Families with teenagers in education know the private, hidden pain of exam season. But this year, what might have been a summer of quiet family anxiety has erupted in several countries into public unrest. Exam-related turmoil has led to mass student protests in Mexico after nearly 60,000 university applicants were forced to resit tests amid suspected cheating, while Portugal’s disastrous attempt to digitise school exam marking sparked the country’s worst education crisis in decades.
By far the largest and most ground-shaking incident was in India, however, where an exam paper leak affected millions of students and was linked to more than a dozen students taking their own lives. The scandal forced the education minister to resign, and challenged the government’s hold over its 1.4 billion citizens. Why does this exam season seem to be particularly tense and volatile?
Experts say the growth of AI cheating and attempts by academic institutions to digitise examinations are at the heart of the issue. When coupled with the high stakes of good grades in an increasingly precarious global economy, the result can be explosive. And the results of one examination determining a person’s entire future really creates untenable pressure on young people,” said Eaton, a leading expert on academic ethics.
This is compounded when illicit commercial industries, known as the “education mafia”, exploit student desperation by stealing and then selling exam papers, something that has become widespread in India and elsewhere. Students from across India joined the mass demonstrations led by the Cockroach Janta party, a youth-led protest campaign that began as an online satirical joke and grew into a nationwide outcry that poses an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi’s government. I can’t imagine how India is going to deal with this, just given the levels of corruption and fraud that we’ve seen.” In Portugal, the national fallout from a failed push by its education minister, Fernando Alexandre, to fully digitise the exam marking process has landed the government in a crisis.
Parents, teachers, and students have been protesting, demanding Alexandre’s resignation after his policy resulted in serious marking errors. Similar demonstrations took place in Mexico. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), the country’s most prestigious university, announced that due to abnormally high marks in entrance exam results, which raised suspicions of widespread cheating, approximately 58,000 students would have to retake the exam.
Schools worldwide are rushing to deal with AI use by students, either through bans or teaching AI literacy and ethics to pupils. Denmark announced this month that from the new term, teenagers would have to make a verbal defence of their written essays to combat AI cheating. Eaton has implemented similar reforms in her class.
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