How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.
- Quick cell phone photograph of the page, phone placed in lap
- OCR + AI = answer
- Glance down, copy
- Repeat
For a more surreptitious variant, use the front-facing camera against the bottom of the page, then flip the page. Cell phone can remain in lap.
>Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the “nuclear option” might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate “confidence in the honor” of students.
snip
>In junior year, 49 percent of the 849 computer science majors who responded to an annual campus survey said they would rather cheat on an exam than fail.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/chatgpt-ai-colleg...
Now, I'm not saying every place can be like that, I'm just trying to explain why at this particular university, the honor code is a reasonable policy that may work perfectly well on policing AI in exams. You can't copy that to other institutions, but it answers how they do it here.