It is definitely happening: students are using smartglasses to cheat on their exams.
Anecdotal evidence of this has been reported on Reddit for quite some time: for example, this week and two months ago. It is clearly technically feasible to use smart glasses to help on an exam, given how easy it is to connect glasses that have a camera in them to capable back-end AI models. There are useful documented demonstrations of this: for example, a system based on Rokid + ChatGPT 5.2 was demonstrated to get a student to a score of 92.5 on a computer networking exam for which the class average was 72. There are instances of cheating for which criminal penalties may be appropriate: for example, in Korea, a person taking a fire engineer exam is facing criminal prosecution for cheating using AI-powered glasses.
What should we do as educators? Prohibiting smartglasses on all exams seems like the right place to start. But how do we enforce this?
For significant, important, and long exams, verifying that students are not wearing smartglasses seems doable. It feels oddly personal to ask to inspect student’s glasses, but I guess we will get used to it? My group worked on some options that may make scanning more automated and less personal: a robotic-arm-based scan or a self-administered scan via a mobile phone app. These methods focus on detecting glasses that have displays, but they can probably be combined with methods that detect cameras in similar form factors. So the future of exam-taking is, if you are wearing glasses, a robotic arm takes them from you and inspects them before allowing you to enter the exam room. If you are taking a proctored exam remotely, you install an app on your phone that asks to see the glasses from all perspectives before you can begin. Like in our videos here.
What about other in-class activities, though? Short quizzes? Bonus points for answering questions posed by the instructor on the spur of the moment? Do we need to prohibit smartglasses from educational spaces outright, to ensure that students’ answers are not supplied by AI?