🎓 How Students Use AI at University — A Real-World Study of 1,000,000 Sessions from Anthropic

AI is increasingly permeating education, but most discussions have so far been based on surveys and lab experiments. In a new report, the Anthropic team conducted one of the largest studies of real-world student AI use, analyzing over 1 million anonymized conversations with Claude.ai.

🤔 Who Uses AI the Most?

✅Computer Science students are the clear winner: they make up 36.8% of all conversations with Claude, although in fact they only make up 5.4% of US graduates.
✅STEM disciplines dominate overall — students in science, math, and engineering use AI far more than students in business, medicine, or the humanities.
✅ Business makes up almost 19% of all degrees, but only 8.9% of all AI sessions. The picture is similar in healthcare and humanities.

🤔 Why students turn to AI: the most popular queries

✅Creating and editing educational materials - 39.3%
✅Solving assignments, coding, explaining theory - 33.5%
✅Analyzing and visualizing data - 11%
✅Assistance in research and tool development - 6.5%
✅Translations, proofreading, creating diagrams - the remaining percentages.

🤔How exactly do students interact with AI?

✅Direct problem solving
✅Direct content creation
✅Collaborative problem solving
✅Collaborative content creation

💡Interestingly, all 4 types are found approximately equally often (23–29% each).

⚠️ The issue of academic honesty and thinking

The study showed that Claude most often performs high-level cognitive functions according to Bloom's taxonomy in conversations with students:

✅Creation — 39.8%
✅Analysis — 30.2%
✅Application, understanding, and memorization — much less often

⚡️ All this turns the familiar "Bloom's pyramid" upside down — and raises concerns: are students starting to "delegate" critical thinking operations to AI too early?

💡This study is just the beginning of a long journey, but it already provides a lot of food for thought for teachers, students, and university administrators.

💻The full text of the article is here