UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

A series of Freedom of Information requests shows that students in British universities are increasingly getting busted for using AI to cheat.

After getting responses from 131 universities, The Guardian found that between 2023 and 2024, there were 7,000 cases of students caught using AI to cheat - 5.1 for every 1,000 students. The previous year there were just 1.6 cases per 1,000 students.

When it comes to academic fraud, plagiarism is still the most common offense, the data showed. But since the introduction of easily available AI tools, plagiarism rates have fallen dramatically, and are expected to halve again during this current academic year.

Surprisingly, over a quarter of those halls of higher learning reported that they didn't collect stats on AI cheating as a separate category in 2023–24. Other forms of academic misconduct have remained broadly flat, even as confirmed AI-cheating cases ...