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UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating

UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating

beardyw

Comments (182)

  • jimnotgym
    Ask an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home. They would have said 'cheating', even with no concept of AI.Here is what happened. ACCA, one of several accountancy bodies in the UK, charge their students extraordinary sums of money to take their exams. When I took accountancy exams there were 9of 3 hour written exams, in a real building, with real invigilators. All of the bodies at the same time realised that they could charge the same amount, pay Pearson to administer an electronic test and make more money out of their students. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now
  • xnorswap
    This isn't just about AI, the exams were only moved to remote for COVID.There will be a lot of COVID-era qualifications that are treated with a hint of suspicion in the future.Take a look at A-level scores: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-...( direct link to graph: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall... )It's unfortunate for those affected either way. It was a difficult time when drastic measures needed to be taken at short notice.It's right to go back to in-person testing if there is a problem keeping remote exams fair.
  • chollida1
    My wife is a teacher of physics and math for an online highschool. Its very common for kids to go into the in person exam with a mark in the 80s and 90s and get a failing grade on the exam.The web wasn't alwasy that useful for cheating on timed exams as it was essentially like being able to bring in a formula sheet.LLM's changed this such that you can type in the question and get a fully correct answer in a lot of cases.The only solution that I see in education is that in person exams start to represent a larger and larger portion of a students grade such that the mid term and final will be more than 50% of a students grade for most classes going forward due to the gratuitous use of llms by students.
  • recursivedoubts
    I have a dog in this fight as a professor, but I think the AI era may actually (and ironically) help reestablish colleges as a useful tool for employers. We have a significant amount of legacy infrastructure to support in-person testing, and non-digital written exams may be the best way to determine actual competency going forward.I have historically done my computer science classes entirely online, but I am switching to in-person on-paper tests and increasing their weight in my classes to deal with the cheating.As paul graham said: do things that don't scale.
  • blackhaj7
    I think this will go full circle (as the article indicates). Ultimately , the parents are the “customer” of education institutions as they send their kids there with the goal of them getting good grades. For now, getting a good grade regardless of whether you got it honestly or not should result in you getting a job and therefore the parents are happy.But as soon as employers understand that the grades don’t mean anything, they will start prioritising students from places that are more strict e.g. through in person only exams etc.Once this happens, parents, and therefore schools, will start to prioritise this more.The sad part is that a generation of kids are going to pass through school and come out dumb and ill prepared for life while the systems corrects
  • xnx
    This has more to do with being remote than AI, but it's worth asking: If the test meaningfully measures the skills of being an accountant, and AI will get you good grades, why not use AI to "cheat" at doing the job itself?
  • londons_explore
    > Candidates will have to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstancesMy guess is the number of exceptional circumstances is about to explode...
  • lysace
    It can be hard to prevent cheating in person too: A criminal enterprise was uncovered in 2019 in Sweden. They had targeted the local SAT variant (högskoleprovet).Their end customer equipment consisted of a modified mobile phone hidden somewhere private, a necklace that acts like a magnetic coil and small magnets that you place against the eardrum. Then the operation would call the phone while the customer was in the auditorium and give them the correct answers via voice.The answers had been provided by some back office team based on a copy of the test that they had obtained in realtime from some planted source taking the test at the same time, somehow.
  • jvdvegt
  • brainzap
    sadly cheating software can be found on github, easy to install. for example https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy
  • turtleyacht
    > outpacing... safeguardsCalculations must be getting accurate now. Not only questions about vocabulary or domain concepts.
  • general1465
    In the end of the day academia in general should stop relying on exams based on memorization of random facts and start using real world examples of what kind of work student would be working with as an employee. And if student can deliver correct result even when using AI or any other method, and then explain why those results are the way they are, then student has passed.In real world outside of academia, nobody cares how did you get to the result, only thing which matters is if result is correct and if you can explain why it is correct.
  • silexia
    Remote exams should not be allowed anywhere anymore as cheating is ridiculously easy.
  • drnick1
    Until quite recently, it was trivial to cheat on remotely proctored exams. All you had to do is spin up a VM, take the exam inside the VM, and use the host system to look up answers. I believe the main proctoring services now have crude VM checks. You can probably still use a KVM switch or a DP splitter and a buddy...
  • basisword
    In person exams are useless too. I was at a UK university as a mature student about 8 years ago. When exams came around a significant number of people went to the bathroom repeatedly during the 2-3 hour exam clearly to check notes on their phones. There isn't really anything that can be done to stop this other than doing some sort of spot check/search for phones on people mid-exam which would obviously be horribly disruptive.
  • random9749832
    "We are doing what we can to hang on to relevancy as gatekeepers who already held way too much authority over a field". They are going to use AI on the job anyway.This also applies to universities. The world has changed but they have not and they will make sure to try and stay relevant as much as they can to continue to take money.Edit: looks like it will take a while for some people to accept that we are not going back from this. The cat is out of the bag and your certificates are increasingly irrelevant. Sorry if you spent a lot of money and time to get it.