Last week, protestors rallied outside the largest university in Mexico, chanting, “We demand honesty, not artificial intelligence.” The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) had moved its highly competitive entrance exam online for the first time ever, complete with an AI proctor—and now it seems under that proctor’s not-so-watchful eye, tens of thousands of applicants are suspected to have cheated.
UMAN admits around 50,000 students every year, but more than half of those slots go to students at one of the university’s 14 prep high schools. For the remaining 22,000 spots, prospective students must take the entrance exam. This year, nearly 160,000 applicants sat for the test.
The high-stakes exam has previously been conducted in person with a human proctor. This year, it was moved online to increase access, with two pieces of software employed to keep test-takers honest. The first was LockDown, a browser meant to keep users from accessing any other tabs or programs on their computers during the exam. Then second was an AI proctor created by a company called Territorium, which watched applicants through their webcams to flag any signs of cheating.
Now, experts suspect it may have missed more than a few cheaters.
In the previous five years of entrance exams, only 0.9% of participants scored 110 or higher. This year, that percentage more than quintupled to 5.5%. That big of an increase was immediately suspicious, with applicants and outside experts alike crying foul.
According to the New York Times, one AI specialist, mathematician Raúl Rojas, analyzed the results and estimated that approximately 75,000 of the test-takers—around half of the application pool—may have cheated. Rojas believes that those students may have used a tried-and-true cheating method: “the cheat sheet.”
Though the exam’s AI proctor was supposedly on the lookout for signs of cheating including visible headphones and switched-off microphones, it left plenty of room for academic dishonesty, and social media was circulating strategies for cheating prior to the exam. Those included positioning a second monitor out of the webcam’s field of vision, where test-takers could feed the questions into an AI helper, or hiding headphones underneath long hair.
Territorium has not responded to multiple media outlets’ requests for comment.
UNAM also dug into its own results, creating an expert committee to get to the bottom of things. This week, that committee recommended a “control exam,” a second test for all the applicants who were admitted via the online exam, plus all those whose scores would’ve earned them admission in the past five years.
That means 58,000 applicants have to retake the entrance exam. This time, they’ll do it in person. We can’t imagine why.