Board Editorial

In July 2024, McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s most prestigious business consulting firms, released a survey that reports 71% of all companies which responded uses generative AI in at least one business function. This number had been merely 33% in 2023. In 2025, the number could have only gone up with breakthroughs in generative AI technologies and ever more funding allocated to the development of AI. We, the Scroll C Board, believe that gen. AI will become an integral part in professional settings as well as daily life. 

However, despite the rise in the significance of gen. AI, Deerfield Academy chooses to embrace an academic policy that allows for near zero tolerance of the technology. Although the Academy’s official policy is to leave AI use to the discretion of the teacher, the administration has still enforced a firewall ban of most gen. AI websites on Deerfield’s wireless networks, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. This means that students using Deerfield’s internet could not access most of the commonly used AI websites.

We believe that this new policy against gen. AI is not justified. As an institution that aims to prepare students for a “rapidly changing world,” Deerfield should not shun away from what the editorial board of the Scroll collectively believes will be a crucial technology of the future. The board believes that the current policies of the administration does not encourage AI literacy, a new and critical skill in today and tomorrow’s society. 

The Deerfield administration’s rejection of gen. AI is most evident in our course catalog. While most of our peer boarding schools are scrambling to develop programs that give students experience working with AI and machine learning (ML), Deerfield has not developed a single course that directly engages with the concepts or usages of ML. Choate, for example, has an honors level machine learning course that gives students contact with the leading innovations in the field. While our peers are at least trying to adapt to the new social and academic order under AI, Deerfield has not developed a STEM-based course around AI. In effect, Deerfield is trying to shut itself off from almost all the influences of AI, and these actions contribute to the phenomenon of the "Deerfield bubble” that already bothers many who worry Deerfield students are too isolated from the real world.

Low AI exposure will also put us at a significant disadvantage to our peers. While our peers are learning to recognize the benefits and harms of gen. AI, we are kept in a greenhouse that secludes us from the technology throughout our high school careers. Although we acknowledge that gen. AI too often becomes an easy shortcut that avoids the process of struggling with difficult concepts, a firewall for all major gen. AI websites is too drastic and inefficient of a measure to combat the drawbacks posed by AI. 

However, we give the students the opportunity to grapple with these challenges. This is not to say that we should allow students to cheat by using AI, but rather give the students the chance to make the right decision amidst the myriad of temptations that are distractions from learning. Cheating with AI is no different than cheating on exams or using external help: we can’t stop any of these from occurring entirely, but it’s the students themselves who determine how much they want to learn or take advantage of the course curriculum offered here. That said, we should still maintain a rigorous academic review process that punishes students for misusing the technology and rewarding them for using it correctly.

Furthermore, we think that AI could be utilized as a technology that aids the teaching and learning process. Our traditional pedagogy practices rely on teachers as the sole resource to provide help to students. However, this system falls to inconvenience and inefficiency, as it becomes quite difficult to find a time outside of class that suits both the student and the teacher. As a result, teachers are often overbooked. A specially programmed AI assistant in teaching could drastically ease the process by offering explanations to students at the press of a button while also encouraging the struggle in learning as a real teacher would. Most of the Scroll C Board has had positive experiences in using AI to facilitate the process of learning. At the same time, the demand for teachers to be present during hours beyond classes are also reduced, giving more time to teachers who also need space for their personal and family lives. We acknowledge that there is the risk of AI hallucinating and generating fake information, which is exactly why we argue to expose students to AI during high school. By confronting misinformation, students are forced to learn to think more critically and cross validate their sources—skills necessary in today’s world dominated by AI-reinforced misinformation. 

At the same time, we believe that Deerfield’s AI policy is too extreme. The firewall not only prevents students from using AI in school, it also restricts students from using gen. AI in their academic pursuits outside of Deerfield. Such a policy hinders students with extracurricular pursuits. Based on the rise in popularity of AI in recent years, students increasingly need to use it for projects, competitions, and research opportunities they have outside of the offerings of Deerfield. If Deerfield chooses not to help students to adapt to AI, the least it could do is to not intervene with students’ pursuits of excellence outside of our limited curriculum. We believe that Deerfield’s firewall, which blocks access to most gen. AI, neglects the freedom students have outside of school. 

The solution is very simple: we believe that Deerfield should remove the firewall ban on generative AI and stop the demonization of AI. Deerfield should also strive to adapt and confront the changes in the world caused by AI, instead of simply ignoring them.