The world's largest accounting body has stopped allowing students to take its exams remotely in a bid to crack down on a rise in cheating in exams supporting professional qualifications.
The Association of Certified Public Accountants (ACCA), which has around 260,000 members, announced that it will ban students from taking online exams from March, except in exceptional circumstances.
“We’re looking at sophistication. [cheating] The system outperforms what you can put into it; [in] It's a safeguard condition,” ACCA chief executive Helen Brand said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Remote exams were introduced during the coronavirus pandemic to allow students to continue gaining qualifications during a time when face-to-face exam assessments were not possible due to lockdown.
The UK's accounting and auditing industry regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), said in 2022 that cheating in professional exams was a “real” problem at some of the UK's biggest companies.
Major auditing and accounting firms around the world have been hit with millions of dollars in fines over exam cheating scandals.
The FRC investigation also found that cases of fraud also included the “big four” accountants – KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY – and some tier 1 auditors, including Mazars, Grant Thornton and BDO.
EY agreed to pay a record $100m (£74m) to US regulators in 2022 over allegations that dozens of employees cheated on ethics exams and that the company subsequently misled investigators.
ACCA said it had concluded that online testing had become too difficult to police, given the increasing number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to students.
Mr Brand said ACCA, which has more than 500,000 students, had been working “intensively” to combat cheating, but “those who want to do bad things are probably working at a faster pace”.
She added that the problem of fraud has reached a “tipping point” due to rapid developments in technology, especially AI tools.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), which also trains accountants around the world, said last year that reports of fraud were still on the rise.
However, ICAEW still allows some exams to be taken online.
“Currently, very few high-stakes tests are allowed. [remote invigilation]” Brand said.
