AI Agents Are Taking Entire Online Courses for Cheating Students

Students are unleashing AI agents to log into Canvas and Blackboard and complete entire online courses - quizzes, lectures, papers, even discussion posts - as instructors struggle to tell human from bot.

AI cheating has moved well past copy-pasting a chatbot's essay. Students are now directing AI agents to complete entire online courses for them, logging into learning platforms like Canvas and Blackboard with a command as simple as "log in and complete my quiz," then having the agent watch lecture videos, take quizzes, write papers, and even pose as the student in class discussion threads.

The trend lands hardest in the fastest-growing corner of higher education. More than half of American college students took at least one online class last year, up from roughly a third in 2019, and those asynchronous, self-paced courses are precisely where supervised exams and oral presentations are hardest to enforce. In-person, instructors have retreated to handwritten work and paper dictionaries. Online, they are left asking whether anyone on the other side of the screen is real.

AI companies are doing little to slow it down. A New York Times investigation found that none of the three most popular chatbots among students - ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grammarly - would refuse a request to write an entire paper, while Perplexity argued that forcing AI to identify itself on learning platforms "would put the student's privacy and security at risk."

Instructors are catching the telltale signs. Kathryn Kysar, a community-college teacher since the 1980s, watched students flunk a punctuation pretest and then submit flawless work "studded with colons, semicolons and dashes." Karen Costa, who has taught online for nearly 20 years, summed up the mood: "Am I just interacting with bots here?"

Sources: Futurism, The Star