A new ChatGPT model invalidates unsupervised online testing for academia and pre-employment, according to research from a Virginia Tech psychologist.

Increasingly beleaguered by artificial intelligence (AI)-based cheating, unproctored testing is now completely vulnerable to reasoning large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT. A Virginia Tech psychologist has a few ideas about where to go from here.

Unproctored, or unsupervised, online tests allow employers and instructors to evaluate thousands of people simultaneously and score them in seconds, delivering quick results.

OpenAI’s new o1 model — the earliest of the recent wave of reasoning LLMs — renders unproctored assessments worthless, according to recent research from a Virginia Tech psychologist published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment.

“The findings suggest that few, if any, unproctored tests will remain safe from people using large language models to cheat,” said Louis Hickman, an industrial organizational psychologist who studies the implications of artifcial intelligence in workplaces.