AI has made it ‘close to impossible’ to assess university coursework, regulator says

Office for Students says institutions in England should return to traditional exams and in-person presentations

Universities should go back to traditional exams and in-person presentations to grade students after lecturers complained that AI has made it “close to impossible” to assess coursework, according to an investigation by England’s higher education regulator.

The Office for Students (OfS) said the credibility of degrees from England’s universities was under threat from the prolific use of AI in essays, dissertations and “open book” exams, with students reporting that their peers boasted of using AI undetected by staff.

The regulator warned universities and other higher education institutions that failing to design “valid and reliable measures of students’ knowledge and skills” to combat AI could breach their conditions of registration and lead to sanctions being imposed.

Josh Fleming, the director of strategy and delivery at the OfS, said AI use in higher education “presents a generational risk to the system as it stands, threatening to undermine students’ learning and institutions’ ability to assess them”.

Fleming added: “We need to see far greater efforts to tackle these risks, including far greater use of AI-free assessment.

“The scale and pace of both the challenge and opportunity presents a novel challenge for the sector and us as the regulator. We will continue to work with universities and colleges to help them reap the benefits of AI while avoiding the risks.”

The OfS said many institutions had already redesigned how they assessed students to reduce potential AI misuse, including greater use of in-person written exams or oral examinations known as vivas. Other examples include students critiquing or editing AI-generated output, or “process-based” assessments where students detail how they researched and produced their work.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We expect universities to take this issue seriously and we expect the OfS to both enforce the existing standards effectively, and work at pace to ensure its regulatory framework is explicit, strong and durable on the use of AI.”

The report by the OfS and Advance HE, a charity promoting university governance and teaching, interviewed more than 300 students and staff at 127 universities and colleges this year, to gauge AI policies and use in teaching and assessment.

One academic told the researchers: “AI has put academic integrity at serious risk … coursework is now overwhelmingly written in part, or exclusively, with the help of AI.”

Another university staff member said: “I think we’re realising that a number of our assessments may be unfit for purpose, and that pervasive use of AI may render our assessment of students close to impossible in some areas.”

The survey found that AI use was rife, with students saying their colleagues completed assessments using AI “sometimes in just a few minutes” and received similar grades to those who had completed an assessment without AI.

“Some students described their peers being unable to recall basic details about the assessment they had just submitted,” the report noted.

One student told the researchers: “I’ve had people admit, peer to peer, ‘I wrote this whole essay with ChatGPT’ … then they don’t get caught, they get a good grade probably, and then because it worked the first time, they do it on their next assessment.”

Academics also described receiving large numbers of submissions that looked the same, referenced the same literature and were written in the same style. Others said they believed the assessments used by their institution were not fit for purpose or did not accurately measure students’ knowledge and skills.