A rise in AI usage amongst students at the University of Connecticut has prompted some professors to alter how they administer exams to maintain academic integrity.
“It’s not that I don’t trust students… I did not get into this job to be a cop and police cheating. That sucks,” said Micki McElya, a professor in the history department at UConn.
For McElya, exams are about seeing if students can think critically about the subjects taught.
“I am less interested in whether or not people leave my class having a body of knowledge memorized than I am that they leave the class with a set of critical skills and a set of questions,” McElya said. “I started to ask myself, does an exam get at that? What is the point of an exam?”
McElya said that she stopped administering exams even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic because she believed that students were focusing more on the process of memorization instead of engaging with the material. She turned instead to online worksheets, which were shorter and less open-ended than the in-person writing assignments that she had previously given to students.
This remained the method that she used to test students until last spring, when she said that she began to notice an uptick in the amount of work being turned with the use of AI. This prompted a return to in-person exams for the Fall 2025 semester.
“To get value out of education, learning how to do uncomfortable, hard or just new things, without the assistance of AI…is really crucial,” McElya said.
McElya’s suspicion that more students were using AI to complete exams is supported by a September 2025 report on the usage of Claude.ai conducted by Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. According to the report, Connecticut has the 15th highest amount of AI usage amongst working-aged people, a demographic which college students fall into. In addition, AI usage was specifically up in school settings, as educational tasks rose from 9.3% of total inquiries to 12.4% over the last eight months.
Part of the reason that McElya switched to in-person examinations is because she believes that not all students know that they are cheating, and she hoped to lessen opportunities for mistakes.
“Is having Grammarly rewrite a paragraph cheating? Yes,” McElya said. “But do students all think it is? No. So, they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong.”
One anonymous student who has used AI in the past said that they felt using AI in this way was not cheating, but rather a way to improve work to a level that they cannot reach.
“I want to make my words sound a little better,” the student said. “I think I can learn from it by seeing what types of things it suggests I should use instead.”
They also suggested that AI can be used to help learn concepts from classes they are confused about. The student added that they are under the impression that their professors approve of the ways in which they use AI and that they would stop if they received any indication otherwise. The student said that they also felt that the majority of students at UConn employ AI in the completion of schoolwork in some way and believe that some use it to complete entire assignments.
“I think at first, it’s innocent,” the student said. “Then, you start to realize, ‘Oh, I can get a five-hour assignment done in ten minutes.’”
Despite the convenience of being able to quickly finish work, some call into question the accuracy and overall effectiveness of this strategy.
“You put in the info, tell it to yell at you and sometimes it’s right,” said Christopher Zuraw, a first semester applied mathematics student. Zuraw equated having AI do your work for you to asking a bad writer to edit your work, while estimating that only half the information that AI provides is factual. Still, Zuraw also said that he understands why some students turn to the method to complete work.
“I think people are lazy and will take the easy way out,” Zuraw said.
While there are differing motivations amongst students, they all create the single problem that professors currently face.
Stephen Stifano, an associate professor in residence in the UConn communications department, thinks that departments will have to continue to adapt as AI evolves. Like McElya, Stifano switched to in-person paper exams before ultimately turning to Lock Down Browser, an application that prevents students from opening other tabs and films students while they take the exam so that they can’t use prohibited materials. Stifano allows students to create a one-page, handwritten “cheat sheet” with notes, which he says maintains “the spirit of the original open-book exams that we started using during the COVID era.”
“I think we’re all trying to adjust to AI’s influence on traditional teaching and learning methods — and trying to make sure that our courses are assessing learning,” Stifano said in an email. “There are spaces where AI can be quite useful in that context, but certainly other spaces where it’s detracting from the teaching and learning mission of a university.”