Given the choice, 29% of students asked their AI tutor to teach them, not answer them

The worry about AI in education is that students only want the answer. On 8 September 2026 we gave every student on iTutor a choice on the tutor itself: Just answer, which explains directly, or Teach me, which works through the topic step by step. Just answer is the default. Here is what 2,663 students did with that choice in their first month.

Finding 1: more than a quarter switched away from the default to be taught

771 of 2,663 students, 29%, chose Teach me at least once. Nobody was nudged: the switch starts on Just answer, and a student has to change it. 506 of them, 19% of all students, changed it before they asked anything and never switched back. Another 265 used both modes.

The other 71% kept the default. That is the honest headline too: most students, most of the time, wanted a direct explanation. But a minority this size is not a rounding error. More than one student in four went looking for the slower kind of help.

Finding 2: teaching turns were 40% of the tutoring

Students who chose Teach me used it a lot. 3,872 of 9,607 chat tutor turns, 40%, were teaching turns, and so were 965 of 2,787 spoken turns in the Voice room, 35%. A student in Teach me took 6.3 turns on average, against 3.5 in Just answer: teaching is a conversation, and students stayed in it.

The share moved from week to week, between 34% and 48% of chat turns, and it was lower in the second half of the month. Part of that may be our own doing: on 29 September we changed Teach me to explain first and ask fewer check questions, after feedback that its questions came too early. We report the range rather than a trend.

The same pattern in every large market

In each country where at least 25 students chose Teach me, the share of students who did lands between a quarter and two fifths:

• Canada: 37% (41 of 110 students)
• Pakistan: 36% (31 of 86)
• India: 33% (123 of 378)
• Indonesia: 29% (26 of 89)
• Egypt: 29% (28 of 98)
• United States: 27% (107 of 396)

What we think this means

The question "do students just want the answer?" has a measurable answer, and it is neither yes nor no. Most of the time they want a direct explanation, and a tool that refuses to give one fails them. But a large minority, given a real choice and no push, asks to be taught, and stays for the longer exchange when it gets it.

For anyone building in this space, two implications. First, offer both, on the same screen, as one switch: the students who want teaching found it without being shown. Second, defaults matter. 71% never touched the switch. A product that defaults to answers will mostly deliver answers, whatever its students would choose with a nudge, and that is a design decision, not a fact about students.

Methodology

• Population. 2,663 accounts that received at least one tutor reply in the window, signed up from 138 countries. Internal and test accounts are excluded.
• Window. 8 September 2026, the day the switch shipped, to 9 October 2026, inclusive.
• What is counted. One tutor turn is one reply from the tutor, in chat or in the Voice room, recorded with the mode it ran in. No message text was read or stored to produce this report.
• Default. Just answer is the default for every account. The choice is saved per account and applies to every subject and to the Voice room.
• Suppression. Countries are reported only where at least 25 students chose Teach me.
• What this cannot tell you. These are iTutor's students, who chose an AI study tool; they are not a random sample of students. One month is short, and the product changed during it (29 September). Read the direction as informative and the percentages as specific to this population and period.

Our first report, on the formats students choose and the files they upload, is at What 3,624 students in 145 countries actually do with an AI tutor. We will repeat this one at the same address, so the figures can be compared over time.

Updated 10 October 2026: two internal accounts were removed from the data. The spoken Teach me share changed from 33% to 35%, and three countries were added to the list.