echo 'I\'m a student'
does not work. But the following works:
echo $'I\'m a student'
From the man page of bash:
A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded
by a backslash.
….
Words of the form $’string’ are treated specially. The word
expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as
specified by the ANSI C standard.