Fears grow students are using AI bots like ChatGPT to cheat

Pupils should be made to do some of their coursework 'in class under direct supervision', exam boards have said - amid fears students are cheating their way through school. 

Recently, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT have led to concerns that young people may use them to achieve higher grades.

The program is able to create writing and other content – such as coursework or essays - almost indistinguishable from that of a human.

The Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents the UK's major exam boards, has published guidance for teachers and assessors on 'protecting the integrity of qualifications' in the context of AI use.

Schools should make pupils aware of the risks of using AI and the possible consequences of using it 'inappropriately' in assessment, the guidance said.

It adds: 'Students who misuse AI such that the work they submit for assessment is not their own will have committed malpractice, in accordance with JCQ regulations, and may attract severe sanctions.'

It comes as experts warn schools may need to move to a more 'traditional' version of assessment in the form of exams, rather than coursework, in order to ensure what is produced is the pupil's own work.

Daisy Christodoulou, director of education at No More Marking and who was once hailed as 'Britain's brightest student', revealed teachers had difficulty telling the difference between a short essay written by eight-year-olds and ChatGPT.

Speaking at a Commons Science and Technology Committee she said: 'We asked our teachers when they were assessing them to see if they could spot them (ChatGPT answers), and basically they couldn't,' she said.

'They were more likely to pick an essay that had been written by a real child and say that had been written by ChatGPT.

'So it writes very good essays that are very hard to detect. It was only eight-year-olds, I know, but we're going to repeat it with some older students.'

When asked whether the technology might mean schools will have to reintroduce more intensified exam and exam environments, she replied: 'Yes I think it does, and I think it should.

'I think that the coming of ChatGPT does just mean that doing any of those assessments in uncontrolled conditions just puts you in a situation where you don't know if the work has been completed by the student or not. So that's why I think you have to have exams.

'We do need to have a good, hard look at how we assess and I do think that ChatGPT has huge implications for continuous assessment coursework. I think it's very hard to see how that continues.

'I think some of the people making decisions don't realise quite how powerful a tool ChatGPT is - that it is capable of producing original, very hard to detect, relatively high-quality responses to any kind of question.

'And they won't be perfect, but they'll be good enough for a lot of students. And I think that means that uncontrolled assessments where you're not sure how the student has produced that work become very, very problematic.

'So I do think we have to be thinking that there is a value in having exams and having those traditional exams where you know that it is their own work and their own thinking.–Daily Mail