Ethical Study Coach: Building a Study Companion in the New Age

I’ve always believed that the best tools don’t just make us faster — they make us think better. When I started designing Ethical Study Coach, it wasn’t about creating another chatbot that answers questions faster than professors can reply to emails. It was about building a system that teaches students how to think, not what to write.

Because let’s be honest — between deadlines, caffeine, and ChatGPT tabs, the line between help and homework has gotten blurry. I wanted to design a bridge between academic curiosity and ethical responsibility — something that could coexist with the classroom, not compete with it.

Access the GPT model here - Ethical Study Coach.

Where the Idea Started

It began after one too many conversations about AI “misuse” in education. Faculty feared plagiarism; students feared expulsion. Somewhere in that digital panic, we lost sight of what AI could actually teach.

So I created Ethical Study Coach, a conversational study companion built on three words: Transparency, Accountability, and Context.

The idea was to take the guiding principles of engineering ethics and apply them to the classroom. Instead of detecting cheating after it happens, Ethical Study Coach helps prevent it by guiding students toward understanding — not shortcuts.

How It Works

Think of it as a cross between Grammarly, Socratic dialogue, and your favorite TA — but with fewer typos and more patience.

Under the hood, it uses a Python + Streamlit backend connected to OpenAI’s API. The logic flow is split into three categories:

• Learning Queries: The student is asking to understand — the AI replies with structured reasoning, Socratic questions, and references.

• Compliance Queries: The student is checking whether something aligns with the university's academic integrity policy.

• Plagiarism Risk Queries: The AI nudges the student to rephrase, cite, or rethink — gently reminding them that understanding beats copying.

  
  

Each session logs anonymized metadata to help universities analyze AI usage patterns without invading privacy — a balance between ethics and analytics.

The Engineering Behind Ethics

Building something “ethical” is oddly technical. Every decision — from prompt design to conversation limits — becomes a moral choice disguised as code. Should the AI ever say “yes” to a request that’s clearly unethical?

No. But what if it doesn’t know?

That’s where reinforcement learning came in. I trained the system to ask back — “Why do you want to use AI for this?” That single question turned transactions into reflections.

And that’s the beauty of it. The system doesn’t punish; it provokes thought. It doesn’t block learning; it redirects it. In a world obsessed with instant answers, that’s almost revolutionary.

What I Learned

Honestly, I learned as much about people as I did about prompt engineering. Ethical Study Coach taught me that ethics isn’t a lecture topic — it’s a design constraint. It’s what you build into the system, not what you write around it.

The prototype received strong faculty feedback at Indiana University — especially for how it balances accessibility with accountability. Students liked that it didn’t sound like a policy manual.

Professors liked that it didn’t sound like ChatGPT. That’s a win in my book.

The Takeaway

Ethical Study Coach is still evolving. But the core idea remains: build tech that teaches integrity instead of assuming it.

Because in the end, innovation without ethics isn’t progress — it’s just efficiency with a moral blind spot. And if my AI can make even one student pause and think, “Wait, am I learning or just automating?” — then maybe we’ve started something good.