Universities need to use in-person exams to beat AI

Universities need to shift back to in-person exams as a short term measure to stop students cheating with artificial intelligence.

Professor Matt Bower, interim dean of education at Macquarie University

Universities will need to shift back to in person exams as a short term solution to ensure that students don’t use artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT to help them with online exams, according to a top academic.

Macquarie University interim education dean Matt Bower said in person exams were needed “to ensure that our examinations are reliable and valid” in the new world of free, easily accessible AI programs which can produce, in seconds, well-written and researched essays, computer coding solutions, and accurate answers to science and maths questions.

In an effort to preserve academic integrity universities and other educators are being forced to make rapid decisions before classes start this year. The NSW and Queensland public school systems have just announced temporary access bans on ChatGPT when school starts to prevent students using the platform to write assignments.

However Professor Bower warned that universities could get dragged into a losing arms race if they use one of the growing number of AI detection programs, such as the US-developed GPTZero, to try to uncover cheating.

“If we take a cops and robbers approach to trying to catch people out we will shift our energy into a unproductive dispute,” he said.

He said that longer term solutions were needed which recognised the new reality. “We need to prepare our students for a world in which there is increasingly sophisticated AI,” Professor Bower said.

In the longer term university assessments would need to allow AI to be used and concentrate on things which only humans can do .

“Critical thinking, creativity, problem solving and values are still in the domain of humans,” Professor Bower said.

UNSW academic integrity researcher Cath Ellis said that, with classes beginning in a few weeks, there was only so much that universities could do in the short term.

“We need to be thinking longer term,” she said. “I’m encouraging teachers to give some of these (AI) tools a go and see what they are capable of doing and what they are not capable of doing.”

Professor Ellis said academics needed to have conversations with students about which tools were acceptable for which purposes.

She said that longer term, the educational response to AI was not just about changing assessment, but reshaping the curriculum. “What are the skills, knowledge and abilities they need to take with them into the workplace?” Professor Ellis asked.

Jack Goodman, founder of academic writing feedback service Studiosity which is widely endorsed by universities for student use, said that an “enforcer response” to AI cheating only dealt with the consequences and not the cause of academic dishonesty.

He said universities had grown into a “massified” system “where investment in the student experience has failed to keep pace with technology and student needs”.

Mr Goodman urged universities to improve the student learning experience.

“Because students who feel their teachers know them and care about them are far less likely to take a shortcut to pass a unit or cheat their way to a degree,” he said.