After an era of take-home exams, primarily due to COVID-19, in-person exams are returning to campus. For some professors, suspected cheating and AI use is behind the shift.
Since large language model tools like ChatGPT became commonplace and freely available, some measures suggest cheating has become more common. Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detection program which released an AI detection feature in April 2023, reported that more than one in ten papers reviewed in its first year were at least partially written using AI.
APMA 1650: “Statistical Inference I” and BIOL 0470: “Genetics” have both returned to in-person exams this semester.
“I grew tired of dealing with suspected academic dishonesty (and) students collaborating or straight-up having AI generate their solutions,” wrote Applied Math Lecturer Amalia Culiuc PhD’16, an instructor for APMA 1650, in an email to The Herald. “There was always some plausible deniability: friend groups all had the exact same answer because, according to them, they had studied together.”
Culiuc mentioned that AI usage is “harder to detect” in computational assignments. She added that she most clearly saw AI usage in APMA 1210: “Operations Research: Deterministic Models,” a class that requires writing proofs.
“It’s very hard to explain — hence why it’s so hard to prove — but you can really tell when a text doesn’t quite sound human-generated,” she wrote. “I think students literally copied and pasted the entire exam into ChatGPT and had it output answers.”
She added she had even seen the phrase “as an AI language model” in her students’ work, indicating they did not do any proofreading.
Culiuc added she often had to turn a blind eye to blatantly obvious cheating, due to the “lack of admissible evidence” to prove cheating had occurred.
“Interestingly, my student evaluations included quite a few comments about how take-home exams had made them less likely to engage with the material and how some had observed their classmates cheat but didn’t feel like they could say anything,” she wrote. “That really made me feel like I was doing the right thing going back to in-person.”
ANTH 0300: “Culture and Health,” a class that has essay-based midterms, also switched to in-person blue book exams after a few semesters of online exams. Associate Professor of Anthropology Katherine Mason cited ChatGPT as a major reason for this switch.
“If an exam is given online, the temptation to cheat using ChatGPT would be really high,” Mason wrote in an email to The Herald. “Good old paper solves this problem and that’s why I made the change I did.”
Professor of Biology Mark Johnson, an instructor for genetics, instead attributed the switch to the “simplicity” of in-person exams.
“During the COVID pandemic, we taught genetics completely remotely, so we came up with a way to do exams online,” Johnson said. “It’s really flexible for students with accessibility issues and it made taking the exam easier, more accessible and more possible.”
He noted that using take-home exams came with its downsides. Students now had to come up with a place where it could be quiet and have access to technology. Take-home exams “posed a bunch of challenges to learning,” he said.
He added that the genetics teaching team wanted to give students an opportunity to “just focus on reading the question” and “doing the best they can.”
“Our class really emphasizes taking concepts that we talk about in class and applying them to genetics problems,” he said. “If you sit down to do that at your computer in your dorm room with access to the entire Internet, it’s easy to get distracted and do a bunch of things that you think might be helpful but are getting between you and the learning.”
For Johnson, the first in-person genetics midterm this fall turned out to be a “good decision.”
He explained that in-person exams ensure everyone has access to the same set of resources, unlike take-home exams, where there was ambiguity on what resources were allowed.
“Bringing the course back to in-person and on paper, it really simplifies all of that,” Johnson said. “The only resources you have are the pencil that you’ve brought and the paper that's in front of you.”
“It allows us to focus on a particular type of learning experience that we want during the exam,” he added.
Culiuc mentioned that the switch to in-person exams has improved student learning. In APMA 1210, for instance, she is using the same notes that she had used during Fall 2023, when exams were take-home. Yet, students are now catching errors that no one had noticed the first time around, indicating to her that students are engaging more with the material.
“I think (students) take the class more seriously: they organize more study groups, ask more clarifying questions and read through the notes more carefully,” she wrote. “I’d say the big shift is in the perceived difficulty — I’m not giving any fewer As than when the exams were take-home, but an A is now less of an expectation and more of a reward for consistent hard work throughout.”
Johnson also noted that the difficulty of the course did not change due to the shift to in-person exams.
“Genetics is not a class that really emphasizes memorization,” he said, adding that the exams focus on “implementation of ideas to solve problems.” He added if the class was more memorization and fact-based, then ChatGPT would likely have been a larger issue.
Shrey Mehta ’26, a student who took genetics last fall and is currently a tutor for the class, said he believes the difficulty of the class did not change substantially.
“There’s definitely a mindset shift and people are more stressed about it being in-person,” Mehta said. “I think the professors made (course content) pretty fair this year and maintained the difficulty of the exam, from what I heard from my tutor students.”
Culiuc mentioned that she does not think “all AI usage is evil,” and has encouraged students to utilize AI to generate practice problems for exams.
Still, “when you read your 5th AI generated proof in a row, warn the student not to do it again and then they apologize with an AI generated email, you start wondering what the point of your job even is,” she said. “It goes without saying that that student’s email did not, in fact, find me well.”
Claire Song is a Senior Staff Writer covering science & research. She is a sophomore from California studying Applied Math-Biology. She likes to drink boba in her free time.
