Rivelato: migliaia di studenti universitari del Regno Unito hanno sorpreso a imbrogliare usando AI
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jun/15/thousands-of-uk-university-students-caught-cheating-using-ai-artificial-intelligence-survey
di ThatchersDirtyTaint
16 commenti
I don’t know why they didn’t see this coming.
Even when I was at uni, 5 years ago, people would try to cheat their way out of writing essays.
I’m applying for jobs and apparently one of the things I can do to make my applications stand out is to not use AI. It’s absolutely insane how lazy people have become.
PSA for university students, if you can do your coursework with ChatGPT/AI it probably means your future job can be done via ChatGPT/AI.
Oh and watch assessment move back to being 100% exam based wherever possible.
My girlfriend is a university lecturer and she caught other lecturers using it to mark student papers.
_caught_ being the key word.
Less than <5% of cases will be caught and punished.
Back in the 90s at uni people were posting their homework on news groups, memory may be wrong here but I feel like alt.science.math was a popular one. Also “ask dr math” was another place you could get strangers to do your homework.
Point is – cheating at uni isn’t a new thing. It’s just easier to get caught now
The article doesn’t say what ‘cheating’ entails.
Using it to write an entire essay? Probably cheating, but ChatGPT is terrible at writing from scratch.
Redrafting bits of text, getting feedback, brainstorming ideas – not cheating imo
Students at uni were cheating before the internet was widespread. I remember one particularly lazy student who would wait in the common room for a suitable person to come so that she could copy their assignment. She knew better than to ask me.
I’ve decided to go into industry rather than continue on in academia after my PhD partly because of this.
Its infuriating to hold seminars where most of the group cannot speak a word of English, but then they submit work for review in perfect English which is blatantly AI created. There is still integrity in academia, but not at undergrad and postgrad levels.
Well, duh. Did they think AI would just be dismissed by the Uni students? It’s a tool a lot of my friends love to use (though the validity of its answers are varied). One of my lecturers in a coding module told us to use it, because that’s one thing it’s not too bad with.
Yeh. Enjoy your freedoms with things like ChatGPT while it lasts because in the future you’re probably going to need a special license to use this shit.
I’m not surprised, my 12 year old cousin has been doing his homework with chatgpt, why wouldn’t uni students also be doing that?
Practically every single student at uni uses AI to cheat on assignments.
It’s a tool that people just need to learn properly. I imagine this is how it was when calculators came in.
I did my undergrad and first postgrad without it. I am dyslexic and found that having someone read over my work and ask what I was trying to say and help me structure it helps me go from Cs to As. That and when I first properly learnt how to do a literature review and to find resources and properly put them all together.
What AI helps me with is having someone to help me convey what I want to say clearly. It hallucinates too much to ever write an essay. The essays would be shit and would never pass at undergraduate or post graduate level. It is also very good at creating the outline and structure for me, which used to take hours of reading and thinking to come up with. I still have to do the research and synthesis to put the meat on the bones though.
>A survey of academic integrity violations found almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating using AI tools in 2023-24, equivalent to 5.1 for every 1,000 students. That was up from 1.6 cases per 1,000 in 2022-23.
Be interesting what proven means in this context. AI tools assessing if AI has been used have been shown to be as useful as flipping a coin.
I know someone lost their phd because of this. The lecturers couldn’t prove it for ages until one of them clicked on a picture in one of her reports and adjusted the crop, it displayed the crop around the image as ChatGPT.
Few thoughts on this –
1. Presumably they were “caught” because ChatGPT writes fairly obvious word salad that is often littered with errors.
2. I don’t see why you’d do this? You’re only cheating yourself. The reason higher education involves writing essays is because writing things out and explaining them generally means they stick in your head and you learn to think about them critically.
3. I hope we’re not seeing too many false-positives where students are being wrongly accused of using AI, because we’ve already seen this happen. Seen a few threads about it on the UK Legal Advice sub – fairly obvious the person wasn’t using AI, but a lecturer used a dodgy AI detection website that was throwing up way too many false positives. Students often have an annoying habit of writing like AI when doing essays, and this long long predates ChatGPT.