Could artificial intelligence help students cheat their way through exams and qualifications?
New research (June 2024) reveals that AI submissions can outperform human students in university exams, raising urgent questions for education and assessment integrity.
AI scores higher …
At a leading UK university, researchers (Scarfe et al., 2024) recently tested whether AI could infiltrate university exams unnoticed.
The study injected ChatGPT-generated responses into undergraduate psychology exams, with 33 fictitious AI students (BBC News) sitting alongside real students.
The result? A staggering 97 per cent of AI-written responses went undetected, outperforming human students in both first and second-year assessments.
At the time of the study, “the use of AI to complete exams was not allowed and fell under the standard University academic misconduct policy.”
The experiment showed that these AI submissions scored, on average, half a grade boundary higher than real students’ work. The more advanced, abstract reasoning required in third-year exams posed more of a challenge for AI.
… the AI relative grade advantage of AI submissions over real student submissions across all modules!
Image: Scarfe et al., 2024
How should schools and colleges respond?
As schools and colleges continue to embrace digital tools, the rise of artificial intelligence represents a new frontier in academic integrity. Many institutions have already shifted towards more inclusive, take-home assessments, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. While this offers flexibility, more and more studies suggests that AI could exploit these unsupervised environments.
This is important because AI can complete work that meets (or exceeds) expected academic standards, all without student input. For teachers and school leaders, this challenges the value of traditional assessments if the risk of undetected AI cheating is real.
Is your school acting to safeguard the integrity of its assessment systems?
To resolve AI headaches, assignments completed away from the examination hall or any digital device will remain the norm for some time until clear policies and procedures are established. However, how do we resolve coursework and assignments completed away from the examination hall?
It may require us to incorporate assessments that measure deeper critical thinking and problem-solving, which AI (currently) struggles to replicate. Teachers might also increase supervision during key assessments, explore hybrid models, or use digital tools to help track unusual student performance patterns. The abundance of tracking tools available having increased exponentially. Does your school use any in particular?
Reflection questions for teachers:
- What current assessments vulnerable to AI misuse in schools and colleges?
- Could exams be designed to test skills beyond AI’s current capabilities?
- How would teachers explain the ethical use of AI to students?
- Should schools reconsider the balance between supervised and unsupervised assessments?
- How can teachers integrate AI-related tasks into lessons without compromising learning outcomes?
- What resources can help teachers identify AI-generated submissions?
- What there professional development opportunities for teachers on AI in education?
- What role could collaboration with colleagues play in improving assessment security?
- How can schools balance the benefits of AI tools with safeguarding academic integrity?
- Are there any changes schools should implement to make assessments more AI-proof?
The research concludes:
Today’s AI has been made possible by training AI models on large corpuses of data. Pick a specialist topic and a human expert might do better than GPT4, but in terms of overall “factual knowledge” GPT-4 “knows” vastly more than one human.
Students could cheat undetected using AI – and in doing so, attain a better grade than those who did not cheat!
- Download and read the full paper.
- Image: ChatGPT4o
I found this article very insightful,. I would also like to add that the indication of AI use could be confused with correct academic instruction. Considering AI is informed by human input, at what point will we understand that a student who writes well is informing AI and then it is seen to be AI use rather than their own words? Just a thought i had while reading this article
A good question. I think the use of AI is determined by the output material being copied and pasted over elsewhere = into an assignment. Tools can track if and when that has been done, rather than if a person has used the AI to generate and refine their ideas.
Hi Ross, I teach CIE IGCSE Global Perspectives which is 65% coursework. Now, my students are almost entirely second language speakers and I can see that some people might think that these students are unfairly disadvantaged by AI checkers (I use GPTZero by the way). However, I do not think this is true, because if you know the level of each of your students’ writing – we do Oxford placement tests before they start – then it is easy enough to see a candidate who has either plagiarised or used generative AI. A greyer issue is the use of translators, where the student will write their essay in, say, Mandarin, and then have a translator change it for them. I would be interested to know where you stand on this.
A great source to avoid this though, is a librarian. Get the students into a library where they can be taught how to research properly. Also work on time management skills, as I think most students use AI to save time. All of our students have also signed a pledge before starting with us, agreeing not to use AI in their coursework which is also sent to parents. This adds a sense of honour to it.
Hi Luke – good to hear from you. There is already research to suggest ESOL/EAL students are already penalised by AI due to linguistic translations/understanding. Ai tools should be helpijg everyone. not creating further disadvantage.