A.I. Cheating Rattles Top Universities in South Korea

Many college students in South Korea are enjoying downtime, relieved to wrap up midterm exams. But the nation's elite universities have been left scrambling after it emerged that testing season was marred by a spate of mass cheating incidents involving A.I.

One high profile incident, at Yonsei University in Seoul, became public on Sunday. Local news media reported that a professor had found that dozens of students may have cheated by using textbooks, computer programs or even ChatGPT during an online midterm examination for a course on ChatGPT. Hundreds of undergraduates took the test, and 40 of them admitted to cheating, the school said.

Within days, similar episodes of mass cheating emerged at two other top-tier schools in South Korea — Seoul National University and Korea University, which also said students had used A.I. to cheat on recent tests. Collectively, the colleges are known by the acronym SKY, which is also a nod to their status in the hypercompetitive world of Korean education.

While the questionable use of artificial intelligence in colleges is becoming widespread, it is rare for a nation’s most prestigious universities to simultaneously be embroiled in A.I. scandals.

Education is still seen as a driver of social mobility in South Korea, which has one of the highest proportions of college graduates among developed countries. For most students, the goal is to secure a spot at the SKY schools.

To do that, they need a top score on an eight-hour college entrance exam testing their knowledge of Korean, math, English and other subjects. On Thursday, more than half a million high school seniors in South Korea sat for the exam, a decades-old tradition that disrupts the rhythm of the entire nation. Flights are grounded, construction is halted and traffic restrictions are enforced, and the public is urged to keep noise at a minimum so the students can concentrate.

In recent years, A.I. has become entrenched in higher education. Over 90 percent of South Korean college students who have some experience with generative A.I. said that they used those tools on school assignments, according to a 2024 survey by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training.

Some educators say colleges have failed to keep pace.

“A.I. is a tool for retaining and organizing information so we can no longer evaluate college students on those skills,” said Park Joo-Ho, a professor of education at Hanyang University. Since students are already using A.I., he added, they should instead be tested on their creativity, something A.I. cannot replicate.

Yonsei students taking the “Natural Language Processing and ChatGPT” class were forbidden from using A.I. for the Oct. 15 midterm. It was administered online, and test-takers were told to keep their laptop cameras on so proctors could monitor them. After examining the camera footage, a professor said he found evidence of dozens of students cheating. They will be given a 0 on the test, the school said. On a separate occasion, students at Yonsei were caught sharing test answers on a phone app that uses A.I., the school said.

“It’s inevitable that A.I. will affect our education,” said Ju Yuntae, an undergraduate at Yonsei who is studying physical education. He said he used ChatGPT to find research papers and for help with translating between English and Korean.

“But if students break a pact with their professors to refrain from using it,” he said, “then it is a matter of trust and a bigger issue.”

That covenant also appears to have been broken at Korea University in Seoul. Several students admitted to using A.I. during an online test last month for a class about aging societies, a university spokeswoman said, after one student reported that some had used a group chat to share recordings of their screens and answers throughout the test. Those students will be given a score of 0, the spokeswoman said.

In a statement on Wednesday, Seoul National University said that it had discovered that students used A.I. to cheat in a statistics exam, but did not disclose further details. The exam will be given again, the university said.

In recent years, these schools have set forth some A.I. guidelines. Korea University has an 82-page guidebook that states that “unauthorized use or submission of AI-generated content is considered academic misconduct.” Yonsei’s rules declare that using A.I to “generate the quintessential and creative output of research is prohibited.”

Lee T.H., a graduate student in computer engineering at Seoul National, said he started noticing students using A.I. soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. He now uses A.I. to speed up his coding.

“Some professors don’t like us using A.I.,” he said. “Some encourage it because it helps solve problems quickly.”

But, he added, “there isn’t really a way you can stop students from using it.”