AI Fuels Return To In‑Person Tests
- Concerns about AI-assisted cheating are pushing professors and employers toward in-person, proctored assessments. - Responses include calls from academics to restore in-person exams and reports that graduating students widely use AI tools for coursework. - Institutions are reconsidering take-home and remote evaluations to ensure assessments measure unaided candidate performance ( ).
Professors and employers are bringing back in-person tests because generative AI has made take-home work and remote screening harder to trust. (browndailyherald.com, computerworld.com) At Brown University, economics professor Roberto Serrano said he will return to in-person exams in all his courses after a take-home midterm in ECON 1170 produced a 98% median and 40 perfect scores out of 86 students. He told The Brown Daily Herald that past midterm averages in the course usually ran from 65 to 85. (browndailyherald.com) Serrano said he saw answers that matched a “very convoluted contradiction argument” generated by ChatGPT, while assistant professor Bobby Pakzad-Hurson said he no longer has confidence in take-home exams and has reduced the weight of homework after seeing “perfect performance” there and weaker test results. (browndailyherald.com) The shift reaches beyond one department. Stanford said in October 2025 that its Academic Integrity Working Group was in the third year of a proctoring pilot, with more than 50 courses participating that quarter, and it recommended in-person formats such as oral exams and in-class writing for high-stakes assessments where instructors want to limit AI use. (stanford.edu) Students’ own AI use helps explain why schools are reworking assessments. A 2025 Higher Education Policy Institute and Kortext survey of 1,041 full-time undergraduates found 92% had used generative AI in some form and 88% had used it for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. (hepi.ac.uk) Business Insider described the class of 2026 as the first cohort to spend nearly all of college with ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022 during their freshman year. The story said some students learned to use AI as a study and work tool, while others risked leaving school with weaker reasoning and writing skills if they outsourced coursework. (businessinsider.com) Hiring managers are responding in similar ways. Computerworld reported in August 2025 that Gartner found 72.4% of recruiting leaders were conducting interviews in person to combat fraud, and that Google, Cisco and McKinsey had reinstated some face-to-face interview rounds. (computerworld.com) Cisco said remote work and better AI tools have made it easier for fake candidates to slip into hiring pipelines, while Google said it banned AI tools during virtual interviews for engineers so it could measure fundamental coding skills. McKinsey said in-person meetings also help assess judgment, empathy, creativity and connection. (computerworld.com) Schools are not moving in one direction only. Stanford said instructors should also prepare students for jobs where AI will be integral, and Cisco said candidates may use AI in interviews when an exercise explicitly allows it. (stanford.edu, computerworld.com) What is returning is not every old rule from before the pandemic, but the parts of testing that let a professor or recruiter watch someone think in real time. In classrooms and hiring loops, that now means more blue books, more whiteboards and more seats in the room. (browndailyherald.com, stanford.edu, computerworld.com)
