In-Person Classes Aren’t Safe From AI Cheating Boom

Online courses have long bred fears of rampant academic dishonesty, exacerbated in recent years by the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital technology. But in-person courses may be just as vulnerable, according to one biology professor at Arizona State University who conducted an audit of her department’s class offerings.

A preliminary analysis of syllabi for 21 in-person ASU biology courses during fall 2025 shows that on average, 45 percent of points for those courses can be easily earned by employing digital cheating methods, including some powered by artificial intelligence.

“We were measuring student effort by class attendance or by having them watch a video and answering a set of questions before class. That was before every single student had access to ChatGPT at our university,” Sara Brownell, the professor who conducted the analysis, told Inside Higher Ed. “Now they can just copy and paste the question into that and get the answers. We’re using students’ grades as a reflection of their learning and effort in class, and AI, other technology and increased academic dishonesty [are] undermining that.”

But ChatGPT and similar large language models are not the only digital cheating tools students are using, Brownell said.

A self-described “elder millennial,” she enlisted a graduate student and several undergraduates to help her research whether current best practices for biology education are still effective as cheating becomes easier; over the past 25 years, science education has moved away from primarily assessing learning through high-stakes testing and toward rewarding students for active learning and participation.

While Brownell has supported the active learning movement, she said she realized last year that many of the students enrolled in her large, in-person biology course weren’t attending class—but receiving participation points anyway by using an electronic clicker, a common tool that allows students to answer in-class questions remotely. Some students even answer questions for their absent classmates.

“Yes, I cheat on participation,” one student told Brownell’s research group. “Participation made up a really big part of our grade. I wasn’t about to sacrifice points that I might need in the future if I’m not doing well on a test. It’s nice to have that safety blanket and there’s really no reason to not have a really good grade in participation.”

In addition to gaming digital clickers and using large language models to generate answers to test and homework questions, Brownell also learned that students were sharing answers with each other via group chats; discreetly snapping pictures of test material with smartphones, smart glasses and smart watches and looking up answers online; and, for online courses, increasingly instructing agentic AI browsers to complete all the assignments.

“We always expect some level of cheating and we try to monitor it,” said Brownell, who took an anonymous poll of her students last year to find out how many were resorting to a variety of dishonest tactics to complete their assignments. “But I was shocked by the prevalence of student cheating.”

Heightened Temptation

Brownell said that given how easy digital technology has made cheating, she understands the allure.

“It’s easy to blame students, but when it’s 9:45 p.m. and you have an assignment due in 15 minutes and you just finished a shift at your job and you’re exhausted, it’s just too easy and too tempting to take that question and feed it into AI,” she said. “The temptation to cheat is not only really high, but if a student is competing against another student who is cheating, they almost feel like they have to cheat to be able to keep up with that other student.”

Brownell’s research also found that students devise ways to cheat on some exams, too. While they said it’s difficult—but not impossible—to cheat on a proctored exam, they have no trouble getting around a locked-down browser that’s supposed to prevent cheating on an exam delivered remotely.

As frustrating and disappointing as these findings may be for faculty, Brownell said they need to confront the escalation of digital cheating tools and address the threat they pose even to in-person learning.

“This is fundamentally the responsibility of instructors,” she said. “We can’t be just giving away points for cheating, and we can’t just shrug our shoulders and say it’s OK that 50 percent of our course points can be cheated on.”

One of the best ways to address such concerns for now is to administer in-person, pencil-and-paper exams and take the time to double-check the legitimacy of students’ in-person participation, Brownell said.

“I want to give my students participation points for coming to class, engaging with the material and working hard in class. That’s going to be helpful for their learning and I don’t want it all based on exams,” she added. “But if instructors aren’t willing to put in that extra time and effort to make sure that students aren’t cheating on those aspects of the course, then maybe they do need to move to all high-stakes exams in person.”