AIBRIEF
Mexico's largest university saw the share of top scores jump from 3.5% to 16.3% on its first fully remote exam in 2026. An expert panel just told the rector to make 58,000 students take it again in person.
About 58,000 students who thought they had a place at Mexico's largest public university now have to retake the entrance exam in person, weeks before classes were scheduled to begin on August 10.
UNAM (the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) ran its licenciatura entrance exam fully online for the first time in late May and early June, putting roughly 160,000 applicants behind a lockdown browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring. The results did not look right: the share of test-takers scoring 100 or above on the 120-question test jumped to 16.3% in 2026, from 3.5% on average across 2021–2025, per Ars Technica. At the 110-or-better threshold, the share rose from 0.9% to 5.5%.
UNAM commissioned an expert panel, the Comisión Técnica, to review the process. The commission's recommendation, published in Gaceta UNAM and corroborated by NPR and El País, was an in-person "control exam" for everyone caught in the anomaly. Rector Leonardo Lomelí apologized to honest applicants, calling the retest "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," per Gaceta UNAM.
The proctoring vendor, per Infobae, was Territorium. UNAM has not yet said whether the August 10 start will move to make room for the retest.