room
Almost every conversation I have about AI happens with people who build it. We talk about context windows, tool-calling, hallucination rates. It's a useful conversation and it is also a very small one.
These students use AI constantly and think about it completely differently. They don't ask which model is better. They ask whether using it for homework is cheating, whether it will still be worth learning the thing it can do for them, and whether the answer it gave them is actually true.
Those are better questions than most of the ones I hear at work.
What they told me
I went in planning to explain what AI is good and bad at. I spent most of the session listening instead, because what they described was more interesting than my slides.
They use it as a patient teacher, not an answer machine. The most common use wasn't "write my essay". It was asking the same question three or four times until an explanation finally clicked — something you can't do to a teacher moving through a syllabus with forty other students in the room.
Trust is uneven, and roughly correct. They trust it for explaining a concept. They don't trust it for facts they'll be marked on. Nobody taught them that distinction; they worked it out by getting burned. That instinct is better calibrated than a lot of professional usage I've seen.
Language is a bigger deal than I expected. Being able to ask a question in the way you actually think, and get the answer back in plain terms, removes a barrier that has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with vocabulary.
They worry about the right thing. Not "will AI take my job" — that's the adult worry. Theirs was closer to: if I let this do the hard part now, will I be able to do it later when it matters? I don't have a clean answer to that. I'm not sure anyone does.
What I took away
The gap isn't access. Every student in that room already had these tools. The gap is that nobody has taught them how to check an answer — and that skill, not prompting, is what decides whether AI makes them better students or lazier ones.
If I ran the session again, I'd spend the whole half hour on exactly one thing: how to verify what the machine told you. Ask it to show its reasoning. Ask the same question in a different shape and see if the answer holds. Look it up somewhere that isn't a model.
That's not an AI skill. It's the skill that makes AI safe to use, and it's the one nobody is teaching.
Thanks
To the students who asked genuinely hard questions in a half-hour slot at noon, and to the college for having me. A room full of people who use this technology daily without any stake in hyping it is the most honest feedback available.
Happy to do more of these — get in touch if you'd like one at your college or school.