Denmark makes teenagers orally defend their essays to stop AI cheating

Danish students aged 16 to 19 will have to defend written essays orally, starting immediately. About 9,000 upper secondary students a year write the major SSO assignment at home, and all will now face an oral examination on it. Schools must also deploy monitoring tools and firewalls during written exams and are urged to move assignments into supervised classrooms. "Unfortunately, we have a problem with AI cheating in upper secondary schools. Action is needed now," said Denmark's education minister. A comprehensive national AI strategy for the education sector is in preparation. The oral defence approach sidesteps detection tools entirely by testing whether the student can account for their own argument.

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