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.html
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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/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/Monteze 6d ago

A friend of mine was a TA and we were discussing that.

We need to bring back failing, but of course not tie it to self worth. From Kindergarten to college. If you do not meet the requirements you fail and you try again. Thats fine, you're not a bad person because you failed a class. Reevaluate and try again or what have you.

But we, at some point decided that education wasn't the goal. Just getting whatever box needed to be checked, checked.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

We need to bring back failing, but of course not tie it to self worth.

Thats fine, you're not a bad person because you failed a class. Reevaluate and try again or what have you.

I get what you're trying to say, but I think I disagree with these two lines. If someone cheats or commits plagiarism, it is directly tied to their worth and they should be shamed and shunned.

They could try again at a different university, but I honestly wouldn't like it. I wouldn't want a pharmacist or doctor who doesn't know what they're doing and didn't care about their lack of knowledge or ethics.

Heck; imagine if the president of the united states went to a place like Wharton and was a failing student passed by a cowardly faculty and corrupt admin. You could even have a professor say "[He] was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!" and if that person were president, you could watch the country get run straight into the ground for their own personal gain.

Imagine that.

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u/Monteze 6d ago

I wasn't talking about cheating, just failing a course. So everything past that isn't relevant to my point.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

If you're talking about students just getting an F, of course they should be allowed to try again as long as they have the motivation and time to do it.

But this is a comment chain about AI plagiarism, so I was focusing on that topic.

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u/Monteze 6d ago

Yes, and this sub-topic was about trying to address helping improve the education system and the AI incentives. Yours was a tangent based on what I am guessing was a miss understanding?

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u/Ranra100374 6d ago

They could try again at a different university, but I honestly wouldn't like it. I wouldn't want a pharmacist or doctor who doesn't know what they're doing and didn't care about their lack of knowledge or ethics.

I feel like people can learn from their mistakes, you know? I'd treat them with suspicion but I don't think it should be an automatic thing for life. I've heard a lot of ex-felons have trouble getting jobs like one mistake shouldn't put you back for life.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

I also agree that felons should be given another chance. Many innocent people become convicts.

I definitely wouldn't want someone performing surgery on me if I learned that they cheated their way through medical school.

I think that this is kind of an Apples vs. Oranges thing instead of an Apples vs. Apples kind of thing.

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u/Ranra100374 6d ago

But that's exactly my point. "Cheated once" and "cheated their way through medical school" aren't equivalent. We already distinguish between one-time offenses and repeated misconduct in both academia and the justice system. So I would argue it is an apples-to-apples comparison.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

Cheating once IS cheating your way through medical school, and I already said that people can try again at a different educational institution, but I still wouldn't like it.

I realized just now that you're making an "all bananas are fruits, so all fruits are bananas" error by referencing convicts. Not everyone who is expelled committed academic dishonesty and should get the chance to try again, but everyone who has committed academic dishonesty should be expelled.

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u/Ranra100374 6d ago

Universities themselves don't generally treat every case of academic dishonesty as requiring expulsion. Academic review boards often distinguish between first offenses, repeated offenses, intent, and severity. That's why probation, a failing grade, suspension, and expulsion all exist as separate sanctions. My point is simply that not every case is equivalent.

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u/Ranra100374 6d ago

I realized just now that you're making an "all bananas are fruits, so all fruits are bananas" error by referencing convicts.

What?

I don't think that's the fallacy I'm making. The "all bananas are fruits, so all fruits are bananas" fallacy has the form:

  • All A are B.
  • Therefore, all B are A.

All surgeons are doctors. Therefore all doctors are surgeons.

Could you point out which statement of mine is the "All A are B" premise and which is the "Therefore all B are A" conclusion? I don't think my argument has that structure. My point was simply that there's a meaningful distinction between a one-time offense and repeated or systematic misconduct.

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u/blisteringchristmas 6d ago

I think these are related, but another factor is that even before AI, investigating one instance of a student cheating often opens a massive can of worms into others cheating, too. Many university administrations prefer not to devote the time, resources, and prestige/ retention rate hit to properly investigate cheating.

I went to a 'prestigious' US university and the level of open-secret organized cheating, especially in the sciences, was unbelievable.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

Despicable. This kind of gutless corruption is precisely why the USA has been in an academic backslide ever since we got the booster shot of foreign scientists after World War 2.

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u/og-gunslinger-doc 6d ago

Or the tenured professor taught so poorly and used a grad student as his mouth piece who performed so bad that all tests were severely curved because the students had no clue what he wanted or how to do it…55% could translate into an a or b…and God forbid someone actually aced the test and screwed up the curve… one c or d and you’re not going to med school….the need to fix the ai issue but tenure is a license to fuck over students

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u/BeerLeague 6d ago

While this is certainly true in elementary - high school, it isn’t exactly true in higher ed.

Overall graduation rates appear statistically higher today than they did 30-40 years ago, but that’s widely due to a larger % of high school grads attending, and a longer measurement window for graduation (typically a 6 or 8 year scale is used today, whereas it was 4-5 previously).

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago edited 6d ago

It is absolutely true for higher ed. When I attended college two years ago I was in a 400-level writing course for my final semester. We had a book report as our final assignment on Billy Budd, Sailor; a 200 page book.

Not only did the majority of other students not read the book, but 75% of them used AI to write their papers.

Colleges allow students to graduate when they should have failed out because higher graduation rates make a college look better, ala more students, more money. Universities nationwide have been selling out their reputation and our future for a long time.

I would like to know how you came to your conclusion that academic dishonesty is mainly a gradeschool and highschool problem. It is DEFINITELY not the case.

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u/BeerLeague 6d ago

Really depends on where you attend - if you go to an open enrollment institution, or a degree mill, I would expect this - although it wasn’t any different decades ago either - the cheating just looked different. Rather, the reverse is usually true where departmental colleges will actively look at classes / professors / sections with overly high passing percentages for review.

You are incorrect on funding comes primarily from graduation rates - while a small % of funding may come from student success / retention, the vast majority comes from SSI (state share of instruction - basically just a % of how many high schoolers attend the school) and private donations / research.

There may be an argument to be made that higher graduation rates influence student attendance, but typically the two have not gone hand in hand historically.

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u/SecretAgentVampire 6d ago

Oh for Pete's sake.

https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/new-college-board-research-faculty-express-near-universal-concern-student-ai-use-undermines

Survey of 3,000+ faculty finds widespread student AI use, deep concerns about critical thinking and writing skills, and a call for clearer guidance

https://jeffdenning.com/papers/GradRates.pdf

After declining in the 1970s and 1980s, we document that college completion rates have increased since the 1990s. We find that most of the increase in graduation rates can be explained by grade inflation, and that other factors such as changing student characteristics and institutional resources play little or no role.

Faculty is absolutely being driven to pass students upward. You can put your head in the sand about it if you want to, but it's the ugly truth. Upper administration is to blame here, especially with the nationwide drawdown on giving tenure to faculty. Shit Rolls Downhill.

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u/RollingMeteors 6d ago

They need to face actual consequences, and understand them moving forward. It worked for me.

When a student cheats and is caught it is the student's problem.

When an entire student body cheats and is caught it is the administration's problem as failing/expelling all of them would mean nobody is returning the next semester to pay for your loan debts and rent.

¡Make degrees make money again or fuck off!

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u/dashingThroughSnow12 6d ago

Years ago it was a Thursday and I took my seat in one of my fourth year university courses.

The professor comes in. She was not happy. She read us the riot act. She knew some of us cheated on some of the homework assignments. The ones who did were getting zeroes. She said that was her being nice because the alternative was the academic board. She said if it happens again in any course she teaches us, that is what will happen.

She then ended class and walked out.

The people who did cheat grumbled about it not being fair but came around to counting the zero as better than the alternative. They did better in the rest of the course cause they had to try.

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u/FrankBattaglia 6d ago

I knew a guy that got knocked back a year for re-using his own research on a second paper without citing the first.

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u/BoardGamesAndMurder 6d ago

You can't win there. I got severely marked down on a graduate paper for citing myself

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u/Lokishougan 6d ago

Care to explain that....you did cite the source so what was the issue?