UK accounting body to halt remote exams amid AI cheating | Business
The world’s largest accounting body will stop allowing students to take remote exams to guard against a rise in cheating in exams that support professional qualifications.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has approximately 260,000 members, said that starting from March, students will not be allowed to take online exams except in exceptional cases.
“We see the development [cheating] systems that outperform what can be deployed, [in] ACCA chief executive Helen Brand said in an interview with the Financial Times:
Remote testing was introduced during the Covid outbreak to ensure students could continue to qualify at a time when lockdowns prevented face-to-face exam assessment.
In 2022, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the UK’s accounting and auditing industry regulator, said cheating in professional exams was a “live” problem at Britain’s largest companies.
Millions of dollars in fines have been imposed on large auditing and accounting firms around the world due to test cheating scandals.
The FRC’s investigation found that cases of fraud involved some first-tier auditors; this category consists of the ‘big four’ accountants (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY) along with Mazars, Grant Thornton and BDO.
EY has agreed to pay a record $100 million (£74 million) to US regulators in 2022 over allegations that dozens of employees cheated on ethics exams and that the company misled investigators.
ACCA said it concluded that online testing had become too difficult to police due to the increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to students.
Brand said ACCA, which has more than half a million students, was working “hard” to combat cheating but “people who want to do bad things are probably working faster”.
He added that the rapid rise of technology, led by artificial intelligence tools, has pushed the issue of cheating to a “turning point”.
Last year, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), which also trains accountants worldwide, said reports of fraud were still increasing.
However, ICAEW still allows some exams to be held online.
“There are very few high-stakes exams that currently allow it. [remote invigilation]said Brand.
