Students who don’t rely on Artificial Intelligence chatbots to solve schoolwork have been found to outperform their peers who do, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2025 Program for International Student Assessment report has discovered.

The OECD’s flagship educational report, released on Tuesday, was based on a representative sample of over 760,000 students in science, math and reading, across 91 countries and economies, out of 33 million 15-year-olds, and closely watched by politicians and policymakers as one of the leading measures of national education systems. 

According to the report, 15-year-old students who say they never or almost never use AI to draft texts for writing assignments or doing preliminary research, scored 509 on a science test, while their peers who use AI for that purpose daily, scored 481.

The report explained that for summarising texts, the 28-point gap, adjusted for socio-economic status, equals to roughly a year and a half of teaching.

The OECD also found that students who weekly used AI to learn, rather than to help them draft or summarise, scored around 500 in science, which is among the highest results reported for any AI-use group.

However, the report also found that students who frequently used AI to learn and were taught at school to assess AI-generated information, performed slightly better than students who used AI less often or not at all.

The OECD Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, stated that, “In the same way that we do not become fit by watching sports but by doing sports, learning does not occur through the consumption of content, but as a productive cognitive struggle of the mind with new material.”

Mr Schleicher urged students to use AI as a “scaffold, not a crutch,” adding, “Where technology enables or enhances that cognitive struggle, students will advance. Where technology short-circuits the productive struggle of learning, it will undercut students’ development.”

It stated that though they could boost productivity at work, AI chatbots were changing education, especially the risk of “cognitive offloading,” where pupils give difficult tasks to AI rather than doing them themselves.

The report stated that the PISA 2025 recorded the lowest average performance so far across science, reading and mathematics, adding that reading fell 28 points across OECD countries between 2015 and 2025, translating to about one and a half years of learning.

The report also showed that Mathematics fell 22 points, while one in five 15-year-olds across the OECD, is now a low performer in science, mathematics and reading, representing a 16 percent increase from 2022.

The report blamed digital distraction, weaker reading habits, school resource pressures and uneven student engagement for the development.