England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), has declared that artificial intelligence has rendered standard coursework grading "close to impossible." The warning follows an investigation by the OfS and Advance HE, which interviewed more than 300 students and staff at 127 universities and colleges this year. Josh Fleming, the director of strategy and delivery at the OfS, stated that AI use in higher education "presents a generational risk to the system as it stands, threatening to undermine students’ learning and institutions’ ability to assess them." The regulator explicitly warned that failing to design "valid and reliable measures of students’ knowledge and skills" could breach registration conditions and lead to sanctions being imposed on institutions.
Academic integrity under threat
The survey found that AI use was rife, with students reporting that their colleagues completed assessments using AI "sometimes in just a few minutes" and received similar grades to those who had completed an assessment without AI. One student told the researchers: "I’ve had people admit, peer to peer, ‘I wrote this whole essay with ChatGPT’ … then they don’t get caught, they get a good grade probably, and then because it worked the first time, they do it on their next assessment." Academics described receiving large numbers of submissions that looked the same, referenced the same literature and were written in the same style. Another university staff member said: "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." This widespread mimicry clearly undermines the credibility of degrees from England’s universities.
Shifting to traditional methods
The OfS recommended that universities return to traditional exams and in-person presentations to grade students effectively. Many institutions have already redesigned how they assessed students to reduce potential AI misuse, including greater use of in-person written exams or oral examinations known as vivas. Other examples include students critiquing or editing AI-generated output, or "process-based" assessments where students detail how they researched and produced their work. A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We expect universities to take this issue seriously and we expect the OfS to both enforce the existing standards effectively, and work at pace to ensure its regulatory framework is explicit, strong and durable on the use of AI." The sector must now implement these changes rapidly to maintain trust in academic qualifications.
