Why building AI for schools is harder than building a chatbot: inside Smartschool’s approach to exam prep

https://media.thenextweb.com/2026/07/smartschool-ai-exam-prep-sat-act-classroom.avif

Artificial intelligence has proven that it can trawl the internet to retrieve information quickly for answering questions. But teaching students using AI is a harder task. The stakes are even higher when the goal is not just learning in school, but performing well on high-stakes exams like the SAT and ACT.

On the face of it, education might seem like a natural extension of large language models. If AI can replace customer support, certainly it can provide back answers just as a teacher would.

But being educated in a school is not a consumer experience. Teachers and school administrators aren’t looking for chatbots. Chatbots can hallucinate, chatbots can make mistakes. But if you hand over the instruction of a pupil to a chatbot, you can impede a student’s progress for months. Educators need the tools they use to be bullet-proof, safe, accountable, and consistent.

That’s why the creators...

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