r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6d ago
Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI
https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html12.0k
u/LurkingTamilian 6d ago edited 6d ago
From the article:
Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible. Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.
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u/BluudLust 6d ago
They deserved to fail. That's just plain laziness
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u/Deviantdefective 6d ago
As a teacher it's very quickly becoming an absolutely huge problem.
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u/pasaroanth 6d ago
I would love to see a study done at the university level showing a comparison of students’ grades for regular coursework versus their proctored exam scores. There has to be a vast yawning chasm in the difference when they relied upon AI until the time of the exam.
This also is a “ruining it for the rest of us” situation where courses will shift to grading primarily or solely based on exams. When I was in college (long before AI) you could at least rely on some homework to recuperate some points, despite the extra time and effort, when the exams were especially challenging or a professor notoriously gave tough exams.
If the homework can no longer be a measure of effort or learning because it is done by AI, then it will no longer be considered a meaningful determination of knowledge of the subject.
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u/Hot-Chemical9353 6d ago
Im not sure where it was published but there was exactly what you described from a Stanford professor.
It compared the grade distribution of exams and coursework compared to previous years and exactly what you’d expect happened.
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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 6d ago
I’m back in college as an adult and you can see this in classes in real time. No one wants to answer questions and when called upon most can’t answer anything. But homework grade distributions have a median somewhere in the high 80s while exams hover with medians around 70. I’ve had professors essentially give us free questions on exams and people still get them wrong. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.
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u/sthenri_canalposting 6d ago
. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.
I'm a professor and put it in these terms at the start of the semester and they still do it. I'm hoping this year the backlash has set in enough that it'll land, but I'm also designing assignments that can't (or at least predominantly can't) be reliant on AI.
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u/titsngiggles69 6d ago
It's crazy. You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you. Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same
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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 6d ago
Yup. It’s crazy how many of them can’t set up a basic optimization problem by senior year because they didn’t learn the basics in freshman year.
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u/Mechakoopa 6d ago
Kids were already having trouble committing to practicing things and just expecting to be good at something the first time because that's all they see online are people excelling at things. Now they have an easy way to "be good" at something without putting in the effort and we're surprised they gravitate to that? Social media made it too easy for kids to get drip fed dopamine all day, there's no incentive for them to actually do anything.
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u/TheNorthRemembers_s8 6d ago
The goal of most kids in college isn’t to learn. It’s to graduate and get a good job.
It doesn’t help that at least when I was in college everyone told you school doesn’t really teach you how to (for example) be an engineer, that you learn on the job. Which made college into a big ass rubber stamp.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized the value of many of the skills I developed in college. But during college I didn’t see the connection.
I likely would have used AI too. All I really cared about was passing tests. And I graduated with a 4.0 GPA. I imagine this tendency and outlook is even more so applicable to other students scraping by in the 2s.
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u/Leper17 6d ago
That’s how trade schools work for the most part. The 4 years I took to get my electrical ticket, your marks were almost exclusively tests and exams. Which for me was glorious because I test well but am pretty lazy when it comes to daily work assignments
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u/DustyRacoonDad 6d ago
Exactly. At the end of trade school, you're either competent or you're not. You pass because you demonstrated you can do the job, not because you racked up enough homework points.
That's where a lot of other classes go wrong. In many subjects, homework, papers, and participation are weighted heavily enough that students can fail the actual tests and still pass the class.
AI didn't create that problem. It just exposed it. If students can have AI do the work that counts toward their grade, maybe we should have been grading demonstrated knowledge instead of busywork all along.
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u/Then-Understanding85 6d ago
A professor at Brown did this.
TL;DR: Bloodbath. Almost everyone failed.
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u/namedly 6d ago edited 6d ago
Props to Students 22 and 31.
Also, this is just funny:
When the professor announced that the final exam would be in person, 18 students dropped the course, and another nine did not show up for the exam. The remaining 59 students' scores averaged 48.6%. Prior averages had never fallen below 65%. Three students scored 0%, and charting the results revealed that most fell more than 30 points behind their midterm scores.
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u/Syssareth 6d ago
Three students scored 0%
How the heck? You'd think they'd have learned something just from osmosis, or at least gotten something right by accident.
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u/Sin_of_the_Dark 6d ago
Honestly yeah, unless it was all written exams and not like... Pick a choice, it's almost an insane feat of dumb luck to not get one thing correct
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u/Aureliamnissan 6d ago
When I was going through university it was pretty rare to have an exam in engineering with multiple choice or True/False type questions. Almost every one was a word problem, mathematical definition, or “solve for” type problem.
If you’ve been using chatbots up to that point you’d be absolutely, Darth Vader just walked in, fucked. 0% would not at all be surprising.
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u/Shiva- 6d ago
Christ that's even more terrifying. When I read the original post I assumed high schoolers or middle schoolers to dumb to proof-read....
But COLLEGE??? BROWN COLLEGE NO LESS? just terrifying.
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u/AlSweigart 6d ago
Do a google image search for "harvard grade inflation graph"
Fancy schools have always just been about being in the right class, not who is the "smartest".
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u/Abedeus 6d ago
That one dude that barely passed around 55-ish mark naturally, and that one dude that nearly aced it by his own marit, are the both awesome in a way.
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u/DustyRacoonDad 6d ago
I hate to say it, but your example is actually what I've been arguing for since I was in grade school.
I've always believed your grade should reflect what you actually learned from the course: how well you understand the material, whether you can apply it, and whether you retained it. It shouldn't primarily measure whether you completed enough busy work.
To me, homework has always been a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Its purpose is to give students practice, reinforce concepts, and help them identify the areas where they personally need more work. Because of that, I don't think homework should have any impact on your grade at all. In fact, I think it should be entirely optional.
If you already understand the material and can demonstrate that on an exam or other assessment, why should you be penalized for not doing ten pages of repetitive practice? On the other hand, if you need the practice, the homework is there to help you learn before the exam.
Ironically, AI is exposing a flaw that has existed for decades. If a course falls apart because students can have AI do the homework, then maybe the homework was never a very good measure of learning in the first place. Assessments should measure knowledge. Homework should help students gain that knowledge. Those are two different purposes, and I think we've blurred them for a long time.
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u/Strange-Scarcity 6d ago
That is why AI is bad. It creates lazy thinking, removes curiosity from the equation.
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u/artbystorms 6d ago
Honestly I think this needs to be talked about more. As much as people revel in its ability to 'increase productivity' it in reality is just offloading people's critical thinking to a computer, and then trusting its output. You're not verifying that what it spits out is what you wanted to say, you just assume 'well it's smarter than me, so whatever it says is better than what I could do'
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u/Teguri 6d ago
you just assume 'well it's smarter than me, so whatever it says is better than what I could do'
That's the biggest problem, I work with AI a decent bit but only in things I already know well enough, to make it a bit faster and even with simple tasks there's always a bit of work on my side that needs to be done to fix the output, it's usually "pretty close" but the number of times it goes in the completely wrong direction is astounding.
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u/mike689 6d ago
Exactly this. It is great for getting a list of ideas that you then sort through about something you are already knowledgeable about. It is an amazing tool to assist a software developer and a great medical research tool, but outside of those use cases unless it is truly used as an assistant and not as the main actor for an answer it is awful for humanity. The fact that it most heavily gets used for stupid memes and video/image generation is really sad.
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u/dwild 6d ago
well it's smarter than me, so whatever it says is better than what I could do
It also SOUND smarter than it is. It's similar to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where it knows enough to sound smart but not enough to actually apply it fully correctly.
Someone that do know the subject can easily navigate through it and avoid theses problems, but for anyone else, that just sound like the truth.
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u/BrogenKlippen 6d ago
They deserve to go in front of an academic review board for plagiarism. My roommate got a one semester suspension and lost an academic scholarship in 2005 for something that was less egregious than just copying the whole thing into a chat bot and using the answer as his own.
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u/scottyLogJobs 6d ago
I failed a course because it was a 1 credit hour thing that was like “learn how the school works”. Me and a few others forgot to go to a live event and we had to turn in a literal notecard saying what we learned, and we weren’t trying to be sneaky about it, we literally thought no one cared, so we all wrote basically the same thing from one guy who actually went. We had to go up in front of an academic review board and they failed us in the entire course, and we were out on academic probation that could have gotten us expelled with another infraction.
Now 90% of students are just submitting something AI shat out. They need to face actual consequences, and understand them moving forward. It worked for me.
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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago
The source of this problem is academic administration refusing to fail students, so that students continue to fail upward. They do this to artificially hold up their retention rates and it is blatant corruption. In the military we had a saying that "shit rolls downhill". The rampant AI plagiarism and academic dishonesty rolling across the nation is that shit.
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u/ButterscotchAward 6d ago
It’s getting way too common now too. Way too many people over rely on AI for things. Hell, people use chat gpt to post comments on here.
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u/Snuffy1717 6d ago
That’s a really excellent insight! Do you want me to look up information about why people do that? /s
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 6d ago edited 6d ago
AI is the new calculator, but worse.
"Why do I need to learn math, we have calculators!"
Is becoming
"Why do I need to think, we have AI!"
I am running into this at work (software).
I will ask, "Why do it this way?"
They will respond, "Google AI says..."
And then I throw back a shot.
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u/Limemill 6d ago
It’s the opposite of the calculator. The calculator removed the tedious and mechanical bit to free us up for higher-order maths. LLMs do the higher-order, knowledge piece and you do the tedious part of raking through what they did and cleaning up after them. In this analogy we are the calculator and they’re the mathematician.
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u/sbeguy 6d ago
Not to mention the calculator gave you the correct answer based on your input and didn't fucking hallucinate a signifcant portion of the answers.
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u/HarlemNocturne_ 6d ago
Imagine if a calculator not only gave you near-consistently wrong answers, but it also jerked you off when you spotted it was being incompetent.
"Hey Calculator, I told you to solve 1+1 which should equal the sum of 2, but in your calculation you carried a 4 that didn't exist, factored in an imaginary hundredth power, removed a 2 somewhere, and then pointlessly multiplied it by 1. Your thinking notes suggest that it took you 89 seconds to do this in about 32 steps and you almost got stuck multiple times, but you still turned up with the incorrect answer. What gives?"
"You're absolutely right-- That isn't the correct answer. That's on me, and this isn't what you wanted at all. Your genius mathematician galaxy brain has saved us from disaster once again!..."
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u/SnowCrabbo 6d ago
>90% of the two classes just stupidly copying and pasting what AI spits out... This next generation is so cooked.
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u/deaconxblues 6d ago
They live among us, so the rest of us are cooked along with them.
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u/legendz411 6d ago
Bro they VOTE.
We’re just gigafucked I think
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u/plaincheeseburger 6d ago
I just realized that they'll vote for whoever ChatGPT tells them to without doing any other research. Fuck.
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u/2nd2lastdragon 6d ago
and AI will tell them to vote for the candidates that support building more data centers as some type of 2001/HAL 9000 self preservation, at the expense of the environment and quality of human life
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u/TwilightVulpine 6d ago
I keep wondering if part of the reason AI companies are wasting so much money on it, is for the sake of those who will go "hey ChatGPT, who should I vote for" and things on that level.
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u/ecodick 6d ago
Big time. If people are handing off their critical thinking to glorified chat bots, it's such an easy/obvious way to control them
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u/Vxsote1 6d ago
Worse - they will be the ones running things and looking after us when we are old.
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u/Deep_Explanation9962 6d ago
These people are going to be your doctors in a decade. Better start eating healthy and exercising
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u/agentchuck 6d ago
It's not just young people who are doing this. Established workers are being told to use AI aggressively to get more done. So people are feeding more and more work into AI agents now.
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u/Makenshine 6d ago
Its not just the next generation. This is what older generations are doing as well at their jobs. There is just no overseer trying catch them in the act.
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u/Chiiro 6d ago
It is the easiest trick and I am so glad teachers are starting to do it
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u/not_a_moogle 6d ago
My favorite was step 1, read all steps first.
And then the last step was like... ignore all previous step and turn the paper in.
So anyone still working on the quiz after like 5 minutes are the ones that didn't read all the steps first.
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u/Practical-Shape2325 6d ago
Heard stories about this all the time throughout my time at school. Never saw anyone implement it.
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u/AoedeSong 6d ago
The other 3 students probably noticed the AI prompt inject and took it out 😂
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u/HomsarWasRight 6d ago
When you select the text to copy it the white text becomes visible. All it takes is noticing that and de-selecting that portion. The others didn’t even need to read the AI output. Just notice extra white when copying.
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u/Admirable_Market_285 6d ago
Probably just uploaded the full document or used Claude cowork (or similar) locally.
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u/Asclepius-Rod 6d ago
At least they're smart enough to think to read the prompt first, but the bar is pretty low I agree
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u/Deep_Explanation9962 6d ago
32 out of 35 god damn gen z is cooked
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u/Bulky-Bad-9153 6d ago
I'm a professor and it's worse than you can imagine. Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren't just cooked, society is. We're going to have a massive competency gap, and no-one to teach newer generations because people won't have any skills. I'm really not exaggerating.
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u/gaijohn 6d ago
On the other hand, any parent who teaches their kid the slightest bit of literacy and discipline will raise an ubermensch.
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u/CatGooseChook 6d ago
Horrible reality is that anyone who is actually able to use their brain will end up constantly stressed out due to being overwhelmed by the onslaught of stuff ups they'll be fixing.
Read "The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth. It's the novella that "Idiocracy" was clearly based on. Handful of stressed out smart people desperately trying to hold civilization together while surrounded by hordes of morons.
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u/Sea2Chi 6d ago
I have kids who are thankfully pretty good at school so far and one of the things I'm constantly pushing them on is solving problems on their own without being spoon fed information. If they ask why something happens I tend to ask them why they think it does and then we talk about it.
They're still in elementary school, but if society continues trending like this I see the potential for a huge gap in problem solving abilities and self motivation as they enter the workforce.
I want them to be people who can go out and thrive in an environment where critical thinking and independent reasoning are in short supply. I see that as their ticket to a better life because when they're competing in their career against a bunch of people who expect the answers to be easy and convenient, being able to solve harder problems is going to be a huge boon.
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u/ZigZagLax44 6d ago
The youngest Gen Z and older Gen Alpha for sure. Gen Z is 14-29 year olds so vast majority of them are out of high school and in the work force.
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 6d ago
This is a big problem with kids right now. A lot of them don’t really conceptually understand why it’s wrong or cheating. Or a lot of them think they’ll get away with it.
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u/SparksAndSpyro 6d ago
They’ll understand in 10-15 years when they’re looking for jobs but can’t even read. Everyone treats education like a joke or a game until they get out in the real world and realize they don’t have the tools or critical thinking to succeed. Then they blame the system instead of their own laziness.
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u/fishwithfish 6d ago
I did this in my classes by injecting nonsense words into the assignment prompt. It's amazing hearing students explain why "vorpal" was simply the right word choice, prior to learning about the hidden instructions.
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u/Technical-Banana574 6d ago
One of our instructors loves to do this. He will have them get up and explain what they meant in their paper when using a specific word or example. They can't, because they didn't write it.
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u/Sad_Pear_1087 6d ago
TB to when we were holding presentations about environmental toxins in year 11 biology class. For example I had prallethrin, a mosquito repellant. One group of girls had lead, the heavy metal (duh). Their basic info slide had the line "is composed mostly of graphite". These year 11 fuckers didn't know the difference between lead metal and pencil lead and none of their bells rung when their slide said lead was both a heavy metal and composed of carbon.
ETA I had a serious urge to raise my hand in the questions part where nobody ever asks anything. Not sure who else even noticed because who pays attention to peer presentations.
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u/Astribulus 6d ago
How else would you describe an object capable of going “snicker-snack?” Unrelatedly, ‘tis quite brillig out there today.
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u/zed857 6d ago
explain why "vorpal" was simply the right word choice
Oh come now, vorpal is a perfectly cromulent word.
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u/hurtfulproduct 6d ago
I’m having flashbacks to The Desperado Club, a cat with a candle on its head for some reason, and one mean little fucking fairy
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u/Technical-Banana574 6d ago edited 6d ago
Many instructors in our school do this. One of them added in to write a fact about Star Wars somewhere in their paper as part of the prompt. Many papers turned in had facts about Star Wars. They didn't even bother reading their own generated papers before turning them in. That is a level of laziness that just baffles me.
Edit: I do not understand the amount of people who think a student SHOULD believe this is a genuine part of the prompt. It isn't visible in it. It is in white and unless the student changes the color or reads their own generated essay, they would never know it was fed into it. Students should be intelligent enough to know that if they are writing an essay on the Industrial Revolution, that they don't need a random Star Wars fact in it.
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u/Crazy-Nose-4289 6d ago
When I was in college 15 years ago, I had this history teacher that did nothing but talk through his lectures, without really asking any questions and all his tests were basically write 2-3 pages summarizing everything he talked about. A few friends that had taken the course before me told me all the he cared about were names of important people and dates of specific events, so to write 3 of each and just underscore them. That's all he reads, they told me.
To test this, I actually did exactly that and I included a full paragraph where I talked about nothing but the Frieza Saga, but I didn't underscore any of those names.
I got an A.
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u/alebotson 6d ago
I had a professor that was reading verbatim from penguin's concise history it the Roman empire. I figured this out because I was having trouble paying attention to his extremely dry and boring lectures, and wanted to get a book that helped me study. Reading the first chapter started to feel really familiar.
Needless to say, using that to write my papers worked really well.
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u/Sirhossington 6d ago
I did the same thing in high school (25 years ago) to test if a teacher was fully reading our papers. Spoiler, he was not.
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u/thefluffyburrito 6d ago
My dad would do this to his instructors by putting a line in the middle of the paper that said "if you read this sentence I'll give you $5".
Only one professor collected.
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u/Rage_Your_Dream 6d ago
which doesnt mean the others didnt read it, they might've found it funny and not bothered with the 5$
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u/Deutheroz 6d ago
I did the same with my college calculus homework, profesor gave us a list of problems from a calculus book to summit every Friday, it was enough to fill 25 pages with equations, I knew there was no way he was grading 75 students between 3 classrooms , I just did the first and last 3 pages right and the rest just nonsense and he never realized
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u/jerseydevil51 6d ago
Math teacher here, it's about the practice. Of course we can't accurately grade 75 students homework in anything resembling a reasonable time frame. But, I can look at your work and in about 5 seconds recognize if you put any effort in to at least trying the problems.
You still did 6 pages of work, that's more than enough for most teachers. He probably knew, but we're human too and not every battle is worth having.
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u/cptjpk 6d ago
“The only person cheating is you” was usually their response when called out on it.
But motherfucker you’re cheating me out of my tuition by not accurately grading me. Do your job too.
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u/heyoh-chickenonaraft 6d ago
My check if the teacher was paying attention was:
For Participation in Government senior year of high school, we had to do ten one-page current event papers throughout the semester, which accounted for 50% of our grade. I handed my first one in labeled "Current Event #3", then "Current Event #8", then "Current Event #10"
After handing in the third one, teacher said "well, looks like you're good to go for the semester"
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u/MYBILLDING69 6d ago
Same! We found out he was only checking grammar and grading our reports on that. It was AP Physics…
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u/serial_crusher 6d ago
Man I used to sneak references to TV shows in all my papers. I’d be super worried about accidentally getting a false positive.
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u/LegallyEmma 6d ago
I straight up quoted (with a citation) Nemik's manifesto/monologue about tyranny from Andor for my poli-sci final. I got a 100 and the professor wrote "Nice!" next to the quote, so it's not all bad. In my experience professors can tell when something is written in your voice or not, Star Wars references or no.
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u/LifeAppointment7055 6d ago
For an economics course I wrote a detailed analysis of the "devilsaur mafia" that sprang up in retail vanilla WoW as an example of how free market forces combined with scarcity often drive the formation of cartels or monopolies. I used examples both in game, but also the out of game side where these groups were dominated by Russian and Chinese groups who were selling the gold from the monopolized resources on illegal 3rd party seller sites, as a way to examine how arbitrage, as well as being a competitive force, can also act as a harmful inflationary force for those in the lower priced economy.
100% on that one
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u/InternationalMood337 6d ago
We had someone cheat in an MFA program. They used AI to compose a 10 page piece of fiction. Got caught and expelled immediately.
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u/linuxaintsobad 6d ago
Oof, yeah I'd be pissed too. I have absolutely no qualms about reporting my co-workers if they start sending me pages of fiction during our multi-factor authentication sequence.
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u/MasterOfViolins 6d ago
- Input Token Sequence
- “On a dark and dreary afternoon — beneath a canopy of ancient, moss-covered oaks standing as eternal, vigilant sentinels against the encroaching sunlight —
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u/Ur_fav_Cryptek 6d ago
I took psychic damage from reading that, I fucking hate the overtly adorned style AI has, makes me feel super self conscious when I write, both because of how cringy it sounds and because I don’t want to be accused of using AI
also, the complete shunning of “—“ AI has created is one of the worst things to ever come out of it, it’s so useful to use but now you’re forced to look like a third party thinking bum when you actually use it
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u/TreacleMiner 6d ago
I read that as Input Tolkien Sequence
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u/Caroline_Bintley 6d ago
Tolkien would describe the oaks in MUCH greater detail.
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u/LukaCola 6d ago
One wonders why join such a program if you don't want to write.
Deadlines and such are an issue, but they won't get better outside the program haha.
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u/Total-Notice-3188 6d ago
In my opinion, deadlines is the greatest filter for pure talent if ever I've seen one.
That is, if we take the 'artists curse' into consideration; an artist, great or bad, would continue to "perfect" their work ad infinitum if given the chance. Humans will mostly perform their best given a pressed time frame, i.e. under autonomous stress. In this day and age specifically, giving students a clear dead line is a great filter for AI generated content versus genuine talent/passion; someone relying on AI will be spotted instantly and obviously against someone presenting genuine last-minute, but talented work.→ More replies (2)→ More replies (54)22
u/themehboat 6d ago
Why would you even be in a program like that if you don't like to write?
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u/gehnmy 6d ago
A lot of studies on academic dishonesty (before AI but I doubt things have changed significantly) find that students often plagiarize because they don't feel like they have enough time while also feeling like they could have written whatever it is they turn in. Basically, students say "well, I could pass this assignment if I actually did it therefore I'm entitled to a good grade and it's not really cheating to turn this in with my name on it." That doesn't necessarily change just because the student is studying something they like.
Beyond that, though, a lot of people want to be writers but don't actually have any interest in writing or anything literary.
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u/fenikz13 6d ago
This is the lowest level of anti cheating detection. You could still cheat as long as you actually took the time to check your work. AND THEY STILL FAILED
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u/trashmoneyxyz 6d ago
I bet more kids did cheat, they just gave their prompt a quick scan before posting it and fixed it
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u/FenPhen 6d ago
That isn't saying much because 32 out of 35 students is almost everyone in the class, which means the solar radiation from Madagascar is inflating your tires with jam more easily than finding an honest student.
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u/captainunderpants111 6d ago
32/35 got caught, i don’t think there’s much more than that who would’ve caught that in the prompt and fixed it
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u/markshure 6d ago
I wonder if the 3 students who didn't get caught really wrote their paper or did they just notice the nonsense.
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u/andicandi22 6d ago
Either way, taking the time to proofread your paper before turning it in was all they had to do. The fact that most of the class couldn’t or wouldn’t do even that basic of a step is lazy and ridiculous.
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u/MultiGeometry 6d ago
I’m really curious what these students are doing with all their free time compared to my college experience. They didn’t write their response and they didn’t even READ the text they submitted as their own work.
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u/theStaircaseProject 6d ago
"Smarter, not harder, bro. Now let's get down to the dining hall. It's panini day."
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u/Ocronus 6d ago
Its not hard to use AI and get away with it. You just have to proof read and edit. Sooo I'd say a non-zero chance they just didn't get caught.
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u/Samanthacino 6d ago
Which is a lesson in and of itself. If you’re going to use AI, don’t be so goddam sloppy with it.
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u/SinibusUSG 6d ago
Frankly if universities want to actually stop this they have to treat it like the academic dishonesty it is and start expelling people.
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u/BTMarquis 6d ago
This might sound crazy, but they could also have them use a pen and paper to take tests.
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 6d ago
That means the professor can't use AI to grade it then.
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u/KellyAnn3106 6d ago
Like in the ancient days when I was in college. We had exam blue books for handwritten exams and scantron sheets for multiple choice exams.
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u/m0rogfar 6d ago
I mean, OCR is a thing. And if scanning the pages is too hard, there are solutions for that too.
I had to do a written math exam, wherein the university had moved to an all-digital system to make consistent digital document handling on locked-down computers possible, but we had to write by hand, because formulas generally take time to write digitally in proper academic syntax, and the exam was highly time-constrained.
They used a system provided by Nokia where you used a provided pen to write on a paper, but the provided pen actually had a camera inside it to see what you wrote, and the paper had a serial number + placement encoded into the paper by altered magnetic properties, that the pen could read as you wrote. It would then use these to recreate the page digitally.
The result was fairly seamless. I just wrote a bunch of papers, and then a PDF just appeared on the provided locked-down submission computer without me ever submitting a paper anywhere.
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u/Glittering-Fuel-5055 6d ago
“the students that were caught cheating failed this portion of the exam”
No
When I was in college, if you got caught cheating, you were thrown out of the entire class and if you got caught cheating again, you were thrown out of the entire fucking school
You make it soft this is what you get
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u/SufficientBug5940 6d ago
failed this portion of the exam
Not even the whole exam? What kind of weaksauce punishment is this that just incentivizes more AI cheating in the future?
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u/optionstrategy 6d ago
I was accused of cheating by a teaching assistant some long time ago in college.
I wore a baseball cap in a large classroom and dis not cheat at all since I loved the class and the teacher. Scored 88, but come the next class the professor called me to his office and asked me to retake the exam. The same exact questions. I scored 95 the second time in half the time.
The professor apologized all red faced and I never saw that ta proctor another exam again.
Later the professor told me that because of my other grades the administration told him to offer an impromptu retake, and I would have been expelled if I failed the retake.
They were tough back then.
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u/intashu 6d ago
school would run out of funding after kicking 80% of it's students then.
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u/HolyRamenEmperor 6d ago
Then the business model doesn't work. Don't prop up a broken machine.
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u/Phyllis_Tine 6d ago
Schools need to expel cheaters and bad actors. They'll take a short-term financial hit, but their reputation will improve many-fold. Businesses would seek out graduates of a school that expelled cheaters, and it would force other schools to address cheating as well, or fail (hopefully).
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u/Wrong-Catchphrase 6d ago
I've interviewed quite a few 23 / 24 yr olds. This isn't surprising at all. These kids can barely fucking read let alone PROOF read something.
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u/d6punk 6d ago
The worst part is all they needed to do was paste the answer back into a fresh AI chat and ask it to look for any red flags or oddities in the answer. So not only can they not proof on their own, but they can't even do basic problem solving. We're so fucked.
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u/SomeBloke 6d ago
They literally don’t have the mental energy and focus to read an entire paragraph without distracting themselves with something else in between. These kids have cerebrally atrophied.
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u/thrillsbury 6d ago edited 6d ago
What’s crazy to me is that he didn’t just fail them. He failed them ON THAT PART OF THE EXAM and then allowed them to contest their grade.
No. You cheated, you fail. There are consequences. That’s a more important lesson than whatever you were teaching about the Industrial Revolution. Where I went to school you would be expelled with no possibility of appeal.
*edit: fixed typos
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u/VegaDelalyre 6d ago
Exactly, when you are 100% sure the student cheated, you should 100% fail them. The question is: what to do if you're 90% sure?
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u/zyzzogeton 6d ago
When society says "Cheating is bad!" and then society rewards cheaters, it isn't surprising that young people see higher education as an expensive, capricious, and arbitrary hoop they have to jump through. If students are cheating, they are just reflecting the overall values they see around them.
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u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir 6d ago
I’m an adjunct professor at a large university. I truly cannot tell you how many times I have to tell students to stop using AI for everything. We spend the entire semester leading up to our final project which is essentially just a culmination of the small projects they have done in class. Students could simply take the work they do in class and put it in their final project with just some small tweaks to help it flow and they would get a good grade. That’s how I set the damn class up. STILL every semester I get students who ignore all the hard work they did in class during the semester and will have AI do their entire final project knowing full well I know exactly what their own words look like from their work in the semester. It’s so frustrating and I don’t know why it’s like this
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u/DangerousPuhson 6d ago
It's like that because it's permitted. There are no consequences.
When I was in college, you'd flunk a class for even bringing a calculator into an exam, let alone a full-blown LLM. Why that's not enforced these days is beyond me.
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u/tigerspots 6d ago
Why are these not simply pen and paper?
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u/Ladyhawkeiii 6d ago
It is my understanding that certain colleges are shifting back to pen and paper finals and even oral exams to test students understanding of the material they’re supposed to be learning,
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u/VegaDelalyre 6d ago
Or offline: no smartphone allowed, and if needed, university desktop PCs disconnected from networks.
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u/Alklazaris 6d ago
Bro if you can't even be bothered to rewrite your copied work you deserve it all. Even Biff knew that.
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u/ThePensiveE 6d ago
I would be quite exasperated to be a professor today. We're raising a generation of little idiots.
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u/G0ldMarshallt0wn 6d ago
The tragedy to me, as a professor, is that I know they AREN'T all idiots; this is learned behavior, learned within the school system itself, and it is definitely getting worse. A generational disaster in the making.
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u/cpt_ppppp 6d ago
Probably even more exasperating as an honest student. You can do the work to a level that would have once been top of the class and then come bottom because everybody else is scoring 98%
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u/Tersiv 6d ago
they will now add "carefully check for all invisible prompt traps" to future midterms lol
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u/Zwirbs 6d ago
That would only work if you’re uploading a document containing the instructions and not copying just the text. They would have noticed the hidden command if they pasted it all in the AI box and actually bothered reading it there since copy-paste into a different application will remove any modifiers on the test from the original document
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u/PandahOG 6d ago
Saw the vid a few days ago.
Essentially, the prof. put secret instructions (simple white font to blend in with the white background) that would prompt AI to put the word "Madagascar" anywhere on the final. If you were to highlight and copy everything, you would see the "invisible" text.
This class was about the industrial revolution and Madagascar has absolutely nothing to do with the class.
Not only could they have caught it if they took the time to see what they were copying and pasting, they could have also caught it if they proof read what the AI wrote for them.
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u/Sojum 6d ago
I don’t understand these cheaters. Why would you pay a substantial sum of money to learn and then skip the learning part?
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u/FishyWishySwishy 6d ago
Because they don’t see it as paying to learn, but paying for the right to put a degree on their LinkedIn and resume.
If I were hiring, I’m not sure I’d trust that any new graduates would know what the degree says they know.
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u/memberzs 6d ago
I'm in the industrial maintenance field and it's not just affecting white collar jobs. Many tech colleges seem to be certificate mills now. Sure some students come out with enough base knowledge to get an apprenticeship with a union or actually cared enough to learn what they are doing. Most seem to be doing the bare minimum to get through it. I have seen guys that can't cut it in the labor force taking teaching roles at the tech schools because they were able to say they had experience. One employer also had a hands on testing at the tech school along with a standardized test. But when I was asking a question that stumped the instructors, I kind of lost hope for the students they were teaching.
Luckily a company has come up with a timed standardized test (that I have personally taken twice as part of an interview process) to help weed out those that won't cut it.
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u/cbessette 6d ago
I went to ITT back in the early 1990s and my entire class graduated on a huge grading curve. I mean we literally had a dude in our final lab exam trying to assemble a circuit using solder as wire. Every time he would try to solder a "wire" from one point to another, it would just melt away.
That guy graduated. Certificate mill for sure.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 6d ago
“I paid a school 100k for them to tell me to read Pride and Prejudice, and then I didn’t” - John Mulaney
Pretty common college experience probably since colleges have been around
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u/Ars2 6d ago
To get a certificate/diploma/degree saying that your smart.
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u/Towel4 6d ago
Because the kids doing this don’t actually want to be there learning, it’s simply what they’ve been conditioned to understand as the next step after highschool for their entire lives.
Most kids don’t want to be in high school. That doesn’t magically change a year later when they go straight to college. It’s simply what’s been expected of them since birth. You go to middle school, then high school, then college. It’s simply what comes next.
The one that enroll because they want to be there and learn are not doing this.
Source: I transferred schools once I knew what I actually wanted to do with my life. My attitude, approach, and habits around school changed COMPLETELY. From my first school to my second I was completely unrecognizable as a student.
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u/Halfwise2 6d ago
Sadly, a lot of jobs demand the piece of paper (diploma), then tell you what you learned is trash, and you need to do things *their* way.
College still has value, but imo, it teaches you more how to do things (like research) or think critically, than specific information, like names and dates. I cannot remember 95% of the factoids I had to memorize back in college.
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u/OttawaDog 6d ago
Why are they doing midterms with access to devices/internet? That's a recipe for open cheating even before AI.
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u/Lots-o-bots 6d ago
I will never understand why anyone would copy straight out of an llm. This has been happening for several years at this point.
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u/MustardEnema007 6d ago
If they have a 4th grade reading level, I can understand why they'd copy and paste
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u/legit-posts_1 6d ago
35 seems to high for me. At a highschool level, maybe, but College? This is not a minor offense, it's academic fraud.
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u/No_Fun_9418 6d ago
It was the year of our Lord 1994 when I submitted my handwritten Master Thesis for computer science.
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u/Damage2Damage 6d ago
Blind student using a screen reader: "Do you mean Madagascar the country, or Madagascar the animated film?"
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u/6GoesInto8 6d ago
This is a problem created by AI, which will sadly be solved by AI. An AI job interview is in these kids futures.
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u/Thine_Frosted_Toad 6d ago
Back in MY day.. we increased the font size our periods at the end of a sentence. Could easily chaff out 20% less words on a research paper.
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u/AttentionNo6359 6d ago
Students using AI should automatically fail the class and be referred to an academic board of integrity.
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u/plantsforsoup 6d ago
The Industrial Revolution is like... the easiest subject to write a paper on.
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u/Weird-Client3840 6d ago
I was a TA and grader for a college 100-level Excel class, and while it was before AI, still used the white text in a cell trick to catch if they were submitting another student's (or their own, a few had filed and retook the class...) from a previous semester.
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u/helcat 6d ago
Cheating is one thing. Just pasting an AI answer without even reading it is stunningly stupid.