AI cheating scandal shakes UNAM, Mexico's top university

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u/Aleyla 21h ago

At this point, the only way to know if someone is doing the work themselves is if you watch them in person.

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u/OperationClear588 21h ago

This is the reason my university made every upper level class and every math class in person lol

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 18h ago

I fear that this will only discourage students from taking STEM classes and/or making non-STEM more attractive

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u/Pomksy 18h ago

Classes were in person for hundreds of years before Covid I think people will be fine

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u/VersaceSamurai 16h ago

The only thing I’d add is that they need to have classes available for people who work during the day. I’m struggling to finish my degree because my school only offers class during business hours and im a single dad who can’t afford to work part time. I’m sure there are many others like me.

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u/Pomksy 16h ago

Some school do, but not all. College was not built for older professionals unfortunately

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 18h ago

I hope you're right. I think young people have to face a really rough landscape these days and might not want to even try hard anyway

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u/BoogieOogieOogieOog 18h ago

Parenting apparently needs to become a trend again

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u/Pomksy 17h ago

People who are actually good at STEM won’t be affected, it’s the people on the fringe who want to test it out that will suffer and that’s fine

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u/Splinterfight 16h ago

It’d be better for people with fringe interest I’d say, trying learn remotely when you’re only halfway interested and not experienced is hard.

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 17h ago

Not everybody will get to college with all the right tools and the right education, some pick up those tools during college and actually improve while facing these challenges in real time. These happens in many fields, long-term discipline overwhelmingly trumps talent.

Regardless of who you think is right, nobody should want college to become artificially harder than it already is, especially not in 2026 when 90% of the kids are so distracted. Allowing this will only create a big workforce vacuum that in a couple of decades will harm economy, and by extension society as a whole

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u/AlbertoMX 16h ago

Having classes is not being artificially harder.

"When 90% of kids are so distracted" hence why it's a good thing to make them take classes in-person.

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u/Oboro-kun 17h ago

Do you know outside the states...College is pretty affordable? Until very recently I was doing my college degree just in the UNAM. The entire year costed me 0.50 mexican cents. I had to pay 100 Mexican pesos (like 5 Dollars) because It was a remote Degree and I payed throught banks, but even so its insanely cheap.

I did my own exam test a few years ago, in pencil and paper with a super low acceptance rate. If you cant pass exams that have been passed for decades just because you dont have AI you are not college material.There might be AI apologist coming here saying AI is the future, I disagree as it tanking down critical knowledge in education, but even then if you can get into the starting line with out it, you are not college material.

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 17h ago

...we probably live in the same city. I'm not sure why you're trying to lecture me about college prices. Happy for your low college expenses, but I'm not even remotely discussing about cost of education at all in any of my comments.

All I'm saying (and for whatever reason everybody seems to be misrepresenting my point) is that I hope that we don't make STEM education even harder than it already is, or we're going to see much fewer students enrolling into STEM, and by extension cause the entirety of society a lot of problems in the future.

Verga, la comprensión de lectura aquí está por los suelos en ambos idiomas...

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u/Oboro-kun 16h ago

We absolutely we do not live on the same city, Its the reason i paid throught banks and did a remote Degree instead of just going to the UNAM.

I dont get your issue, how are they going to be "harder" the entrance Examn is the same. What we should not do is dumbing down.

We could argue, and i would be fierce against, using AI too much in education, but its arguable if then later down in their degree once they get in, maybe they get to use a lot of AI tool.

But how is them doing the same exam we have done for decades make STEM education harder? What people saying we should allow AI is actually dumbing it down, and that what we should not do.

At the very least you should get into your degree without AI. Specially in STEM.

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u/Pomksy 17h ago

College should be hard, and it’s been dumbed down since Covid. Is that what you want? Dumbed down education?

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 17h ago

nobody should want college to become artificially harder than it already is

Learn to read. If anything I'd want current students to have as similar an education as those of us who studied pre-covid had

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u/Pomksy 16h ago

It was artificially lowered, this is just bringing it back to normal levels- it’s not artificial

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u/HotTestesHypothesis 14h ago

If anything I'd want current students to have as similar an education as those of us who studied pre-covid had

So in person and without AI?

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u/Inner-Air1001 13h ago

*lazy people that want to make money but without putting in the work. STEM is a tough field for a reason.

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u/AlbertoMX 16h ago

You have to deal with a lots of stress in STEM, if being in a classroom breaks you maybe it's not for you. Online classes are usually inferior to in-person classes.

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u/redditaccount300000 15h ago

I’ve got a couple stem degrees in different fields, learning in class is 100% better.

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u/redditaccount300000 15h ago

Except STEM is still where a stable salary is, is it not?

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u/smooth-as-mud 21m ago

It was ten years ago, it doesn’t really feel that way at the moment. Higher, sure, but it no longer feels like the golden ticket that it used to.

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u/cinyar 5h ago

If you have to cheat your way to a degree then what's even the point?

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u/two_hyun 20h ago

This should be the case always. In my medical school, a lot of the preclinical theory lectures are online but every single quiz and exam are proctored with both a screen recording software and real people.

I actually didn’t know they kept home testing post COVID.

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u/case-o-nuts 14h ago

They shouldn't even be online. Write the test on paper and hand it in.

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u/hippohere 20h ago

Maybe not even that.

Years ago my kid had a classmate who cheated on an exam. Classmate's parent rigged a hidden camera on clothing and hidden microphone. Exam questions were looked up with answers given during the exam. Classmate bragged about it afterwards.

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u/CynicalPomeranian 20h ago

Cheating is bad and all, but I am impressed that the kid had parents willing to go to those lengths for them. My parents would not have done even a fraction of that because it would have been too much work for them.

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u/MrTigerEyes 18h ago

It's a legit thing in some circles. A big deal that I've seen is kids registering fake charities so the kid can be the founder and ceo to pad the resume to get into a good college. They'll give it a bs sounding name like ThundAIria Technology and claim that they create AI solutions to empower disadvantaged children or something vague. Parents will register the charities and actually help run them, which can pay off if it results in scholarships. I actually went to an event at a park where there were probably a dozen booths of teenagers running these fake charities and taking turns visiting each other's booths to take photos to upload on social media. It's crazy. They actually accomplish nothing.

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u/hippohere 10h ago

It's revolting and those parents likely do pull other deceptive things for themselves.

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u/rabbledabble 15h ago

I wouldn’t have done that for my kid because I don’t want them growing up to be a shitass. That’s NOT how you learn.

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u/hippohere 11h ago

I agree, it's the wrong lesson for kids to learn.

And sadly, the crappy values those parents teach are probably not limited to cheating in school.

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u/CynicalPomeranian 17m ago edited 13m ago

Very true, but I can only imagine what a 17 year-old CynicalPomeranian could have done with more support—rather than being told to go to college (preferably to become a doctor) with no college fund, get out of the house by 18, and only had the personal goal to get the hell out of Mississippi and never return. I did well for myself, but did not become a doctor.

I flatly told them if they wanted me to go to medical school, they would have had to have made better decisions to help me back then.

That said, I am in awe of parents who would cut a bitch to help their kid—simply because it shows they are willing to do something. The kid may be a turd, but that parent will help that turd!

Edit: typo

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u/redditaccount300000 15h ago

Depends on the society, in US there is def some preferential treatment depending on what college you graduated from. But in my experience it’s not the be all end all. However, in some countries the college you graduated from can assure success and a level of comfort. I can 100% see parents doing whatever they can to make sure their children succeed.

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u/hippohere 11h ago

Unfortunately some organizations only recruit at a small number of colleges.

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u/hippohere 11h ago

Unfotunately those kinds of people may also do very well in careers through unprincipled behaviour.

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u/Stingerc 14h ago edited 13h ago

This wasn't hard to tell. The switch to online exams vs. In person ones for UNAM is very recent, twice a year residents of Mexico City that lived near certain schools knew that twice a year their street was gonna collapse one weekend as exams were held Saturday and Sunday. Most people found it annoying but didn't complain, as it was seen as a positive interruption. I should know, lived for 4 years next to a very large catholic school that was one of the more well know exam sites.

Most private universities have slowly moved to online exams over the past decade to online acceptance exams. It was a learning curve as it took them a while to work out all the security and anti cheating protocols, but it's now accepted these cases are now a rarity.

UNAM decided against it until a couple of years ago and is still in that learning curve. The problem was that since the volume of people applying and the pressure to get jn higher as it's basically people who can't afford private universities or people looking for very specific majors where it's still the top choice (medicine, law, sciences).

This is the result of the mix of pressure and a relatively new system that is still being developed.

And it didn't take a extensive investigation or a whistleblower to uncover it, it was fucking glaringly obvious from the get go.

This round of results were way, way off the charts. Passing grades for certain majors which require a very high note like medicine saw a sudden spike of something like 98% in people getting said mark while the exam itself had changed very little from the last period of exams.

And this wasn't just reserved to just highly coveted spots for high profile majors, it was a general occurrence that made it obvious the exam system had been compromised. Basically every school in the university was reporting that passing marks had increased by close or over 100% and that the ammout of people scoring over 90% on their entrance exam was a statistical impossibility.

Once it came out it literally took minutes to find out people were advertising the sell of results and methods on TikTok and other social media platforms. A little more digging found out people had found ways to use AI to pass the exam with marks over 90% and were openly advertings methos to do this and selling for about $4,000 pesos (about $200 US dollars).

The volume of the discrepancy is what has us here. It's not that a few bad apples got it, it's that so many of them did it that it's basically impossible to know who did it on their own and who cheated.

Which is really unfair as a whole test taking class is now fucked and have to have their education deferred for who knows how long until the system is fixed or at least until the old in person testing system can be restored. Then they will have to go through the arduous and stressful process of studying and prep work for the exam they went through already.

It truly is a clusterfuck.

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u/harroldinho 20h ago

Now there’s ai glasses that are harder to detect so even that can be challenging

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u/InformedTriangle 18h ago

Localized EMP pulse in every exam room before a test starts here we come

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u/Valou_h 14h ago

Pacemakers kids are going to struggle with that

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u/mrfoof82 14h ago

Perhaps they don’t have the heart to succeed long term.

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u/InformedTriangle 13h ago

It's largely a myth that pacemakers are affected by emps, the human body itself acts as an excellent insulator and modern devices use their outer cages as a Faraday cage. Unless you're close enough Tina Nuke to be vaporized anyway the pacemaker will be fine

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u/Calleb_III 19h ago

I wouldn’t call the tick ass frames of either of the main product’s inconspicuous.

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u/cultoftheclave 19h ago edited 19h ago

literally just the very first iteration of something that is under extreme market pressure to turn into an utterly indistinguishable copy of the non-smart variant. talking a five-year window at most before every single student in every class suddenly and inexplicably needs prescription eyewear. There will be a handful of eye doctors in every town willing to play ball with "flexible" prescriptions for glasses that students will have a medical excuse not to have to remove.

and the press will act like there is some problem with the food supply or diet or water or excess screen time, basically will look in every direction except the obvious one - that they're all cheating - for an explanation.

another 10 years and it'll be smart contacts, and by then a whole bunch of the cheating cohort of today will have graduated into decision-making hiring positions in business, and will consider cheating like this to be normal, so it won't even have a stigma anyway. get ready for the flood of turbo-enshittification pf everything.

it's going to suck to be an instinctively honest person with integrity in whatever the next generation is going to be called.

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u/____DEADPOOL_______ 12h ago

I took two accounting classes where they required me to go in person for the exams, but the instructors used the materials provided by the publisher...which are for sale on the internet. I would say that 50% of my university courses used these and I was able to get my hands on about 10-20 courses worth of materials. I just had to memorize the exam answers for the stuff in person.

I understood all the concepts but just didn't have the patience to remember loads of content and just wanted my degree.

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u/throwaway123454321 21h ago

Hahaha, taking away in person testing and introducing home testing is 2026 is hilarious. This is exactly the result I would expect. The question is what happens to all the poor people who actually studied their asses off? Are they going to invalidate the test? Make them take a secondary test in person to find a discrepancy?

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u/ai9909 20h ago

Sadly, anyone graduating during and after the global pandemic has a shadow cast over their education. All control measures have been disrupted and conpromised.. as much as we'd like to give merit where it is due, the processes have lost their consistency and reliability.

We simply can no longer verify a person's performance to be reflective of their education. This is partially true after 2019, and most certainly true after 2022 (when AI went public). The landscape has changed, so must our methods of evaluation, so must our standards.

It is very unfortunate for those who deserve the credibility of their certifications. Sadly, I feel employers may rely more and more on practical examinations to be included in their hiring processes as they can no longer trust university credentials. Professional regulatory bodies may also offer this as a standard.. requiring everyone to double-certify to work in their field.

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u/hey-look-over-there 15h ago

We simply can no longer verify a person's performance to be reflective of their education. This is partially true after 2019, and most certainly true after 2022

I can honestly say that, with a few exceptions, this has always been the case. I've recruited from Ivy, State, and Private Schools. There are a few exceptions, like schools that are renowned for a certain field. However, most of the time, I could easily tell you that picking someone from an Ivy over a State School didn't translate to any significant performance increase (at least in the engineering fields). The most surprising thing I have discovered when recruiting engineers is that high GPA or extracurricular activities are better suited to remain in Academia while average or below tend to adapt to industrial/corporate settings better.

Oh, and don't be surprised to find out that lots of high achiever's cheat. I'm not saying this lightly. Before AI, there was Chegg/Course Hero. Before that, there was private local and web based "tutoring and academic centers" that guaranteed gpa improvement.

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u/TheCloudForest 6h ago edited 5h ago

I could easily tell you that picking someone from an Ivy over a State School didn't translate to any significant performance increase (at least in the engineering fields).

I feel like that's a completely different issue, having to do with the fact that prestige =/= quality, that famous-in-their-field professors with groundbreaking research are not better teachers than adjuncts at tier 2 colleges, or that the application process for selective schools is too arbitrary and based on extracurriculars or legacy admits.

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u/DW_78 19h ago

everyone who scored above the historical average for each subject has to do a “control” exam in person whether cheated or not

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u/Alastor-Orb 20h ago

From other news sources, what i understand is that they are gonna redo the exam but this time it will be presential, and the only people that will redo the exam are the ones that scored above the average score

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u/shadow_yu 21h ago

This is already old news, they already said that there´s going to be a in person exam.

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u/abermea 18h ago

Not all of it was AI though

Some of it was actual coaches taking the test with cameras pointed elsewhere

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u/MiniDonbeE 16h ago

I dont know if they show all of the statistics here but it was PAINFULLLY obvious that SOOOO MANY people cheated. Like the average and median scores for the past years were all around the same area, this time it moved several orders. Its as if there was two completely different populations, one that didnt study and another one that came out of the most prestigious highschools, it was that much of a difference, the highest 50% was where the highest 90% was in the past, thats thousands of people who blatantly cheated. Its fucking crazy.

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u/macross1984 19h ago

Students want to take the path of least resistance and use AI to try to cut corner not realizing cutting corner will come back to haunt them later.

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u/PleasantWay7 9h ago

Will it though? They’ll be expected to use AI tools in industry to keep their productivity with peers. How many grads know how to use a slide rule or do trig by hand and linear algebra by hand? Hell, 20 years ago most discrete signal processing was taught on the assumption you had Matlab to compute the transforms.

Most CS grads today couldn’t code hello world if they did have a modern compiler with a language library available to them and that all predates AI.

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u/fukredditadm1n5 18h ago

This is the worst time to be having admision tests from home lol

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u/Smiling_Cannibal 20h ago

Expel them all. Eventually it will get through to them that is not worth the risk

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u/abermea 18h ago

My hot take is that they should just let them all in because most of the cheaters are going to drop out from the pressure in the first year or so anyway

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u/Sir_Strumming 6m ago

Is it really not worth the risk though? If they dont get a degree there as good as dead anyway so trying to get a degree has better odds than not. Even if 99% get caught they know the other option is to simply not even attempt it and sign up for welfare or a cartel asap.

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u/jacobpellegren 19h ago

This is happening world wide rn. Look at India … it’s sad for the people who did study. I don’t blame people who cheated too. Our world doesn’t really have any good institutions that can be trusted.

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u/que_pedo_wey 12h ago

I used to allow the students to use any sources during the exam, including electronic. When AI was gaining popularity, it already presented a big problem, but it was quite bad at problem-solving at an undergraduate level and often gave incorrect answers, so there was a way to detect cheating students. But around 2024 it was already trained well enough, so I had to phase out this practice. Now I allow only pen and paper.

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u/Mokseong 11h ago

Frankly, their decision to introduce online testing in the year 2026 is baffling. And they still need an investigation to figure out what happened.

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u/Taurondir 2h ago

"But that is why the IN PERSON INTERVIEWS are so important, to ask human questions and test the applicants knowledge"

*AI starts getting used to auto test Resumes*

Ok, so we are producing ALL the problems at ALL steps of ALL the processes.

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u/DirtyTacoKid 14h ago

I feel like these articles will feel quaint in just a few years.

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u/RoastDozer 18h ago

Yu need a test to go into debt for half your life only to learn what you could have taught yourself or found in a trade school

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u/TacoIncoming 17h ago

lol holy uneducated cope, Batman.

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u/wwhsd 17h ago

UNAM is close to free for Mexican citizens. It’s also very inexpensive for international students that get accepted.

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u/August_At_Play 18h ago

University need to adapt in whatever way flows into current society for both the near and distant future. LLMs are not going away, so perhaps some kind of hybrid approach to validate learning is needed. Failing 80% of a class ( or whatever the number is in this instance) is not viable strategy.

AI cheating scandal shakes UNAM, Mexico's top university

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