Students at 11 universities made 82,512 mock exam questions with AI

Students' use of AI tutors surges all at once two to three weeks before midterm and final exams. At universities that adopted Ubion's AI learning platform, daily exam question attempts peaked at 839. That is about seven times the usual 100 to 120 a day.

The platform is Ubion's Cosmos AI-Learning Experience Platform (AI-LXP). It launched this semester and was first adopted by 11 universities in Seoul and other regions. The AI tutor is layered on top of the learning management system (LMS) universities already use, so students can check concepts and review outside regular classes. The key feature is that students can take mock exams alone, whenever they want. The company says no such option existed before. During the semester, 8,780 enrolled students used AI to create 82,512 mock exam questions related to their majors, and they solved 82,484 of them.

The core of the design is that it does not give answers outright. When a student solves a problem, the AI grades it and gives feedback in real time. Rather than telling students the answer, it asks questions that help them organize their reasoning on their own. A professor or teaching assistant would face limits of time and place in doing the same, but the AI handled more than 80,000 questions in real time. More than four in 10 university students reportedly checked their answers and then solved the same problems again. The company describes this as voluntary repeated study that emerged without any requirement or separate instructions.

So what changes? First, review and preview became possible outside class. Students can ask about a concept they did not understand during a lecture and keep asking follow-up questions. Universities believe that if they run the AI tutor in connection with their courses, preview and review can be carried out fully. Lim Jae-hwan, CEO of Ubion, said, “The results of one semester of operation show what happens when AI helps students find answers on their own, rather than thinking in their place.” The company plans to expand AI tutors across domestic universities based on the same design principle. However, the effect of higher levels of personalized learning is still at the expectation stage.

Similar trends are visible in the United States. California State University and Arizona State University have adopted OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu. Big tech services such as OpenAI's Study Mode, Google's Guided Learning and Anthropic's Learning Mode are also designed to lead students to answers on their own by asking them questions. The point is that whether AI serves as an answer key for university students or as an aide that draws out their thinking has now become a question of design.