A class 9 student is stuck on a physics problem. She knows the formula, has tried solving twice and still cannot figure out where she is going wrong when she uses AI tools and gets the answer in seconds. The problem appears to be solved until her teacher asks her the next day to explain why she used that formula. She cannot. The small gap between getting an answer and understanding it is becoming one of the most important questions in education as AI enters the everyday lives of students. For today’s students, the challenge is no longer simply access to information. It is learning how to question it, work with it and make sense of it. Economic Times (ET) Masterclass AI for Academic Excellence is designed around this shift, helping students in classes 5-12 use AI not as a shortcut to answers, but as a learning companion for understanding concepts, practising problems, revising lessons, preparing for exams and strengthening their academic work.Explore AI programs by ET MasterclassThe problem is not that students use AI. It is how they use it.Consider another familiar situation. A student has a history chapter to revise before an exam. Instead of going through 20 pages of notes, they ask an AI tool for a summary. They get one. They read it once and move on.But when the exam question is framed differently, the student struggles to recall the argument or connect two events. The technology worked. The learning did not. This is where AI for Academic Excellence takes a different approach. Rather than teaching students to produce faster answers, the programme introduces them to ways of using AI that keeps thinking and promotes participation among the students.A chapter can become a set of questions that tests what the student actually remembers. A difficult concept can be explained at different levels until it makes sense. An AI tool can challenge a student with a quiz, identify gaps in understanding and help create a revision plan around those gaps. The difference may seem small. Academically, it is significant.From “Explain this” to “Help me figure this out”The programme's objective is not to make AI another source of ready-made homework. It is to help students turn the technology into a more interactive study environment.Students learn how to use tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, NotebookLM and Google Classroom for practical academic tasks. They can use them to break down difficult maths and science problems, turn study material into summaries and mind maps, create flashcards or quizzes, improve answer writing and organise revision.But the more important skill is learning how to ask the right question. Instead of asking AI to solve a problem, a student can ask it to identify the step where their reasoning went wrong. Instead of asking for an essay, they can use it to challenge an argument, suggest gaps in their reasoning or take help to structure their thoughts. That changes the student's role from recipient to participant.A more useful outcome than a perfect answerImagine a student preparing for a term-end examination who has three chapters left but does not know where to begin. A conventional revision strategy might mean rereading everything. An AI-assisted approach can be more targeted. The student can test themselves chapter by chapter, identify weak areas, generate questions around those topics and build a revision schedule based on what they actually need to work on. The outcome is not simply a completed study plan. It is a student who has a clearer picture of what they know, what they don't and what they need to do next.That is the kind of independence AI can potentially support when it is used well.The skills students may need beyond the classroom.There is also a larger reason to teach this distinction early. Students entering higher education and eventually the workplace will encounter AI not as a separate technology, but as part of everyday tasks. They will be expected to work with AI-generated information, question its accuracy, refine outputs and make decisions based on their own judgement. That makes AI literacy more than knowing which tool to open.It means knowing when to trust an answer, when to question it, how to verify it and perhaps most importantly when not to use AI to think for you.AI for Academic Excellence brings these ideas into the academic setting through a three-week programme with six live online sessions, where students work with AI tools to create practical outputs such as study notebooks, chapter explainers, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes, revision packs, exam-preparation plans, answer-writing exercises and presentations. The emphasis is on application rather than theory.Preparing students for an AI-assisted classroomThe real promise of AI in education may not be that a student can finish homework in half the time.It may be that a student who once waited for a teacher, parent or tutor to explain a difficult concept can now explore it independently. That a student who reads without knowing what they have missed can test themselves. That revision becomes a process of identifying gaps rather than simply rereading notes.Used this way, AI does not replace the teacher or the student's effort. It gives the student another way to think, practise and learn. And that is ultimately what AI for Academic Excellence aims to teach: not how to get better answers from AI, but how to become a better learner while using it.