Mexico's largest university is making tens of thousands sit its entrance exam again — in a room, on paper, with nothing in their pockets
UNAM ran its undergraduate entrance exam entirely online for the first time this year, between 23 May and 10 June, with more than 158,000 applicants. When results were published on 17 July the score distribution did not look like any previous year: the share of candidates answering 100 or more of 120 questions correctly rose from 3.5% across 2021–2025 to 16%, and the share scoring 110 or more went from 0.9% to 5.5%. By degree the jumps were sharper still — medicine from 9% to 29.3%, law from 3.7% to 19%, science from 9.7% to 30.4%. The exam's own AI-assisted proctoring, camera and microphone monitoring reviewed by behaviour specialists, had already voided about 3,000 papers, roughly 2%, while the exam was running. It was the score curve, not the proctoring, that exposed the scale of the problem. A technical commission of 16 specialists in education, AI and law recommended a fresh in-person control exam; the university convened about 58,000 applicants and is applying it to 43,619 of them across four cities between 12 and 19 August, reaching Tijuana on Sunday. UNAM has also filed criminal complaints against companies that sold exam-taking services.
Related stories
For two years schools tried to keep chatbots out. Now they are handing them to pupils and asking them to catch the mistakes.2026-08-21Two school years, 18 schools, one AI tutor: the gain was about what practising without it produces
2026-08-20A university system pointed a model at 14,000 syllabuses and asked it to find the forbidden topics
2026-08-19ChatGPT now guesses whether it is talking to a child — and if it decides yes, the product changes around them
2026-08-18Ninety-eight teenagers wrote the AI school policy the adults have not — and it tells teachers to declare their own use
2026-08-16