Minister targets AI cheating with monitoring and oral exams

Education Minister Magnus Heunicke is presenting a package of measures to prevent students from using artificial intelligence to cheat their way to higher grades in exams at upper secondary schools and other youth education programmes, DR reports.

The package will encourage schools to monitor students’ screens during written exams using monitoring tools. There are currently no guidelines for such monitoring.

Schools will also be encouraged to have students complete more assignments on campus, giving teachers a better opportunity to follow their work and provide feedback on how they solve tasks.

Students on the two-year hf programme will also have to give an oral defence of their SSO, or Major Written Assignment. Students already defend this assignment orally at general upper secondary schools and at HHX, HTX and EUX programmes.

“Unfortunately, we can see that AI is being misused and that students are cheating with AI at our upper secondary schools. So we have to act and ensure that people cannot use AI to cheat their way to better grades. In the end, they are only cheating themselves,” Heunicke said.

The package follows reports from several upper secondary schools across the country about AI-related cheating. Schools have also said students have become worse at writing, doing arithmetic and thinking independently because they have used AI for school assignments.

Maja Bødtcher-Hansen, chair of Danske Gymnasier, which represents the country’s general upper secondary schools and two-year hf programmes, welcomed the measures. She is also principal of Frederiksberg Gymnasium.

“All three things are measures that can be implemented here and now,” she said, highlighting the proposal for hf students to give an oral defence of their SSO assignment.

She said the oral defence would create greater certainty around the exam because teachers currently receive assignments they do not know whether students wrote themselves. At the same time, students who did write their assignments themselves may worry that their teachers do not believe them.

The Danish Upper Secondary School Students’ Association also welcomed the package, but said the minister had focused too heavily on cheating.

“It is of course a problem. But we cannot organise upper secondary education in a way that focuses only on cheating and not on using artificial intelligence responsibly,” said Oscar Tønsberg Hoffmann, the association’s chair.

He described the proposals as “three relatively small changes” and said he wanted more fundamental changes to how AI is used in upper secondary education.

Students at Aalborg Cathedral School, which offers both a general upper secondary programme and an hf programme, were divided over the plan. Mohammed Hassan said stricter rules could be necessary because students also need to learn.

Marie Nielsen Buje said the current rules were already somewhat strict. She agreed that AI should not be used during exams, but said it should be allowed as a learning aid.

Linn Van Zanden said she could not concentrate as well at school as at home and therefore completed many assignments there. Having to do more work at school would be stressful for her, she said.

In addition to the immediate package, the government plans to develop an overall national strategy for AI across the school and education sector.