AI leading to a surge in cheating in schools and anti-scam taskforce to tackle online scammers. Video / NZ Herald
A leading principal says artificial intelligence is giving students new ways to cheat at “frightening” speed amid a surge in exam breaches.
Education officials last year investigated 876 exam breaches – a 250% increase on the 345 in 2019 – with 738 of those being proven,a NZ Qualifications Authority (NZQA) report in May found.
Fifty-nine investigations were officially linked to AI use but it likely played a part in many more breaches, teachers say.
Ten students were accused of taking too long in the toilet, 88 had phones with them in exams, and one had multiple handwriting styles in their paper.
Auckland had the most investigations overall with 389, while Gisborne had the highest rate of investigations at 2.4 per 1000 students, followed by Nelson/Marlborough at 1.8 per 1000 students.
Patrick Drumm, principal of Auckland’s Mt Albert Grammar, said that with AI-models improving every month, schools were struggling to keep up.
Most teachers had studied traditional teaching techniques and now needed expert guidance on how to protect assessment integrity and fairness in the new age.
“You think you can set up a policy around [AI], but it’s gone by lunchtime,” he said.
Mount Albert Grammar School headmaster Patrick Drumm. Photo / Supplied
The 876 exam breach investigations included 206 related to “authenticity”, which former Secondary Principals’ Association president Vaughan Couillault believed likely involved some use of AI.
Another 13 cases involved students with exams that had a “text increase in short time period”, presumably meaning they were accused of copying and pasting from somewhere else.
Seventy-one cases involved “navigating away from the digital platform”, suggesting that even opening a new window on a computer could offer a momentary but powerful way to cheat.
Drumm said AI’s “brave new world” left schools grappling with ethical questions and technology predictions that wider society hadn’t even fully addressed.
If humans come to rely on AI to do most of their writing in the future, for example, Drumm questioned what skills were most important for students to be learning now.
For instance, should they be assessed on how well they could write an essay themselves or on the quality of work they could get AI to prepare for them, he asked.
And how much change was needed before AI-generated brainstorming ideas were no longer considered plagiarised?
“What degree of modification is required ... when does it become someone else’s work versus your own?” Drumm said.
On the flip side, getting AI to prepare high-quality work likely required good foundations in comprehension and logic that were typically best built using traditional methods like reading and handwriting, Drumm said.
“We’ve had really good evidence around ... the whole process of the physical mechanics of writing being huge in terms of the cognitive process.”
Despite the challenges, NZQA deputy chief executive Jann Marshall said there were hundreds of thousands of entries in the country’s NCEA and NZ Scholarship each year.
The vast majority of students worked hard and fully complied with all rules, she said.
Secondary students needed to understand AI ahead of a future where it “will be an integral part of many industries”.
Her team were aware it brought opportunities and risks, she said.
They had created guidelines to help teachers by encouraging them to regularly check-in and observe progress on essays and other tasks, to chat to students about their conclusions and seek “careful” assistance from AI detectors.
When it came to exams overseen by the NZQA, the group did not allow the use of generative AI at all, Marshall said.
NZQA also had a range of other measures in place to “identify attempted breaches of the rules”.
Marshall said she couldn’t reveal them for security reasons.
Earlier this year, she said the aim was to have students use AI “appropriately to brainstorm information, not replicate or simply transfer the information into an assessment“.
She said 418 of the 876 breaches investigated resulted in action being taken.
Sometimes students were issued warning letters but still received their results.
“So for example, if a student takes notes into the assessment, but the notes wouldn’t help them in the assessment, then that’s often a warning letter.”
