Student Strategy
How to Use AI for IB Coursework Without Cheating
A practical guide to using AI for IB coursework safely, covering IB academic integrity, AI use in IAs, essays, TOK, revision, feedback and citations.
Overview
A practical guide to using AI for IB coursework safely without losing authorship, academic integrity or control over your own work.
A practical guide to using AI for IB coursework safely without losing authorship, academic integrity or control over your own work. The dangerous moment is rarely the first prompt. Most IB students do not open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini planning to cheat. They ask for help understanding a topic. Then they ask for a better research question. Then a possible structure. Then a sample paragraph, just to see what good writing looks like. Suddenly the work has a voice that is cleaner than theirs, a logic they did not build and a conclusion they cannot fully defend. That is where AI becomes risky for IB coursework. The IB does not ban AI tools outright. The important question is authorship. Coursework is submitted as your own work. If AI produces text, analysis, images, graphs, code or other material that appears in your final submission, you need to be transparent about it and follow your school’s citation rules. More importantly, you need to make sure the thinking is yours. This guide is for students who want to use AI for IB coursework without wrecking their academic integrity. It applies to IAs, the Extended Essay, TOK, oral preparation and general revision. Your school may add stricter rules, so treat your teacher’s guidance as the final authority. The basic rule: keep authorship in your hands AI is safest when it helps you understand, plan, question, revise and study. It becomes risky when it starts creating the material being assessed. There is a big difference between asking AI to explain how a Biology IA research question can be made more specific and asking it to write your research question for you. There is a difference between asking for possible limitations in a Chemistry method and asking it to produce your evaluation. There is a difference between asking for feedback on your own TOK paragraph and asking it to generate the paragraph from scratch. The best test is simple. Could you explain the choice to your teacher without opening the AI chat? If you cannot explain why a sentence, source, model, method or conclusion is there, it probably should not be in your coursework yet. Use AI before the assessed writing begins AI is excellent for the messy early stage, when you are trying to understand the assignment. For an IA, you can ask what makes a research question focused in that subject. For an Extended Essay, you can ask what makes a question too broad. For TOK, you can ask for a plain-language explanation of