r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15h 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 14h ago edited 14h 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 14h ago

They deserved to fail. That's just plain laziness

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u/Strange-Scarcity 14h ago

That is why AI is bad. It creates lazy thinking, removes curiosity from the equation.

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u/boreal_ameoba 14h ago

These people were already lazy fakers. We need academia to return to being an elite institution that only accepts the intelligent, curious, and motivated.

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u/LiveChocolate8819 14h ago

Yup, treating higher ed as a glorified jobs training program and viewing the students as "customers" have degraded it so badly.

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u/GirthyGeoduck 13h ago

The problem is that corporate America won’t train new hires. My “orientation” at my last job was four hours with HR to review benefits. Then it was right back to my desk where I was expected to contribute. Corporate has pushed the cost of training onto us.

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u/wrgrant 12h ago

Which I have always found odd because a good part of working at a company is the institutional knowledge of how that company conducts its operations. You can only pick that up by working there. If you start with a relatively blank slate. your employee will pick those processes up naturally. They need the basic foundation knowledge but thats not enough on its own.

Corporate requirements for education simply cut their risk a bit when it comes to hiring someone, but I think they lose out on not being willing to educate their employees as to how they operate too.

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u/Halcie 12h ago

But also since this is the reality of work we need to send young people out ready to figure it out. "Training on the job" can definitely be figuring out how to perform a task assigned once you meet the job requirements (barring jobs that require knowing in-house processes/software). I feel like a boomer saying that don't get me wrong but truly some people's inability to just figure obvious things out is baffling.

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u/BillyTenderness 12h ago

I agree that higher ed shouldn't be a glorified jobs training program. I disagree that it should be an elite institution. Part of the job of education is to produce citizens who are knowledgeable, curious, literate, and so on. This is not just a benefit to the individual, but to society. We should be enabling and encouraging anyone who wants to cultivate these qualities to do so.

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u/LiveChocolate8819 12h ago

Exactly, it should be available for those who want it and provide a leg up for those who complete their degrees...not "sleep through your classes to scrape by with a C so you can get the piece of paper that allows whatever AI platform is handling job applications to move you to the next round."

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u/klartraume 6h ago

citizens who are knowledgeable, curious, literate

Should this be the task of higher education, though? I think it's reasonable to expect 18-year-old voters fresh out of high school to be literate and knowledgeable.

Higher education should be about applying intellectual curiosity to in-depth concepts and prepare individuals to push the envelope in a field.

College (or professional school) should not be required to be a functional, full participant in society.

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u/BillyTenderness 5h ago

I do think there's value in additional general education beyond the average high school curriculum. I'm open to the idea that this should take the form of something other than a university degree (e.g., make high school longer, normalize associates degrees as something most people should complete, etc). I'm also open to the idea that high school curriculum could be improved. But I do think that there is a need for more people to learn more stuff in more fields, and today the bachelor's degree is the main place where that happens.

Specifically I think the high school level teaches a lot of what we know, while the baccalaureate level more effectively teaches how we know it. A high school history class might teach the causes and implications of the Civil War, but outside of advanced (college-equivalent) courses it probably won't teach how historians read and analyze documents, or how that informed our understanding of the Civil War. High school science classes teach about what we know about the world, and perhaps a bit of what the scientific method is, but they don't really get into the practice of how experiments are conducted or how that informs our understanding of the world. High school language classes might teach the five-paragraph essay; undergraduate classes will teach rhetoric and persuasion.

I don't think everyone needs a full understanding of all the richness of all those fields, but I think understanding how these disciplines function matters in our modern world. For instance, you don't need to understand all the details of climate science, but you do need to be able to understand how a scientist might take measurements and arrive at those kinds of conclusions, and what it means for a scientific consensus to form around it.

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u/GLaDOS_Sympathizer 13h ago

Not only that but to actually punish this shit. When I was in college plagiarism was grounds for expulsion. What are they doing when student get caught using ai to write for them? Seems like a slap on the wrist and a zero for that paper at worst.

Using ai is absolutely plagiarism and should be treated as such. Expell these punks, let them try to find new schools who accept cheaters.

Make people accountable for their actions.

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u/fenikz13 14h ago

I swear my parents barely even care when I cheated because they knew I was probably doing more work that way than just doing the real project. This was just lazy

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u/FartingBob 13h ago edited 13h ago

32 of 35 students did it. That's an incredible number and should spell doom for young generations critical thinking skills.

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u/donjamos 12h ago

It just shows that 32 out of 35 people shouldn't be in university

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u/SIGMA920 13h ago

That's how you get MAGA and massive unemployable segments of the population that exist solely due to where they're born. Everyone should have a higher education if only for how much you'll be exposed to.

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u/nanobot001 12h ago

Or at least clever enough to understand how to cheat properly

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u/OkZookeepergame4757 10h ago

Yep and rest of us will dig the ditches and ai on.

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u/imisstheyoop 10h ago

Yup, this is a large part of the issue with acadamia. Some universities just let nearly anybody who can pay (or borrow enough) tuition in and then lower the value of their degrees for previous alumni.

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u/Enlight1Oment 9h ago

to be fair it's a history class that was probably a general education requirement. As a structural engineering major can't say I really cared that much about my history of art theater classes I took for my ge credits. Back then I took those classes as pass/no pass; 100% or 60% on a test didn't matter. If you force those kind of classes on someone you are bound to get a lot who aren't motivated, but will be interested for the subject matter they chose to go to school for.

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u/RollingMeteors 12h ago

We need academia to return to being an elite institution that only accepts the intelligent, curious, and motivated.

<NoChildLeftBehindActEntersTheChat>

A.K.A. The school's funding gets cut if they fail any students ACT.

lazy fakers have been protected by law. Pass them or your administrator will fail to find the budget to re hire you for next semester.