How many students are caught cheating in GCSE and A-level exams, and how many cases involve AI?

How many students are penalised for exam malpractice each year?

Exam boards penalised 4,735 GCSE, AS and A-level students in England for malpractice in summer 2025, down from 4,975 in summer 2024.

Ofqual counts proven cases where a penalty was issued. One case can involve several students, and one student can be involved in several cases, so the number of cases (5,025) is higher than the number of students (4,735). In summer 2025, 94.1% of penalised students were involved in only one case.

Student cases rose from 4,090 in 2022 to 5,155 in 2024, then fell 2.5% in 2025. Ofqual notes that 95 cases were still under investigation at its data cut-off on 12 November 2025.

What are the most common types of exam malpractice?

Taking a mobile phone or other communication device into the exam room is the most common offence, involved in 44.3% of student cases in summer 2025.

The chart counts each case once. Cases with more than one offence type are grouped as "multiple malpractice types", which is why phones show 42.0% here and 44.3% in the headline figure, which also counts phones within multi-offence cases.

Ofqual's phone category includes smartwatches. "Other unauthorised materials" includes non-smart watches, which have been banned from exam rooms since September 2021.

Do teachers and schools commit exam malpractice too?

Yes. Cases involving school or college staff rose from 245 in summer 2024 to 465 in summer 2025, mostly because of a rise in maladministration.

Maladministration, which Ofqual describes as a less serious form of malpractice, generally covers mistakes or poor process without intent to harm. It appeared in 73.7% of staff cases in summer 2025 (340 cases), up from 56.9% (140 cases) in 2024. The most common staff penalty was a written warning (310 cases).

Cases against whole schools or colleges rose from 145 to 200. In total, 175 schools and colleges received at least one penalty, 2.9% of the 6,010 with GCSE, AS or A-level results.

Methodology and sources

• All GCSE, AS and A-level figures come from Ofqual's official statistics for the summer 2025 exam series, published on 11 December 2025. They cover England only and count proven cases where a penalty was issued.
• Ofqual rounds figures in line with its rounding policy for statistical publications, to protect confidentiality.
• Cases, students and penalties are different measures. A case can involve several students or offences, and Ofqual cannot always tell how many penalties were issued per case.
• Ofqual warns against dividing malpractice cases by exam entries, because entries are counted per student and component while a case can span several. This page does not calculate cases per entry.
• Vocational figures come from Ofqual's research and analysis report on vocational and technical qualifications for 2024 to 2025, published on 5 May 2026. It is not an official statistics release, and it covers a different set of qualifications, so its figures are shown separately.
• Aripsy has not adjusted or derived any figure on this page. Every value is quoted as published, and each table links to the section of the source it comes from.