ChatGPT: The End of Online Exam Integrity?
This highlights a critical problem for educators and institutions in maintaining fairness in online exams, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concerns about AI in academia.
The study examined ChatGPT's ability to perform high-level cognitive tasks and generate human-like text, finding it poses a significant threat to online exam integrity in tertiary education due to its realistic output with minimal input.
This study evaluated the ability of ChatGPT, a recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) agent, to perform high-level cognitive tasks and produce text that is indistinguishable from human-generated text. This capacity raises concerns about the potential use of ChatGPT as a tool for academic misconduct in online exams. The study found that ChatGPT is capable of exhibiting critical thinking skills and generating highly realistic text with minimal input, making it a potential threat to the integrity of online exams, particularly in tertiary education settings where such exams are becoming more prevalent. Returning to invigilated and oral exams could form part of the solution, while using advanced proctoring techniques and AI-text output detectors may be effective in addressing this issue, they are not likely to be foolproof solutions. Further research is needed to fully understand the implications of large language models like ChatGPT and to devise strategies for combating the risk of cheating using these tools. It is crucial for educators and institutions to be aware of the possibility of ChatGPT being used for cheating and to investigate measures to address it in order to maintain the fairness and validity of online exams for all students.