Is using AI in exams cheating? Or just making the best use of the tools available to move you forward in life?
With the advent of AI, the tool that now provides ‘all the answers’ without us having to do the hard work of thinking about things, students are finding it hard to resist – even for cheating in their university exams.
Mass ‘cheating’ at universities
Summer 2026 had two notable examples. Firstly, after a shooting on campus at Brown University in the US, a kind economics professor moved a mid-term exam online as a one-off concession to students, so they didn’t have to come back on site en masse soon after the event.
This particular class had always averaged somewhere between 60 and 80%, yet in the online exam, it averaged 96%. Sensing that the vast majority of the students had used AI, he switched their final exam back to the in-person format. Tellingly, the class average collapsed to 48.6%, and several students dropped out of the course instead of sitting it.
Additionally, in Mexico, almost 58,000 students had to retake the entrance exam for the country’s most prestigious university, National Autonomous University of Mexico, after students achieved an unusually high number of top marks in the results of an remote online version of the test. There is tough competition for places here and this was the first time the entrance exam had ever been offered remotely. Those analysing the results concluded that the only plausible explanation was mass AI-assisted cheating. The university also held the re-sit as an in-person exam.
What does this show?
Is this about dishonesty? Or simply using a tool that’s freely available and that can give you a better chance to move forward in life? More likely, it is about the pressing need to rethink assessment at every level in a world that has moved on. Unsupervised coursework and exams were built on the premise that producing a good answer required students to understand the subject, but this is no longer a realistic way to assess how much they know, especially when they can just ‘ask ChatGPT’.
There is a degree of irony in that AI is a fast moving technology with so much potential when focused on the right areas, yet it has forced exams processes backwards, to the pen and paper scenarios exam boards have been trying to move away from for many years.
