Enthüllt: Tausende von Studenten der britischen Universität erwischten Betrug mit KI
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jun/15/thousands-of-uk-university-students-caught-cheating-using-ai-artificial-intelligence-survey
Von ThatchersDirtyTaint
30 Kommentare
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.
I have to write a 300 word thing for work, the temptation is unreal.
Spend an hour or so writing it, or spend 5 minutes writing a good prompt. I’d still have to go through the arseache of editing it either way. I almost certainly won’t do that because it’s not worth the risk but the temptation is absolutely there, so I’m not surprised that students who have to spend dozens of hours most weeks writing essays who have way more opportunities to give in to the temptation find themselves doing it.
I don’t really know what the solution is.
Strewth! I dont believe it! Yes until your Tutor says today we are doing everything VERBALLY, your stuffed!
These people have no idea they’re asking for a lifetime of impostor syndrome
Something that people should fear more than students using AI and being caught is students who haven’t used AI being accused of it by AI detection systems which are usually not always accurate. If you’ve used AI and don’t get caught then great good on you, if you use it and do get caught then karma is a bitch.
But if you’re a student who hasn’t used AI yet your work has been picked up as “AI made” by a detector then you could literally have your grades and work ruined over something that never even happened.
When u first learn maths… You don’t get a calculator. To train a skill. Where and when is important. For me… I find it mad people use got to get an outline or a structure. I love doing that myself. And I hope people at uni will learn to organise their thoughts on their own before they start using AI for it.
I think AI is a great tool to assist, but not straight up replace.
It’s an interesting one that I am heavily involved in professionally. I think we might see a move away from graded essays and back to interviews/professional discussions. For example for many level 3 apprenticeships the apprentice will create a ungraded portfolio based on a mix of research and experience from working. The assessor will then generate questions that are discussed verbally but focuses skills and real examples.
I’ve already seen learners who have generated ‘fake’ examples and have been made to look very silly when they could not talk about in detail these situations. Doesn’t fix all but might be a better direction for some areas.
I am convinced I graduated at just about the worst time — November 2019. Feel free to suggest another time where it was particularly rough.
Too late to the point _everybody_ has a degree, making the achievement a bit redundant and just another universal checkbox in applying for jobs. Degree also attained with the highest annual fees and longest payment period.
Too early where I could just use ChatGPT to buff out a paragraph to hit a certain word count. I’ve also seen videos online of students simply highlighting a question + four multiple choice answers and the AI extension gives you the answer.
Graduated three months before a global pandemic. Lost my graduate job relevant to my degree; have since found work irrelevant to my degree — makes the SFE payments sting with every payslip that I’m actually not in work relating to what I studied. Trying to get back into it but it’s niche, and by 2020 I’m in competition with the following rung of graduates. It’s just impossible in 2025 now — complete runaway train.
If I knew my job today was just going to be generic sales, I would have 100% cheated my entire degree if it meant having an even better social life for those 4 years. The higher education system is compromised and unfair in this country.
Thing that worries me as well .. solid parents who are wealthier and have more time will encourage their kids to think and not just use AI. For the less fortunate there will be no control. Maybe. Could make some inequalities worse rather than better
Literally everyone is using it. You get chatGPT to write an essay, then put it in your own words (or even get chatGPT to do that too!).
I was doing a MSc in GIS and we had a programming with pyrhon module last year, and we could search for each other’s repos on Github. All but a couple were just chatgpt prompts, leaving in the all the comments
The only the way around this is to give a grade based on their contributions during seminars or after an interview-like examination.
Tbf, if I was still at uni I probably would have done the same.
Same old story, new technology. I financed my way thru Uni by writing other people’s essays back in the day.