A Turing Test: Defending the Humble Examination
By Sean Colligan
As we approach the beginning of assessment season, the spectre of the exam looms over Northern Ireland’s student body—and unlike assignments, which can always be postponed and procrastinated, easier to ignore and put off until the last minute, there is a certain inevitability when it comes to standardised testing. Much like one’s own eventual demise, there is no escaping the macabre walls of an exam or the ghastly paper you must sit in full, lest you incur the polite wrath of an invigilator. But I believe there is a case to be made for them in the wake of ChatGPT’s great upending of academia. Our exams, again much like death, are not so easily cheated.
A survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute back in 2024 which polled over a thousand undergrad students in the UK found that more than half had used generative AI to help them with assessments [1]. By the following year that figure had risen to some eighty-eight percent [2]. The temptation to outsource your work to an artificial intelligence which can generate text, summarise notes, and write codes at the touch of a button is quite a hard thing for any beleaguered student to resist. One can even receive individual feedback—albeit delivered in that obsequious, cloying tone we have all come to associate with ChatGPT replies—outside the traditional confines of office hours. Should you really be the one crossing the Whitla Hall to receive your degree if the complete sum of your work was ghostwritten by a chatbot?
This is a problem that necessitates a return to form, and I believe the traditional examination process is the best way to combat this mass corruption of higher education. Whilst not a pleasant experience in the slightest—the crucible of GCSEs and A-Levels comes to mind—they are necessary measures to protect a curriculum hijacked by a growing societal laziness and deference to AI slop. When once the advances of technology spurred the invention of the printing press, allowing the global propagation of ideas and thoughts, they now serve to make us more docile and feckless. Convenience is the enemy of hard work, and that convenience can be summoned with just the right number of words bundled in a ‘prompt’.
When sat down and isolated from the outside world, all one can rely on are the abstract concepts of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘rote memorisation’, olden day concepts swept away by the deluge of easy access, fast flowing media drenching our phones, tablets, and computers. Armed merely with your mind, and the pen and paper by which it expresses its understanding of the task at hand, accountability falls squarely on you. It is by no means a perfect method of gauging someone’s learning, but in this current climate of mass plagiarism, do we really have any other choice? There is a beauty in the academic struggle that we are losing to the forces of convenience—the battle for last minute revision, frantic scramble for past papers, endless mnemonics scribbled on the backs of notebooks. We have made life easier for ourselves, yes, but at what cost?
Think of the sort of unqualified, ignorant, and lazy students we are letting loose into the world, unable to cope with pressure and desperate for help at the most trivial of problems. How will they cope with the rest of the twenty-first century, with the prospect of a political polarisation and economic despair, as we all fight over the ashes of a dying planet that we have abused and mistreated? Our higher education institutions are meant to create model citizens capable of tackling these issues. ChatGPT, OpenAI, and the rest of the greedy cabal have no intention of bettering anyone when they market their products to budding academics. Our misery—and society’s at large—is theirs to profit from.
While exams aren’t perfect, they may be the only way we can defend the integrity of our academic institutions. A return to pen and paper—whether that be open or closed book, lecture hall or the sealed confines of an examination room—will help to stop the ossification of our university careers. We must up the score against the forces of laziness and convenience, even if that means having to relive the sleepless nights studying formulas and dates of yesteryear.
References
- Freeman, Josh. “Provide or punish? Students’ views on generative AI in higher education.” Higher Education Policy Institute. 1 February 2024. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/reports/provide-or-punish-students-views-on-generative-ai-in-higher-education/
- Freeman, Josh. “Student Generative AI Survey 2025.” Higher Education Policy Institute. 26 February 2025. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/reports/student-generative-ai-survey-2025/
