Where the line actually is

What teachers can actually tell

More than students think, and not usually through detection software. Your teacher has read a lot of your writing. They know your vocabulary, your sentence length, the mistakes you make. Work that suddenly does not sound like you is obvious to them in a way it is not obvious to you, because you are not the one who has read thirty of your essays.

There is also the follow-up problem. Hand in an essay you did not write and you have to keep being the person who wrote it: in class discussion, in the exam on the same topic, in the conversation where the teacher asks what you meant by a particular paragraph. That is a lot of maintenance for one piece of homework.

Things that are just straightforwardly fine

• Asking for a concept to be explained a different way when the textbook version did not land. This is the best thing about having these tools.
• Asking for practice questions and getting them marked, with an explanation of what you got wrong.
• Asking why your answer is wrong when you already know it is wrong but not why.
• Asking what a question is actually asking, when the wording is the problem rather than the topic.
• Asking for feedback on something you wrote yourself: where it is unclear, where the argument jumps.

And the ones that are not

• Generating an essay and handing it in, however much you edited it afterward.
• Having it do a problem set so you can submit the answers.
• Using it during an assessment that says no AI, which is the same category of thing as taking notes into an exam.
• Anything where the honest answer to 'could you do this again alone?' is no.

One practical note: your school's rules might be stricter than this, and if they are, theirs win. Find out what they say rather than assuming. Teachers are generally much more relaxed about the first list than students expect, and much less relaxed about the second than students hope.