An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/an-ai-supervised-remote-exam-went-so-badly-that-58000-students-must-retake-it/Open linkView original on lemmy.todaySyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.todayhttps://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/08/an-ai-supervised-remote-exam-went-so-badly-that-58000-students-must-retake-it/Open linkView original on lemmy.today
25 replies
Can we talk about this thumbnail for a second? Does this guy really have 4×4 = 16 written on his arm??? And what’s the second line? Xx=2,7??? WTF???
I don't think AI generated images can ever beat the trove of ridiculousness that is stock photos.
Agreed. There's no way AI would have generated the undisputed best stock photo model of all time:
It's an AI generated image lol
It was generated by AI (probably)
In fairness, he looks like he could be about ten years old. Which is still probably too old to need a reminder of the 4 multiplication table, but at least it's not a high school senior.
The headline kind of misses the main point, which is that the students have to retake the exam because cheating was so rampant, likely due to AI usage but that can't be proven.
Statistics is a math developed to prove cheating. Moe outliers = more cheaters.
My institution is ending digital exams. We had a certain level of trust with students, that's officially over.
Should probably phase out home essays, as well.
My recent exams were digital but heavily monitored. Couldn't even use my own pen lol
Yeah, I'm in infosec and I had to pull browser history of students a lot last year because they used AI to cheat on exams.
Yeah, I was saying the cheating being AI usage is what couldn't be proven. They mentioned a few other possibilities like the tests being leaked or people working off camera with them.
But yeah, the cheating is obvious. And the likelihood of it being done by AI is damn near certain.
One thing is the 58 000 that have to re-take the exam. I'm just as interested in the 2% of exam-takers that were terminated due to "unspecified conduct issues", and how many of those were unfairly thrown out for cheating without having done anything wrong...
sure, keep selling this victim trope online. Idiots are submitting papers with LLM prompts still in them.
You realise that it is a statistical impossibility that there were absolutely no mistakes?
I think you're confused about the AI involvement here.
AI was used to check for cheating in a remote exam. The percentages that passed were several times more than in previous years, while 2% got tossed for "unspecified conduct issues".
Assuming those 2% were actually cheating and not the AI making a mistake is the issue.
These were multiple choice exams. There was no ability to copy/paste from an LLM. Could they have used another computer/monitor to look things up? Absolutely, but hardly relevant to the issue.
There are also people who grew up in Ghana /Nigeria who are being accused of submitting chatbot writing because the fine tuning was done by their compatriots.
I mean AI is totally fine for fine-tuning. Helpful, even. It's a fabulous proof-reader. The issue is using it for a first or second pass, or having it make suggestions for changes.
I believe the point was they were treated as having used ai because ai sounds like them because it was trained by people with their accent.
Similar to the "This is not ai, I'm just autistic".
How is that relevant to the AI falsely identifying students as cheaters?
Sounds like they aren't the ones haven't done anything wrong. Unless you know that's everyone that commenter is talking about
I feel we need double blind test taking like this.
Have you take an exam and the purpose is to gauge your trust. Make the room and setup easy to cheat in but secretly entrap the ones who do cheat.
We really need the filter out the people in society who will compromise rules when they think they can get away with it.
Yes, but then none of the
parasitesrich kids would pass, so we can't have that. Don't you know this is their world?/s
We are already doing that by kicking students out of medical schools and graduate schools. Eventually the shit hits the fan with cheaters.
That's a lot of misplaced trust you're putting into graduate school admins.