Students are relying on AI so heavily that universities are being forced to fundamentally rethink how they grade their work.

England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students, is warning universities that they may need to replace traditional take-home essays and open-book exams with supervised assessments that prevent students from relying on artificial intelligence to do their work.

AI-detection tools are too unreliable to consistently determine whether students have used the technology, the OfS said in a report published Wednesday.

Indeed, studies have found that people struggle to distinguish AI-generated imagery from the real thing, while commercial AI-detection tools used to assess writing are far from perfect and can produce false positives. AI systems are also becoming more sophisticated, making reliable detection increasingly difficult.

Rather than trying to detect AI use, universities may need to abandon certain assessment formats, particularly the “unsupervised, noncontrolled formats” like take-home essays and open-book exams that the report says make up a “significant proportion of assessments used in the sector.”

“In our School, I think we’re realising that a number of our assessments may be unfit for purpose, and that pervasive use of AI may render our assessment of students close to impossible in some areas,” an academic staff member surveyed for the report said.

Universities are increasingly turning to in-person written and oral exams, which make it much harder for students to outsource their work to AI, according to the report. It also points to process-based assessments, which evaluate students at multiple checkpoints, such as a literature review, rather than solely on their final essays.

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