At Durham University, I have been Chair of the Board of Examiners for Philosophy since 2016. Last week I resigned, because I feel that it is my responsibility to raise a vital issue in higher education, one whose true significance is not understood. The existence of a crisis requiring immediate action is not generally recognised. I am not blaming the deans and pro-vice-chancellors. I want to hold the appropriate figures to account: the Vice-Chancellors.

Durham University is a beacon of excellence in the UK university sector. I wish to maintain standards in its top-rated Philosophy department. The issue I am addressing affects students past, present and future, in many leading British universities. It involves a crime that is not victimless. It is this: the lazy student cheats with professional-grade versions of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude, and gets a first-class result. The hard-working student uses no bots, or a non-professional bot honestly, thinking and writing for themselves, but gets a 2:1. That’s not fair. Yet Vice-Chancellors – to mix metaphors – are sitting on their lavishly-remunerated backsides and adopting the ostrich position.

The lazy student cheats with professional-grade versions of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude, and gets a first-class result

The lazy student cheats with professional-grade versions of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude, and gets a first-class result

Let me explain how the university marking system works, at least in the UK. Until Covid, there was a mix of assessment by sit-down exam and continuous assessment. During Covid, this was replaced, for understandable reasons, by “at home” exams done on computer – to the relief of academics who no longer had to decipher student handwriting. After Covid this continued, and worked satisfactorily. A system called Turnitin would check for plagiarism by scanning essays for text compiled from published sources, and it was hard to cheat.

That system has been subverted by ChatGPT and similar AI tools. These apps now work very well for........

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