It would be better for universities to stop thinking of students as numbers and more as real people,”

The experience, in many ways, was emblematic of his time at the university, he says.

If anything, the AI cheating crisis has exposed how transactional the process of gaining a degree has become. Higher education is increasingly marketised; universities are cash-strapped,

They all agreed that a shift to different forms of teaching and assessment – one-to-one tuition, viva voces and the like – would make it far harder for students to use AI to do the heavy lifting.

One conveyed frustration that her university didn’t seem to be taking academic misconduct seriously any more; she had received a “whispered warning” that she was no longer to refer cases where AI was suspected to the central disciplinary board.

using it for an “overview of new concepts”, “as a collaborative coach”, or “supporting time management”.

“I’ve grown desensitised to it,” he says. “Half the students in my class are giving presentations that are clearly not their own work.

sent over a suspiciously polished piece of work. The student, David explained, struggled with his English, “and that’s not their fault, but the report was honestly the best I’d ever seen”.

Researchers at the University of Reading recently conducted a blind test in which ChatGPT-written answers were submitted through the university’s own examination system: 94% of the AI submissions went undetected and received higher scores than those submitted by the humans.

Many academics seem to believe that “you can always tell” if an assignment was written by an AI, that they can pick up on the stylistic traits associated with these tools.

the experience “messed with my mental health,” he says. His confidence was severely knocked. “I wasn’t even using spellcheckers to help edit my work because I was so scared.”

“humanisers”, such as CopyGenius and StealthGPT, the latter which boasts that it can produce undetectable content and claims to have helped half a million students produce nearly 5m papers.

a generative AI researcher at British University Vietnam, believes there are “significant limitations” to AI detection software. “All the research says time and time again that these tools are unreliable,”

a student with autism spectrum disorder whose work had been falsely flagged by a detection tool as being written by AI.

One study at Stanford found that a number of AI detectors have a bias towards non-English speakers, flagging their work 61% of the time, as opposed to 5% of native English speakers

Since then, Turnitin has processed more than 130m papers and says it has flagged 3.5m as being 80% AI-written. But it is also not 100% reliable

Turnitin, which scans submissions for signs of plagiarism. In 2023, Turnitin launched a new AI detection tool that assesses the proportion of the text that is likely to have been written by AI.

In the struggle to stuff the genie back in the bottle, universities have become locked in an escalating technological arms race, even turning to AI themselves to try to catch misconduct.

More than half of students now use generative AI to help with their assessments

Many such tools are now available, such as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Perplexity. These large language models absorb and process vast datasets, much like a human brain, in order to generate new material.

Two years have passed since ChatGPT was released into the world.

ever created an account with ChatGPT? How about Grammarly? Albert didn’t feel able to defend himself until the end, by which point he was on the verge of tears.

It might not have been his best effort, but he’d worked hard on the essay. He certainly didn’t use AI to write it