this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating – and experts says these are tip of the iceberg

Thousands of university students in the UK have been caught misusing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools in recent years, while traditional forms of plagiarism show a marked decline, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

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.

Figures up to May suggest that number will increase again this year to about 7.5 proven cases per 1,000 students – but recorded cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, according to experts.

The data highlights a rapidly evolving challenge for universities: trying to adapt assessment methods to the advent of technologies such as ChatGPT and other AI-powered writing tools.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

No shit. I’m in postsecondary as an instructor and it is so beyond frustrating . They all use it, they don’t want to read or learn.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 44 minutes ago

None of our institutions encourage "learning"; they are built to encourage "making the grade". Why they need the grade and what it represents is irrelevant to students. It's just a barrier that society has placed in front of them.

There needs to be something done about how we, as a society, approach education because whatever we are doing ain't working. It apparently only worked at a very surface level and that was only because A.I. wasn't available yet to be an easy out.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It's not cheating, it's vibe studying

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

If using ChatGPT for tests is cheating, I’d argue calculators are cheating for math.. it’s just another tool at people’s disposal as far as I’m concerned.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

calculators isnt a computer where you can search up the answers lol. its literally plug in a formula and numbers and it spits out whatever you input, it doesnt give you the answer to a question. Also many math questions are abstracts, so you have to discern the correct forumla/mathematics to use.

[–] Semjaza 5 points 3 hours ago

Really? A calculator only puts out what you put in.

A LLM gives you what has been put into it by it's massive illegally scraped training dataset.

A better question would be is there a point to closed book/non-reference material exams, and in that setting is there a place for LLMs?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

How can you be so dense?

Using a calculator for math is cheating unless it has been explicitly allowed. Which it isn't until higher grades because before that, people are supposed to do math without a calculator. Which they should do to get a proper understanding about the subject.

The same holds for literally any tool. If the goal is to get the students to be able to convincingly communicate their thoughts or to see if they understood a topic by making them explain it, having them use chatgpt accomplished nothing and just wastes everybody's time. If the goal is to see if they can produce enough bullshit to satisfy an average public administration, then letting them use llms might be valid. Just like any other tool, it's legitimate to allow llms or not, based on whatever is supposed to end up in a student's head. But using it without it being allowed is cheating, simple as that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Not from UK and also not a student, but imo this is more a school problem than the students. The teachers just do not understand how to cope with AI. With open note exam and traditional exam style questions, I would be an idiot if I do use AI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

professors were already on the bordering of using AI, when before they just use software to look at your essay and any cheating it might detect.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

Three magic words - "Open Note Exam"

Students prep their own notes (usually limited to "X pages"), take them into the exam, gets to use them for answering questions.

Tests application and understanding over recall. If students AI their notes, they will be useless.

Been running my exams as open note for 3 years now - so far so good. Students are happy, I don't have to worry about cheating, and the university remains permanently angry because they want everything to be coursework so everyone gets an AI A ^_^

[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Maybe we need a new way to approach school. I don't think I agree with turning education into a competition where the difficulty is curved towards the most competitive creating a system that became so difficult that students need to edge each other out any way they can.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I guess what I don’t understand is what changed? Is everything homework now? When I was in school, even college, a significant percentage of learning was in class work, pop quizzes, and weekly closed book tests. How are these kids using LLMs so much for class if a large portion of the work is still in the classroom? Or is that just not the case anymore? It’s not like ChatGPT can handwrite an essay in pencil or give an in person presentation (yet).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

University was always guided self-learning, at least in the UK. The lecturers are not teachers. The provide and explain material, but they're not there to hand-hold you through it.

University education is very different to what goes on at younger ages. It has to be when a class is 300 rather than 30 people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

WTF? 300? There were barely 350 people in my graduating class of high school and that isn’t a small class for where I am from. The largest class size at my college was maybe 60. No wonder people use LLMs. Like, that’s just called an auditorium at that point, how could you even ask a question? Self-guided isn’t supposed to mean “solo”.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

There'd be smaller tutorial sessions. I'd have a once a week 5 on 1 session with my tutor for an hour. Lab sessions might be 30-40 people. Specialist courses would be 100 people.

...but yes, lectures were 300+ people for the core subjects. Generally you and your peers would work together on making sense of it all. You'd find that some people understood some subjects better than others and you'd help each other out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

You can ask questions in auditorium classes.

The 300+ student courses typically were high volume courses like intro or freshman courses.

Second year cuts down significantly in class size, but also depends on the subject.

3rd and 4th year courses, in my experience, were 30-50 students

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

You can ask questions in auditorium classes.

I am going to be honest; I don’t believe you. I genuinely don’t believe that in a class with more people than minutes in the session that a person could legitimately have time to interact with the professor.

The 60 person class I referred to was a required lecture portion freshman science class with a smaller lab portion. That we could ask questions in the lab was the only reason 60 people was okay in the lecture and even then the professor said he felt it was too many people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Your disbelief is strange.

People occasionally ask questions in lectures. Anything they are confused about gets covered off in tutorials later. Lecturers and tutors both have office hours where further questions are asked.

If a student has learning difficulties or special requirements there is pastoral care available for that.

It's really not mysterious.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

That’s fine if you don’t, but you can ask questions.

They even have these clickers that allow the professor to ask “snap questions” with multiple choice answers so they can check understanding

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

I can’t believe people go into debt for that experience. I would be livid.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Actually caught, or caught with a "ai detection" software?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago

"Read this document. Was it made with Ai?"

"Yes, it sure was! Great catch!"

"You're wrong, I just wrote it myself 15 minutes ago."

"Teeheehee oopsie! Silly me! I'll try to do better next time then! Is there anything else I can help with?"

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Surprise motherfuckers. Maybe don't give grant money to LLM snakeoil fuckers, and maybe don't allow mass for-profit copyright violations.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago

And thats just the ones that were stupid enough to get caught realistically I think this is more like 5% instead of 0.5%

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago (4 children)

In some regard I don’t think it should be considered cheating. Don’t beat me up yet, I’m old and think AI sucks at most things.

AI typically outputs crap. So why does this use of a new and widely available tech get called out differently?

Using Google (in the don’t be evil timeframe) wasn’t cheating when open book was permitted. Using the text book was cheating on a closed book test. In some cases using a calculator was cheating.

Is it cheating if you write a paper completely on your own and use spell check and grammar check within word? What if a grammarly type extension is used? It’s a slippery slope that advances with technology.

I remember testing and assignments that were designed to make it harder to cheat, show your work, for math type approaches. Quizzes and short essays that make demonstration of the subject matter necessary.

Why doesn’t the education environment adapt to this? For writing assignments, maybe they need to be submitted with revision history so the teacher can see it wasn’t all done in one go via an LLM.

The quick answer responses are somewhat like using Wikipedia for a school paper. Don’t site Wikipedia and don’t use the generated text for anything but a base understanding of the topic. Now go use all the sources these provided, to actually do the assignment.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Chatgpt output isn't crap anymore. I teach introductory physics at a university and require fully written out homework, showing math steps, to problems that I've written. I wrote my own homework many years ago when chegg blew up and all major textbook problems were on chegg.

Just two years ago, chatgpt wasn't so great at intro physics and math. It's pretty good now, and shows all the necessary steps to get the correct answer.

I do not grade my homework on correctness. Students only need to show me effort that they honestly attempted each problem for full credit. But it's way quicker for students to simply upload my homework pdf to chatgpt and copy down the output than give it their own attempt.

Of course, doing this results in poor exam performance. Anecdotally, my exams from my recent fall semester were the lowest they've ever been. I put two problems on my final that directly came from from my homework, one of them being the problem that made me realize roughly 75% of my class was chatgpt'ing all the homework as chatgpt isn't super great at reading angles from figures, and it's like these students had never even seen a problem like it before.

I'm not completely against the use of AI for my homework. It could be like a tutor that students ask questions to when stuck. But unfortunately that takes more effort than simply typing "solve problems 1 through 5, showing all steps, from this document" into chatgpt.

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