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With all the talk about AI there has been some, but nowhere near enough, talk about what this means for education, most especially what this means for qualifications. We raise this issue because it is becoming increasingly obvious to people working in education that AI is now being used, potentially on an industrial scale, to cheat. Even the Guardian ran a headline earlier this year noting that they had found ‘almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating’ at universities, and that this is likely to be the ‘tip of the iceberg’. They’re right.
This is not only a university problem, because schools in Scotland are likely to move away from exams and towards other forms of assessment that are similarly going to allow mass cheating to take place.
What makes this all the more troubling is that those who run our educational establishments have become blindingly progressive over the last few decades. Like many other areas of life that should have nothing to do with politics, how we assess students has become a strange type of political football. To stand up for examinations today, for example, is weirdly seen as right wing, or at least as being old fashioned and out of touch – to not be ‘inclusive’. And of course, the point about exams is that they at the very least limit – and potentially overcome – the problem of students using AI to cheat.
Perhaps political isn’t the correct term, and it is probably better to describe fans of exams as committing a cultural crime, a new type of sin, one that is extremely likely to see you being dismissed by management and correct-thinking-and-feeling educationalists who appear to have all the answers but no solutions. It is also extremely unlikely that ‘exam fetishists’ would be listened to by management, and even less likely that they would be promoted, within pretty much any of our educational establishments. And so the one-dimensional ‘progressive’ perspective becomes mindlessly unquestioned and unquestionable.
In case people are not aware, exams are declining in universities. Some institutions have essentially banned them. This is rarely, if ever, made public, and if you asked them, they would probably deny that this is happening, but it is.
Online exams appear to be fine – you know, those exams that take place in a student’s bedroom, where they are surrounded by their notes, or worse, by their AI buddy and Google, or indeed with their pre-prepared answers ready to download.
There will of course be many students who do online exams as they’re intended, i.e. like an exam, but the level playing field has gone, and now examiners are left scratching their heads wondering what exactly they are looking at. And, of course, if online exams worked in the same way as in-person (i.e. real) exams, why would management be OK with this type of ‘exam’ but not the real thing? It’s as if they know that students are cheating and simply don’t care.
When it comes to essays, the game is essentially up, and it is widely recognised that the technology to spot cheaters is bordering on hopeless. And so we are left with a massive problem: mass cheating and qualifications that become literally meaningless.
We need to think about this for a moment.
If AI becomes a primary source of information for students, and they learn that it can be used for all their assessments, who is passing what qualifications, and what does this mean for society?
The fact that some institutions are dumping exams but not being explicit about it raises the question of why they do not come out and proudly announce their new-found wisdom. After all, if exams are so bad and the new forms of assessment so good, why not let the world know about it and use it as a selling point? One suspects that at least part of the reason for this is that our betters don’t think the less-educated public would understand the depth and quality of this wisdom – they’re not ‘aware’ enough, apparently, to ‘get it’.
There are many excuses made for why we must move away from exams. One of my favourites is the idea that they are not ‘authentic’ forms of assessment. What is meant by authentic in this context is that exams are not things that you would expect to do in the workplace. So, the logic goes, if you don’t do exams in a workplace and universities are preparing students for the labour market, what’s the point?
One could. of course, point out the gazillion other ways that universities are nothing like workplaces, and how students are treated in a rather mollycoddled way, but this doesn’t seem to matter. Likewise, you could point out that the very point of universities is that they are not workplaces; they are, or at least should be, privileged places where young adults spend three or four years developing their intellect and pursuing knowledge for its own sake. But perhaps this is just too old fashioned an idea – or right wing or something!
If university managers really want something authentic, they could close their institutions and start a mass programme of apprenticeships (which, as it happens, may not be the worst idea in the world).
But ignoring all of this, one of the ironies of this argument about needing authentic forms of assessment is that where there are degree courses that are directly connected to professions, like law, then students cannot pass without passing exams.
Let us spell this out in case it’s not obvious what this means.
Where there are actual workplaces/professions and degrees that are directly connected to them, it is almost always the case that the relevant professional bodies, like the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates, demand exams. By contrast, where there is no professional body, the university can dump exams and use the excuse of authenticity to do so. Make it make sense!
Yet another excuse that is used today to banish exams is that they are not universal and inclusive.
One might be scratching one’s unaware head at the moment wondering what this might mean. After all, isn’t getting everyone in a room with a pen and paper, under exactly the same conditions, the very definition of a universal test? Does this not help to overcome the entirely arbitrary guesswork needed by today’s examiners when staring at a perfect online exam answer or an essay that has not a single grammatical mistake, that is perfectly referenced, and that uses the most complex of concepts – all from a student who you thought couldn’t string two sentences together?
But that would be much too old fashioned of you to think that. Get with the programme, people, because you clearly are not aware of this thing called neurodiversity. All (or at least we’re getting there) students are different and have different types of brains and different types of learning, and to think that a one-size-fits-all approach is ‘appropriate’ is so yesterday. And so yet another progressive nail is placed in the coffin of testing students, of putting them under pressure, of ‘stressing them out’, of ‘traumatising’ them. After all, the geniuses in the biggest teaching union in England once described exams as being close to a form of child abuse – especially for the most ‘vulnerable’ children.
We thought about all of this, and became deeply depressed by the inability of educators to introduce the simplest and obvious solution to AI cheating, when I was reminded of Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, Mania.
Lionel was kind enough to talk to SUE when we first set up. A year later she published Mania, a satirical dystopian novel that took the politically correct madness of our times and used it to imagine a world where meritocracy was seen as a form of oppression.
It’s a mad idea. After all, unlike many of the other forms of correct thinking, one would imagine that society does at least have to function. And if we undermine meritocracy, what would this mean in terms of getting things done? Who would be the brain surgeons of the future, the air-traffic controllers, and so on? Wouldn’t society fall apart?
Well, perhaps, but perhaps her novel is not quite as wacky as it sounds.
Take comedy, for example. It has come to my attention that some of the less politically correct comedians are now talking about the ‘rise of mediocrity’.
This term struck us because I hadn’t really thought about it in this way before. But it makes sense. If filling your panel shows with ‘identities’ rather than talent – with guests chosen on the basis of skin colour, gender, or indeed, ‘neurodiversity’ – is the done thing, will this mean that comedic talent becomes secondary, perhaps almost irrelevant? Perhaps what comedy actually is even changes, and we are left applauding, rather than laughing, as the same correct ‘jokes’ are regurgitated by ever more identities.
Additionally, if being ‘offended’ keeps on at its current pace, perhaps this type of comedy becomes a necessity, where knowing the correct words comes to be more important than innovation. After all, innovation involves risk, and risk could mean using the ‘f’ word or the ‘c’ word or the ‘b’ word. And that simply would not do. (In case you don’t know what all these alphabetti spaghetti words mean, then Google them and make sure you are aware in future.)
But who really cares about comedy? Your plane isn’t going to crash because of a lack of laughs.
But then we think about people we see in public. Politicians, for example. These are people who do a type of job that is constantly in the public eye – so they are noticeable – and they are noticeably bad, or at least noticeably unnoticeable.
I guess Boris at least had a personality, but this was arguably cultivated more by his celebrity status on the comedy programme Have I Got News for You than it was in the world. Other than that, it is increasingly difficult to think of a prime minister or even a minister who has some depth or substance.
But what if this is also just the tip of the iceberg? What if the term ‘failing upwards’ is more than a funny term we use to laugh about the latest promoted appendage.
Clearly this is not true of many people. Jobs do still need to be done, and incompetence cannot become as institutionalised as Shriver was comedically suggesting. But if we think about it a little more, there does appear to be something more worrying going on.
Yes, we have the concern about EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) hires – something that goes way beyond comedy. But we also have a situation where more and more institutions are managed by the same type of people with the same type of values.
Universities, for example, are increasingly managed by managers rather than academics. Like many other ‘industries’, it is not your expertise in the fields, your brilliance and your academic achievements that matter. Far more important are your ‘values’ and your technical abilities.
Technical abilities are important, but form filling, box ticking, procedural processing and all the rest of what goes on in institutions is essentially an administrative job and one that should be done by administrators. That is very different to being either a leader, or indeed a professional. It is also something that is relatively brainless. That doesn’t mean it is not hard work, but it does mean that it is not work that is based on genuine expertise, excellence and – most important of all – academic judgement.
This is one of the arguments made by the brilliant American legal writer Philip K. Howard. He has a new book out: Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America. In it is a section on education. Knowing his work, I already knew a key part of what he was going to say, which is that the Western world is being suffocated by law and process, while judgement – the only thing that is really important and that can make a difference – is being blocked or lost.
Does he exaggerate? Well, think about how a headteacher will be employed today in Scotland. Read the eye-wateringly vacuous The Standard for Headship document that gives us the perfect sleep-inducing mix of technocratic gibber wrapped up with incessantly progressive talk about ‘social justice’. Imagine the sort of person who wrote this document, and then imagine the perfect, unthinking, correct box-ticking person they would employ.
The brilliant, energetic, expert teacher who can innovate and inspire children with their subject knowledge and deep understanding of the arts, science or mathematics will stand no chance against the judgement free, neuro-aware, inclusive technocrat. And even if by some chance the right person gets the job, how likely is it that they’d be prepared to stand up to the new, correct, ‘authentic’ way of thinking?
Perhaps, given all of this, Lionel was not as far off the mark as it might first appear. She is not far off the mark to note that meritocracy is becoming something of a dirty word, and that there is a strange type of morality associated with those who are ‘aware’ of all the ‘special needs’ and the necessity, indeed the goodness, of being diverse, caring and inclusive. It is this ‘moral’ quality of our new elites that is deeply worrying, because it means that reason and judgement can be shed for a sense of virtue. The result is that Rome burns around them, unnoticed, and the obvious mass cheating and the growing disillusionment of examiners is ignored.
You may not personally like exams. You may think that some people are smart but can’t do exams. You can argue that we should use other forms of assessment. Well, you may have a point. But if you want to beat AI and you want to have a test that is real, I would suggest you look back over the hundreds of years of exams and wonder why did it seem to work in the past and why, really, are we moving away from them? Like everything, people can learn to get better at exams, and if my experience is anything to go by, the smartest people do the best in exams, and if we don’t bite the bullet and recognise this very soon, education as a serious, meaningful thing is finished.
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News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/12/01/why-media-men-fell-hard-for-trans-ideology/ Stella O’Malley, Why media men fell hard for trans ideology. Male journalists, broadcasters and comedians have been the biggest cowards in the gender wars. 01/12/25
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/12/02/now-lucy-connollys-daughter-is-being-punished-for-her-mums-tweet/ Joanna Williams, Now Lucy Connolly’s daughter is being punished for her mum’s tweet. A school shouldn’t be denying a child a place because of her mother’s reputation. 02/12/25
Colin Wright, Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis. Data shows that the spike in transgender identities is not rooted in biology. 03/12/25
https://archive.is/vGzgi Jill Foster, The trans activists influencing British schools, sports and the NHS. With Stonewall on the blacklist, a new frontrunner is cashing in on the Government’s ‘gender diversity’ gap 07/11/25
Tom Bennett, Neurofog- how useful is the term neurodiversity in education? The dangers of ambiguous definitions, and why we desperately need evidence based approaches in this area 05/12/25
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/12/06/how-the-decolonisation-movement-betrays-black-history/?utm_source=Spiked+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8e612aa1b4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_12_07_11_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e612aa1b4-297273950 Remi Adekoya, How the ‘decolonisation’ movement betrays black history. A simplistic morality tale about good and evil has blinded modern academics to the complexities of the past. 06/12/25
Andrew Doyle, WPATH exposed again. At what point will clinicians admit that this activist body has no scientific credibility? 08/12/25
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