The world’s largest accounting body, The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has decided to scrap remote exams to combat a rise in students cheating when sitting tests remotely.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, which has 257,900 members, will end its online exams from March, requiring candidates to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances, its chief executive Helen Brand told the Financial Times.
Introduction of Remote Examinations
Remote examinations were introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic to allow students to continue qualifying into the profession during lockdowns.
But the ACCA has concluded that online tests have become too difficult to police, particularly as artificial intelligence has made cheating more difficult to combat.
“We’re seeing the sophistication of [cheating] systems outpacing what can be put in, [in] terms of safeguards,” said Brand.
Brand said the ACCA, which has more than 500,000 students, had worked “intensively” to combat cheating but “people who want to do bad things are probably working at a quicker pace”.
Artificial Intelligence Enabled Cheating
One student currently taking ACCA exams told the FT that a friend had been able to cheat by photographing exam questions and then feeding the images into an AI chatbot for assistance.
The ACCA said that while it was confident its processes protected the integrity of its exams, rapid technological advances had pushed matters to a “tipping point”.
Another student said it had been a “huge relief” to sit the exams from home while pregnant and avoid the six-hour drive to the closest exam centre. “At this point in my life, I genuinely don’t think I would have been able to attend exams or lectures in person,” she said.
“There are very few high-stakes examinations now that are allowing [remote invigilation],” Brand said. The ICAEW, which also trains accountants around the world, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland still permit some exams to be sat online.
While technology has made it easier to cheat in remote exams, Brand said some students still cheated in in-person tests: “Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not just the technology. There are other ways . . . formulas up your arm, things down your sock, God knows what — mirrors and everything.”
The ACCA’s switch to in-person testing comes even as it overhauls its flagship qualification for the first time in a decade to include a greater focus on emerging areas such as AI, blockchain and data science.
AI had “fundamentally shifted” the skills required of accountants, said Brand. Firms including the Big Four have been investing heavily in AI-powered tools to improve their efficiency.
That would make it a “challenge” for junior auditors to gain practical experience, Brand said, so the new ACCA modules will simulate real-time scenarios, aiming to train students to apply scepticism to dynamic problems “more than a static exam”.