Mexico's Top University Cancelled Thousands of Exam Scores Over Suspected AI Cheating

Daniel Fernando García Velázquez traveled 400 kilometers from Veracruz to Mexico City three times just to sit UNAM's entrance exam in person, because the university required it. This June, for the first time in its history, UNAM let students take the test online. Velázquez went anyway, scored a strong 94 out of 120, and should have locked in a spot in the Communication and Journalism program at UNAM's Aragón campus. Instead he's stuck in limbo, one of roughly 150,000 applicants caught in a scandal that's now pulled in Mexico's president.

The trouble started when UNAM quietly invalidated about 3,000 of those 150,000 tests, roughly 2%, citing unspecified behavior that violated exam rules. What it didn't say at first was the real tell: a suspicious tripling in perfect scores compared to prior years, alongside a jump in students who bombed the test entirely. Alma Maldonado, part of the technical commission investigating, called the pattern shocking. TikTok videos allegedly showing how to dodge the exam's AI-based monitoring system spread fast, and one applicant told CNN he was offered a program that would solve the test automatically for 2,500 pesos, about $150.

UNAM built this online exam specifically to make admissions fairer, sparing students from across Mexico the cost and hassle of traveling to Mexico City. The AI surveillance layer, run by contractor Territorium Life, was supposed to catch cheating by recording applicant behavior in real time, backed up by human proctors. Territorium insists its platform worked as intended and that exam integrity depends on more than just tech. But the optics are bad: a system designed to open access instead became the thing everyone blames for letting cheaters through, or for wrongly punishing honest test-takers caught in the crackdown.

The stakes here go beyond one exam cycle. UNAM traces back to the 1500s, gained autonomy in 1929, and functions as one of the few affordable paths to a degree in a country where private universities are out of reach for most families. More than 100,000 people apply every year for around 22,000 spots, so admission is brutally competitive already. President Claudia Sheinbaum, herself a UNAM physics graduate, has floated bringing in the attorney general to investigate, which tells you how far this has traveled beyond a campus dispute.

UNAM's fix, announced Friday, is blunt: everyone who scored high enough to pass this year, or in any of the past five years, roughly 58,000 people, has to sit a new in-person control exam. No dates or locations yet, though the commission wants it done fast to avoid wrecking the semester that starts August 10. Rector Leonardo Lomelí is leaning hard on the ethics angle, warning that gaming the system corrodes the country's social fabric. That's a heavy phrase for what started as a rollout of online testing meant to make things easier.