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UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating
- Stancyhd8 10mo agoDo you need quick and reliable hacker service Do you need to catch or hack your cheating spouse and more Henryclarkethicalhacker at g mail com is the solution
- turtleyacht 10mo ago> outpacing... safeguards Calculations must be getting accurate now. Not only questions about vocabulary or domain concepts.
- random9749832 10mo ago"We are doing what we can to hang on to relevancy as gatekeepers who already held way too much authority over a field". They are going to use AI on the job anyway. This also applies to universities. The world has changed but they have not and they will make sure to try and stay relevant as much as they can to continue to take money. Edit: looks like it will take a while for some people to accept that we are not going back from this. The cat is out of the bag and your certificates are increasingly irrelevant. Sorry if you spent a lot of money and time to get it.
- afavour 10mo agoGet back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field. Accounting exams are gatekeeping, yes. The good kind of gatekeeping where you make sure the people doing the job are actually capable. And you have avenues to punish those who fail their clients. > This also applies to universities Eh. I’d say the actual academics are about 1/3 of the university experience. The rest is networking and teaching you how to think and solve problems on a more abstract level. I’d say the people who farm that (and particularly the abstract thinking part) out to AI are going to be the ones left at disadvantage in the future. You’re completely replaceable.
- random9749832 10mo agoAt the end of the day the job market will correct itself accordingly which is what most people who bother going to university or collecting any certificate care about. And right now it is already looking bleak. https://accountancyage.com/2025/09/29/pwcs-graduate-glow-up-meets-a-tougher-market-for-trainee-accountants/ https://accountancyage.com/2025/09/29/pwcs-graduate-glow-up-... Might be time we start adapting the pipeline into employment and start revising the importance of some of these gatekeepers before more people fall into unnecessary debt.
- nottorp 10mo ago> Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field. For exams and other tutorial like material* the LLMs have enough public training data for it to be good enough. * all those vibe coded apps that are 95% boilerplate.
- quesomaster9000 10mo agoI've had no end of problems with accountants regardless of their certifications, they operate in a domain with an incoherent body of contradictory and highly subjective rules yet make it out to be a science. My conclusion as a whole is that accountancy as a profession rarely delivers any actual value to their customers, where much of the job is compliance theater at best.
- ghaff 10mo agoOne of the main issues I had when I took accounting was that you often couldn't figure out things from first principles because the "right" way was whatever the relevant financial accounting standards board said it was. But following that standard is what companies need to do--and therefore has value--even if it's arguably arbitrary (within some general framework).
- design2203 10mo agoI don’t really agree with this. Sure there are standards but there are underlying first principles with some quirks to make things balance.
- ghaff 10mo agoI'm not sure we really disagree. Sure, there are foundational principles but how to handle non-routine transactions aren't necessarily at all obvious.
- Verdex 10mo agoYeah ... that's kind of the point. The money doesn't exist, but the violence people will use if their money is misappropriated is very real. Accounting is loophole patch stacked on loophole patch for thousands and thousands of years. It's not intellectually enriching, but like it has the weight of society going back forever with dire consequences when it fails. That's not nothing even if it's boring from a technological point of view. I think of it sort of like git. Technically, any sort of distributed version control would have served our industry just fine. Git didn't need to win, but things are vastly simplified having basically one version control framework to rule them all.
- nkrisc 10mo agoI don’t think it will be too long before the pendulum swings back towards “real people who actually know the subject”. At that point, I might feel bad for everyone who coasted on AI.
- design2203 10mo agoThe damage has already been done. Much like how if you stop going gym you lose muscle mass, the same happens with knowledge and understanding with the brain.
- nkrisc 10mo agoPeople who have learned how to learn can learn more. People who only used AI never learned how to learn.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoUsing AI is a different skill set that allows you to dive into topics that you otherwise aren’t ready for. I just used it to do a task that would have taken me a couple days of reading up on a different software system that I wasn’t already familiar. Now I have no need to ever really know that system, is that a good thing or not? I don’t know yet. But I had to know lots of basics about how those systems work in general to get the AI to do the thing I wanted, snd it wasn’t a one shot prompt, rather it was an iterative prompt process.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoI touch LaTeX once every 10 years. I'm not going to learn it because I'm not fond of debugging macro processors and have never had a good experience with the language where you have to invoke a stew of packages that will mysteriously stomp on each other. I generated a script the other day to prepare a document in the format I needed. It mostly worked, but the LLM also stumbled on the packages until I could coax a working solution out of it. They're good for these problems where you only need shallow knowledge.
- Verdex 10mo agoCertifications have always been irrelevant for me, but that's only because my goal has always been what I'm capable of doing on my own AND (this one is a biggie) I was unbelievably fortunate to have several people in my career who trusted that I could get the job done. Certifications are about low trust. With the advent of modern LLM tech, trust levels are probably not going up. Nobody needs to hire someone who can use an LLM because if that is the skill they're looking for they can just use the LLM themselves. So if you need to hire someone because the LLM isn't cutting it, then you'll by definition need to be hiring someone who isn't using an LLM. Someone who isn't just using an LLM to make you think that they aren't using an LLM. How is that going to be done? Sounds like a job for certifications to me. Not today's certifications, but a much more in depth, in person, and gatekeepery certification. My guess would be that certifications, unfortunately, will be significantly more relevant in the days of LLMs. Not less.
- gadflyinyoureye 10mo agoIsn't that what the CPA and Bar exams, to use US analogs, do? They are an in-depth test or sets of tests that prove a person has a useful set of knowledge in a given domain.
- jimnotgym 10mo agoAsk an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home. They would have said 'cheating', even with no concept of AI. Here is what happened. ACCA, one of several accountancy bodies in the UK, charge their students extraordinary sums of money to take their exams. When I took accountancy exams there were 9of 3 hour written exams, in a real building, with real invigilators. All of the bodies at the same time realised that they could charge the same amount, pay Pearson to administer an electronic test and make more money out of their students. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now
- warmedcookie 10mo agoSeriously. Kids are going to cheat. It's already easy enough to just throw the test material into the LLM and get a bunch of flash cards on relevant content and memorize that. I Wish I had AI in college.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoYou can also just pay attention and practice
- xnorswap 10mo agoThis isn't just about AI, the exams were only moved to remote for COVID. There will be a lot of COVID-era qualifications that are treated with a hint of suspicion in the future. Take a look at A-level scores: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-will-be-pegged-to-more-generous-2023-baseline/ https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-... ( direct link to graph: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall-A-level-data-970x855.jpg https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall... ) It's unfortunate for those affected either way. It was a difficult time when drastic measures needed to be taken at short notice. It's right to go back to in-person testing if there is a problem keeping remote exams fair.
- cubefox 10mo agoI wonder why it wasn't done earlier as the pandemic has been over for a while.
- fao_ 10mo ago> the pandemic has been over for a while The pandemic isn't actually over, at least, not for disabled people.
- xnorswap 10mo agoI don't want to sound heartless, especially as I'm in the high-risk category myself, but I think it's important to recognise that while COVID hasn't gone away, it is no longer a pandemic. It is now endemic instead, and needs to be managed as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_COVID-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_COVID-19
- DiggyJohnson 10mo agoIt is absolutely over by any sane definition of “pandemic”. Covid persists, but the pandemic is over.
- loeg 10mo ago[flagged]
- drnick1 10mo agoUntil quite recently, it was trivial to cheat on remotely proctored exams. All you had to do is spin up a VM, take the exam inside the VM, and use the host system to look up answers. I believe the main proctoring services now have crude VM checks. You can probably still use a KVM switch or a DP splitter and a buddy...
- hermannj314 10mo agoIt is incredibly trivial to stick a knife into human flesh. Triviality is not a dimension of ethics as far as I have come to understand it.
- drnick1 10mo agoMy point is that since it is so incredibly easy to cheat (despite countermeasures that are essentially theater), returning to in person exams is probably a good thing.
- pessimizer 10mo agoThe point you're making has nothing to do with anything the person you're responding to said, or with the OP. It's just a gratuitous description of sadism as a virtue-signalling imitation of seriousness. You should find somebody who said cheating is fun and good to do, and explain your violent fantasies to them.
- falcor84 10mo agoIt's a dimension of neglect. If I run a service advertising itself as preventing people from harming themselves or each other (e.g. a mental health institution), then it would be criminally negligent of me to not limit people's access to sharp knives.
- hermannj314 10mo agoThat is an excellent point. My recent coursework at Penn State, there were guardrails around cheating using Honor Lock, I am guessing a motivated student could find ways around it, but the system was better than trusting students to do the right thing.
- chollida1 10mo agoMy wife is a teacher of physics and math for an online highschool. Its very common for kids to go into the in person exam with a mark in the 80s and 90s and get a failing grade on the exam. The web wasn't alwasy that useful for cheating on timed exams as it was essentially like being able to bring in a formula sheet. LLM's changed this such that you can type in the question and get a fully correct answer in a lot of cases. The only solution that I see in education is that in person exams start to represent a larger and larger portion of a students grade such that the mid term and final will be more than 50% of a students grade for most classes going forward due to the gratuitous use of llms by students.
- jeffwass 10mo agoThis was going on long before LLMs. When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points. It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores. Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.
- pnutjam 10mo agoYeah, I'm not a frat guy, but don't groups like Fraternities build "Study Guides" that are often just brain dumps of tests with correct answers?
- merolish 10mo agoWe called them "bibles" in undergrad and they were collections of homework and tests from previous terms.
- Verdex 10mo agoYeah, I had this happen to me in an algorithms course. Tests were 80% of the grade and we had the guy who had been organizing mass homework "study" groups taking up increasingly larger sections of the class time desperately trying to figure out how to convince the professor to switch up the grading to be more homework based. I figure that the professor had to know what was going on because he kept giving the same philosophical handwavey reasons for why the tests were staying at 80%.
- jvdvegt 10mo agohttps://archive.is/tiqef https://archive.is/tiqef
- londons_explore 10mo ago> Candidates will have to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances My guess is the number of exceptional circumstances is about to explode...
- samrus 10mo agoYeah. There was a recent post about this sprt of gaming happening at Stanford
- lysace 10mo agoIt can be hard to prevent cheating in person too: A criminal enterprise was uncovered in 2019 in Sweden. They had targeted the local SAT variant (högskoleprovet). Their end customer equipment consisted of a modified mobile phone hidden somewhere private, a necklace that acts like a magnetic coil and small magnets that you place against the eardrum. Then the operation would call the phone while the customer was in the auditorium and give them the correct answers via voice. The answers had been provided by some back office team based on a copy of the test that they had obtained in realtime from some planted source taking the test at the same time, somehow.
- samrus 10mo agoLocks arent meant to prevent doors from being opened, theyre meant to make it harder If thats the sort of james bond shit that has to be done to cheat on in person exams, then theres a way higher chance of being caught. Using chatgpt at home is way harder to catch
- lysace 10mo agoTurns out excellent records had been kept by the criminals. The approximate 70 customers were caught. They received suspended sentences, fines, their scores expunged and where applicable were expelled from university programs. One of them was in a medical doctor program. On that of that their names have been published online (not by authorities). The people behind the criminal enterprise received 2-3 year prison sentences - primarily due to tax fraud.
- recursivedoubts 10mo agoI have a dog in this fight as a professor, but I think the AI era may actually (and ironically) help reestablish colleges as a useful tool for employers. We have a significant amount of legacy infrastructure to support in-person testing, and non-digital written exams may be the best way to determine actual competency going forward. I have historically done my computer science classes entirely online, but I am switching to in-person on-paper tests and increasing their weight in my classes to deal with the cheating. As paul graham said: do things that don't scale.
- Oras 10mo agoAnd what kind of skills would you test with this method? Colleges are clearly not working, as evidenced by the number of unemployed graduates. Some will blame AI, but the reality is that any graduate would require training to be productive in the job, something they didn't learn in college. My point is, if colleges could adapt to the job market, they wouldn't be in their current state.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- recursivedoubts 10mo agoI plan on a mix of conceptual questions, pseudocode and code annotation. I think this may be on of those historical ironies where the slowness of universities to adapt actually works in its favor. I do agree that most universities do a bad job of preparing computer science students and I’m working to fix that as best I can where I teach. We will see how things pan out.
- loeg 10mo ago> Colleges are clearly not working, as evidenced by the number of unemployed graduates. What are you talking about? College-educated unemployment is 2.9% while for highschool-only it's 4.4%. Neither is high, but college-educated is definitely lower. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/unemployment-rates-for-persons-25-years-and-older-by-educational-attainment.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/unemployment...
- brainzap 10mo agosadly cheating software can be found on github, easy to install. for example https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy
- falcor84 10mo agoWhat's sad about it? Why should it be censored?
- basisword 10mo agoIn person exams are useless too. I was at a UK university as a mature student about 8 years ago. When exams came around a significant number of people went to the bathroom repeatedly during the 2-3 hour exam clearly to check notes on their phones. There isn't really anything that can be done to stop this other than doing some sort of spot check/search for phones on people mid-exam which would obviously be horribly disruptive.
- eviks 10mo agoOr you make the tasks smaller and ban bathroom breaks, or replace the task with an equivalently challenging one if break is given. Or you check for phones before the exam. There are a lot of things that can be done.
- tomwphillips 10mo agoInteresting. I don't recall this happening during my studies. You didn't have the time in my exams to cheat, leaving for the toilet was strongly discouraged and if you did leave, you would have an invigilator standing behind you at the urinal or outside the cubicle.
- DiggyJohnson 10mo agoJust ban bathroom breaks and cap exams two 90-120 minutes tops. If longer examination is needed split it into multiple sessions. I genuinely believe that being able to plan around bathroom breaks or manage discomfort otherwise is a reasonable expectation.
- general1465 10mo agoIn the end of the day academia in general should stop relying on exams based on memorization of random facts and start using real world examples of what kind of work student would be working with as an employee. And if student can deliver correct result even when using AI or any other method, and then explain why those results are the way they are, then student has passed. In real world outside of academia, nobody cares how did you get to the result, only thing which matters is if result is correct and if you can explain why it is correct.
- the_other 10mo agoI’m not convinced. Academia should be for exploration, research, or preservation/archival. It’s about knowledge, not profit. Academic attainment should be about the subject. It’s business that should deal with the application, the short cuts, the “ends” rather than the means. I’m sure there’s a formulation of this which also allows for AI in acedemia. I’m not srguing for that kind of purity. But I am saying that acedemia shouldn’t be treated as the training ground for employment.
- kjkjadksj 10mo agoIf academia was solely about job training it would take at most like 6 weeks. It is about getting a rounded education. It is why engineers need to take liberal arts classes.
- mmooss 10mo ago> start using real world examples of what kind of work student would be working with as an employee College isn't hands on employee training; the employer can do that if they want it. College is for the student, and not just for their career - there is much more to life. Knowledge is power for the student. Even working with computers, theory is more universally valuable knowledge than the current programming trend - the wonderful thing about a theoretical abstraction is that it applies everywhere. For example, lots of practical high level coding experience is now less valuable, while people who truly understand theory can apply their knowledge somewhere new.
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- silexia 10mo agoRemote exams should not be allowed anywhere anymore as cheating is ridiculously easy.
- xnx 10mo agoThis has more to do with being remote than AI, but it's worth asking: If the test meaningfully measures the skills of being an accountant, and AI will get you good grades, why not use AI to "cheat" at doing the job itself?
- blackhaj7 10mo agoI think this will go full circle (as the article indicates). Ultimately , the parents are the “customer” of education institutions as they send their kids there with the goal of them getting good grades. For now, getting a good grade regardless of whether you got it honestly or not should result in you getting a job and therefore the parents are happy. But as soon as employers understand that the grades don’t mean anything, they will start prioritising students from places that are more strict e.g. through in person only exams etc. Once this happens, parents, and therefore schools, will start to prioritise this more. The sad part is that a generation of kids are going to pass through school and come out dumb and ill prepared for life while the systems corrects
- KurSix 10mo agoThis was inevitable, and it's not about being strict, but about banal technical limitations. Remote proctoring has always been security theater, but Vision LLMs combined with hardware solutions put the final nail in the coffin. The fundamental problem is simple: you cannot software-secure a device to which the attacker has physical access. ACCA simply admitted defeat in an arms race where the attack became orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective than the defense. The only reliable "air gap" from AI today is a physical room and paper
- Lucyj001 10mo ago[dead]