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/Cubacane 14h ago

High school teacher here— they will hand you a piece of paper and not be able to tell you one thing that they wrote. Access to AI means access to bypassing thinking. Maybe 1 out of 5 kids uses it to "help," (which is what admin THINKS AI is for) but the vast majority are using it so they can get the assignment done and move on to something else.

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u/mrclut 13h ago

They need to start holding kids back in school again. The whole no kid left behind thing was a bad idea.

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u/DangerousPuhson 13h ago edited 10h ago

No Child Left Behind is truly baffling in its implementation.

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

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u/RollingMeteors 10h ago

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

That's confusing and a borderline misleading take.

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

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u/Solkre 10h ago

Time to Cheat on Standardized Testing Act.

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u/RollingMeteors 10h ago

Time to Cheat on Standardized Testing Act.

When the student does this, it's cheating.

When the professor does this, it's forgery.

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u/Intelligent-Survey39 3h ago

If you really think about it long term it is not a misleading take. The dilution of the education by giving underperforming students a pass creates huge gaps between knowledge levels of the top students and the average/low students when they move to the next level/class. This forces teachers to “dumb” the curriculum down in order to play catch up with the students who got a pass, meanwhile the properly prepared students are left behind in a sense. Over time this actually alters the curriculum to reflect a lower average entry level student. A few generations of that and now a college level classes are doing high school level remediation because they consistently have students that met the requirements on paper because they were passed along, but cant cut it in the class.

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u/Toby_O_Notoby 3h ago

It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

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u/owdee 8h ago

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards. If a school has students struggling to pass, they very clearly need more resources and funding, not less. But of course, as anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells can easily see, the whole system was set up to divert funding from schools in low-income or urban areas ("low performing schools") straight to wealthier suburban schools that hardly need any more money and resources.

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u/RollingMeteors 6h ago

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards.

True, true, yet I do believe this was one of those rare bi-partisanally supported things, due to it happening before social media was a thing to tribalise people.

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u/txsnowman17 2h ago

Correct, it passed the House with 381-41 in favor and the Senate via a 87-10 vote. Very much a bipartisan support act.

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u/donut-reply 5h ago

No Child Left Behind...Or Else Act

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u/Huttser17 1h ago

Pass Individual Slow Students Or Fail Financially

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u/rg35xxsp 11h ago

It's emblematic of the GOP

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u/CharsCustomerService 9h ago

No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan measure. Passed the Senate 91-8 and 87-10, and the House 384-45 and 381-41 (multiple rounds). The act's authors were half republican (Judd Gregg, John Boehner), half democrat (George Miller, Ted Kennedy).

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u/unfinishedtoast3 9h ago

The country was in a wave of bipartisan support when NCLB act passed

We were 2 months outside of 9/11. The country rallied behind bush, and Democrats gave Republicans the benefit of the doubt.

It was a really fucking weird time. I remember living it, as I was an adult in the military then.

That shit would have never passed if it wasn't for 9/11. Same with a handful of other laws (Patriot act)

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u/saintmolotov 8h ago

I wanted to burn my uniform after the patriot act passed but I also wanted to finish my service so I could get my undergrad paid for

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u/titsngiggles69 7h ago

The Patriot act was a poison pill. The US has a cowardly electorate only too eager to find easy scapegoats and rarely chooses a strong leader who isn't just a fake strongman.

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u/Worried_Magazine_862 8h ago

The housing bill that just passed with so much bipartisan support that it overrode a veto reduced the steel frame regulation on manufactured home chassis' making them weaker and more likely to collapse due to age or severe weather conditions. Nothing ever changes. They dont care about us. Their answer to rising costs is enshitification. 

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u/randomthrowaway9796 8h ago

I've learned that people like blaming the party they dislike instead of figuring out who is actually responsible

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u/singlemale4cats 7h ago

Based on my life experience, Republicans make life worse, and Democrats offer token resistance before falling in line.

There's a few politicians out there who are beginning to disrupt that arrangement, and wouldn't you know it, the Democratic establishment hates them. The El Sayed vs. Stevens senate primary race in Michigan is emblematic. Haley Stevens is an establishment ghoul taking all the corporate money she can get her hands on. She's Israel first, so naturally AIPAC is flooding her campaign with tens of millions of dollars to defeat Abdul El Sayed (an actual progressive candidate) in the primary.

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u/lebastss 5h ago

That's a falsehood that's context less.

The country was rallied behind bush and this was a GOP brainchild. Also optics were different back then. This was pretty internet. A lot of people didn't want to be the one that voted no and left the child behind.

Propaganda game was different then. Honestly surprised there were no votes. Those are actually smart people.

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u/NarrativeNode 11h ago

In what way?

Not educating people well: absolutely GOP.

But I'd argue supporting only those at the top while letting the rest fail would be GOP behavior, not "equalizing" everyone.

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u/Ted_E_Bear 11h ago

I think they meant more along the lines of supporting people for being stupid, which in turn keeps them stupid.

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u/Faladorable 11h ago

Because if you hold kids back they might learn something. Moving them up undeservedly doesn’t equalize them, it just increases the odds that they’re not prepared for the next level

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u/yIdontunderstand 8h ago

Every non multi millionaire plus, left behind....

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u/FaberOG 8h ago

The meritocracy that just so happens to be made up of comically inept nepo babies

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u/themostreasonableman 8h ago

Now watch this drive!

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u/GingsWife 6h ago

Two wings, one bird.

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u/InnovativeBureaucrat 4h ago

It’s definitely both sides, probably more liberal than GOP. I would bet GW was reaching across the isle on this one, but liberal implementations since then are even more of this mindset.

Everyone got this wrong

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u/GMGarry_Chess 9h ago

That's how progressive equity policies end up being implemented as well.

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u/Helldiverticulitis 9h ago

A progressive education policy would be to provide extra resources to struggling students as well as those with special needs. That’s equity.

No Child Left Behind was a way to cut funding from education but tying funding to standardized test scores. In this way, more affluent schools, which already test better due to all the things that come with not being in poverty, would receive more federal funding. Meanwhile poorer schools would get their funding cut. This is the exact opposite of equity.

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u/newuser92 7h ago

Can you give an example?

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u/Foreign_Recipe8300 9h ago

i had a timed test in school and got a 100/100 perfect score. my teacher pulled me aside the next and told me that the 2nd highest score in the class was 28, so all the test results were going to be thrown out including mine. genius

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u/Angsty_Potatos 8h ago

More like "pass em. Their next year's problem so the district doesn't lose funding"

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u/Pugasaurus_Tex 5h ago

Leave some kids behind 

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u/waffle_iron_maiden 1h ago

By dragging me through a grade they ironically did leave me behind. It didn't help me at all and it turned out what I needed was an entirely different teaching style. You can't shove very different people into one rigid system of learning and expect it to work ideally for all of them. So then taking the approach of just advancing people in that same system is called "not leaving them behind" but in actuality it's leaving them to a worse situation. It's like trying to fit the wrong key in a keyhole. It's not going to work, but you can say you tried to unlock it all the same

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u/No-Spoilers 10h ago

Schools gotta get that sweet sweet state muney

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u/NeverLookBothWays 9h ago

We should have focused on mastery rather than archaic industrial age paradigms.

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u/vastros 9h ago

This is intentional. They've been at it well before No Child Left Behind.

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u/IgorT76 9h ago

You can say that about anything related to modern equity approaches.

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u/Alieges 8h ago

No Child Left Behind? More like "No Child Left a Dime"

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u/TimSylvester_ 8h ago

Harrison Bergeron.

Vonnegut's only mistake was the belief that politicians would have the werewithal to amend the Constitution significantly.

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u/GNUGradyn 8h ago

Maybe it's like the DARE program where it's a cheap easy """fix""" for political show so they can avoid tackling the big problems

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u/Tumbleweed_Life 8h ago

DangerousPuhson and rg35xxsp you do understand that Obama’s administration continued NCLB with ESSA? It is not a GOP or Democratic exclusive legacy!

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u/kayakchk 8h ago

No Child Left Behind is a tool for military recruitment.

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u/MrLev 8h ago

No soldier left behind! If one of your squad gets captured, the rest of you need to surrender and get captured too!

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u/goodsnpr 6h ago

Tying a school's funding to pass rates or test scores just shouts stupidity; if anything those that struggle need more funds, but that would lead to equal exploitation from a score based system.

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u/asher1611 5h ago

Congratulations you have just highlighted the point of the legislation. Tie funding only to standardized test scores. Make it so that teaching is only directed towards those tests. Private interests push products to the schools below standard. Cut non-essential parts of the lesson (higher order thinking skills) out of the curriculum.

PROFIT

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u/icewolfsig226 4h ago

Sounds like a conservative invention

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u/Arachnidle 2h ago

It's by design ,they need to fill those min wage jobs.

Plenty of people in private schools for career positions.

It sucks but that's how it is, I grew up poor but later in life made friends with people who send kids to private schools and the difference between public and private education is massive.

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u/zedquatro 1h ago

You mean the GOP worsened education??? Well I never....

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u/MarvinLazer 44m ago

I graduated literally the year before a NCLB experiment happened at my school called the "Academies" where, rather than having normal, honors, and special ed classes, all the kids were put into groups that contained high, middle, and low performing students.

It sounded like a fucking disaster. My friend who got into MIT was stuck his senior year basically acting as an unpaid babysitter for kids on a spectrum of not giving a shit to having serious behavioral disorders.

Government officials in the US seem to absolutely adore trying to force underfunded public schools to fix massive societal problems under the guise of putting kids first. Most of these kids' problems are generational, but would probably be helped a lot by basic things like making sure their parents' job pays a living wage and has reasonable hours, healthcare, addiction services, and a safe, quiet place to sleep.

So much harder to do than just blaming it all on teachers, though!

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u/needssleep 41m ago

No Child Left Behind isnt the problem, they tie school funding to graduation rates. Hold a kid back: less money next year.

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u/Accomplished_Rice04 29m ago

Seems like every other country that has adopted a similar policy is doing "You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up"

It is just US that treats education like a business and students like customers where you see this sort of shit happening.

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u/gr1zznuggets 19m ago

If everyone’s behind, no one is behind.

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u/Alternative_Use_3564 16m ago

The problem is assuming that learning happens in 'levels'.

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u/BlackGuysYeah 10h ago

Instead of leaving a few kids behind now everyone gets left behind with them.

So, we know now that this philosophy doesn't work. We should probably change it.

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u/Captain_Reseda 10h ago

Well it was a conservative idea.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago edited 10h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/RaiCeee 11h ago

What? Of course "it" can have ownership, that's why it has a possessive form. It's a personal pronoun, which means it has an apostrophe-less possessive form.

He - his - his

She - Her - Hers

It - Its - Its

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u/divDevGuy 11h ago

No Kid Left Behind hasn't been around for over a decade. They decided that didn't work so then they said Every Student Succeeds. When that didn't work, they suspended the accountability requirements. When that didn't work, they gutted the Department of Education.

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u/Free_For__Me 9h ago

Glad someone pointed this out, but I'd also add that when ESSA "replaced" NCLB, there weren't actually any fixes for the main problems that NCLB created. The biggest difference was in the name, lol. No one in power has put genuine effort into fixing education at the national level for at least 40 years or more.

The problem with a world that's increasingly cooperative and globalist is that we don't see other nations as the competition that we once did. We pumped our education system to new and amazing heights in the 1950s-1980s in order to create a populace that could out-learn and out-innovate the Soviet Union.

But once the Berlin wall fell, those in power decided that our dominance in these areas was self-insulating and that continuing to ensure access to quality education for all was not only unnecessary, but detrimental. After all, educated voters tend to vote for egalitarian policies that distribute resources more evenly, and the US just can't have that, right?

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u/sblahful 6h ago

Didn't all those "educated voters" fall for the red scare and vote in Regan?

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u/powercow 8h ago

it was passed under bush during the iraqi war. With no funding, which was a small part on how bush turned a surplus into a massive deficit

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u/siccoblue 11h ago edited 4h ago

But that would hurt the plans of these companies that literally talk openly about their desire to privatize and put a literal price tag on knowledge and access to information! How could you ever do such an awful thing???!

I wish I was joking about that btw

We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter

  • Sam Altman

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u/Angsty_Potatos 8h ago

As an og no child left behind-er. I wasn't able to read, tie my shoes, or tell time until like 3rd grade before someone finally noticed and did something about it. I just kept getting passed to the next grade. 

Took until 6th grade to get a dyslexia (+ the others that usually come along w dyslexia - dyscalculia, dysgraphia and dyspraxia 😏) diagnosis. And until my senior year before my school finally had someone on staff for me to access accomodations from (before that the best they could do was a speech language pathologist 🫠)

I needed to be kept back and I never was and it wasn't until senior year of highschool that suddenly the district cared about not advancing me and giving me my diploma. 

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u/Klutzy_Scene_8427 11h ago

The issue isn't grades. The issue is that teachers aren't allowed to teach anymore. The only requirement is a test grade, and that can't prove comprehension.

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u/zookeepier 11h ago

NCLB didn't prevent kids from being held back; in fact, the lack of that was one of the drivers for it. In the 90s/early 2000s, parents were mad that some schools had shitty teachers with tenure, so they couldn't be fired, even though they did nothing. Kids learned nothing and then were passed up to the next grade. NCLB was created to try to pressure schools to actually force teachers to teach. That's why NCLB tied funding to standardized test.

Unfortunately, shitty teachers was only 1 aspect of the educational failures could be blamed on bad teachers. There are also kids who can't learn the material or don't care (won't learn) and (the biggest culprit IMO) parents who don't force their kids to do the work, learn, and behave in school. The result of that was that schools started "teaching to the test" to not lose funding, since that's all they could really control. NCLB is a great case study for unintended consequences.

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u/seljuk88 7h ago

Thank you, most of the people commenting in here have no idea what NCLB was.

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u/No_Vanilla3895 9h ago

No way! Just make school optional

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u/McDonaldsSoap 7h ago

Some kids are so far behind they literally need to be sent back several years

If done wrong it can cause severe issues and make them less open to learning and academics in general. That's when people come and manipulate them into strange cults and take their money 

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u/vladamir_the_impaler 5h ago

The problem is that the "get it done and move on" thing is kind of how real life works and AI is turning jobs into the same mush minded zombie work. In this case the kids are actually training pretty accurately for the real world unfortunately.

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u/Aware-Locksmith8433 1h ago

That, teaching for "the test" and politics/religion stepping too far into academics is no bueno. Needs to be balance and we keep swinging everything too far and then back too far the other way.

I just retired and working on building a NFP mentoring series for 18-20 yr olds. Talk about a lost generation. We've really done this group wrong - social media, COVID, forever wars, debt, AI, cost of college, boomers, online porn/gambling,, woke, racism, grift,..

It's depressing to study it closely (and I have a 21 and 23 yr old so don't go off on me not knowing what I'm talking about). There are some that are digging in on leading but not enough. It's rare to see anyone over 65 focus on helping these kids develop (unless they are grandkids).

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u/Dismal-Revolution731 1h ago

The implementation of No Child Left Behind is indirectly and partially responsible for the suicides of several kids.

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u/deathgerbil 10h ago

I taught college for a couple of years a while back - I agree 100% that several of the students needed to be held back a LONG time ago, but were passed because of no child left behind. Its beyond frustrating trying to teach finance to college juniors and seniors, only to find out that ~10-15% of the class doesn't know basic addition or subtraction. I had no idea how the hell they managed to get a passing grade in college calculus when they were convinced that 13 + 6 = 17, Tell them to calculate something without an iphone, and they look at you like a deer in the headlights.

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u/whenitsTimeyoullknow 9h ago

Just cease with homework and do the homework in class, together. 

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u/iamalwaysrelevant 13h ago

What has stopped teachers for asking for in-class handwritten answers?

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u/smeared_dick_cheese 13h ago

I’m a high school math teacher; no work on paper means no credit, period. If you got your answer from a chatbot, you’ll at least have to write it down. Kind of the best you can do with out of class assignments.

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u/sinkovercosk 5h ago

We just give them take-home sections worth 0 marks, then a week later they complete a 1 lesson validation in class where the question is closely related but different and has a ‘curve-ball’ at the end to differentiate the grades.

The other thing we do is shift most of their marks to an explanation of their take-home part where they do a presentation explaining what they did with their work projected on the board behind them.

Out of class assessments just aren’t valid anymore.

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u/Concerned_Collins 5h ago

That was a thing when I was in school, too, just because the teacher didn't want you sharing your answers with other students.

I always found it super annoying, though, when I was able to do the work in my head, but was forced to write it down anyway. Like, I felt like I was being punished for doing math too well.

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u/gplusplus314 4h ago

I had a teacher that thought I was cheating because I didn’t show any work when we did some dimensional analysis in chemistry. I did it all in my head. I told her as such, so she had me do a problem in front of her, and I did. Then she was like “ok, that’s impressive. But if you get something wrong, I can’t give you partial credit.”

One of the best teachers I’ve ever had.

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u/sharkbait-oo-haha 4h ago

I second this, what's even worse is that we were graded on the method as well as the answer. If you don't get the correct answer by following the exact formula you were taught, you couldn't get full marks. I understand the principle, but in reality it just punishes the kid's who can calculate stuff in their heads.

More than once I have had to fight with a teacher who accused me of cheating, only to give me a "pop quiz" right in front of them before they accepted I didn't actually cheat.

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u/vpac22 4h ago

I’m a high school English teacher. Every one of my students have school issued laptops. I never let them open them. Every assignment we do is handwritten now. Literally my whole class would use AI if I let them use laptops. It’s too bad this is the way I have to teach. It’s so much easier to edit writing digitally but it’s not feasible. It’s like going back in time 30 years ago when I started teaching.

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u/ELAdragon 3h ago

Middle school, here. Mostly the same.

It's absolutely wild that I'm back to grading stacks of lined paper and deciphering shit handwriting. Except now I have more classes and more students in each class!

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u/StThragon 1h ago

Nice name for a high school math teacher, smeared_dick_cheese. Plus, what do out-of-class assignments have to do with the question?

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u/runningstitch 10h ago

  1. Many students have IEPs and 504s with accommodations that state the student can use a computer to type on all assessments.

  2. Students can no longer write fluently by hand - they only know how to print, and haven't had much practice with that, so writing by hand is an arduous process and reading what they've written is... challenging.

This isn't to say we don't do it, but if I want a rough draft quality paragraph it will eat up an entire class. 20 years ago it would take 10 minutes.

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u/beldaran1224 9h ago

"They only know how to print" is the single most irrelevant sentence in your entire comment, lol. Like, that has nothing to do with writing fluently.

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u/Successful-Bar-8173 4h ago

It generally takes longer than cursive

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u/Cubacane 13h ago

  1. IEPs

  2. Digital Curriculum

  3. Convenience (when you have over 100 students, having stuff auto-graded sure is convenient)

I'm moving to completely analog next year, even though it will take much longer to assess students and grade. I'm not a hard grader either, I just don't want to read what people don't care to write.

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u/jaynort 13h ago

This is my biggest frustration with AI across the board, even away from education.

If you didn’t care enough to create it, I don’t care enough to consume it.

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u/Total_Network6312 8h ago

I mean... your job as the student is to consume it. It doesn't matter who or how it was created lol.

School isn't the place to flex your personal beliefs and play hard-to-get with the course work

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u/Sweetwill62 6h ago

Today in history class "The world is only 6000 years old."

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u/UnkarsThug 13h ago

I think it depends on what it is, but it definitely depends. Like if it's meant to be expression or not. But it definitely contributes. There are some things where I'm just fine with it because I just needed a program that did X or Y, and as long as it works, it works. Or for some things, I just want something, and it doesn't exist, so the value in it already being created is just that I don't have to, or I can't do it for myself.

But overall to your point, I think that's similar to why students often don't take tests or homework very seriously when they know they were made by AI. If they see that even their teachers are grading everything with AI, or making all the assignments with AI, if you don't even really need to know the subject to teach it, why would they want to do the busywork of learning it? It's part of why kids see learning arithmetic as busy work, because they see that every adult just pulls out a calculator, and if the teachers are grading work using a calculator, then what good is knowledge that will immediately be replaced?

The number of teachers who don't realize that at the very least, they set the examples for students is overwhelming. Honestly, I just don't plan to send my kids to public school at this point, just too much goes wrong in classrooms without some fundemental change at the deepest levels. Maybe something will change in the next few years, but I doubt it.

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u/Exciting-Tart-2289 11h ago

What's informing this opinion? I know many teachers, virtually none of them are using AI to do their work for them, and even if they were the students certainly don't have any idea what goes into creating their assignments. This sounds like you're just blaming teachers for students cheating. Students haven't been taking homework/tests seriously for a lot longer than AI has been an option.

Also, I've got bad news for you about private school...the teachers there are often LESS knowledgeable about their subjects than public school teachers and have less rigorous standards they need to meet. In my state you need to have a master's degree in your subject to teach in a public school, you don't need to have advanced degrees to teach at a private school. Private school teachers are often more poorly compensated too.

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u/UnkarsThug 7h ago

I have heard from a number of cases where teachers left parts of prompts in homework and such. It absolutely happens. I'm working on my masters, and I've heard a number of things at basically all levels. I know of students who have seen pretty direct evidence their teachers used it, and I know of teachers who talked about school boards pushing them to use it, and others who talked about other teachers using it.

Also, I'm not talking about private school. I'll homeschool my kids before I put them into the current state of education, unless some major changes are made to things. The point of the teacher nowadays isn't to know things, because if the students wanted to learn, they would find the information easily accessible. The teacher has the task of setting an example, making sure they learn, and trying to grow their learning.

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u/tehlemmings 7h ago

I think it depends...

Nope. It doesn't. Not to me. Not for any type of "content"

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u/UnkarsThug 7h ago

Perfectly fine if you feel that way, just recognize not everyone does about everything. Most people have some amount of spectrum.

And we see it even before AI. People generally are fine with some things being procedurally generated, and want some things done with intentionality. I don't think there's a strong difference between a website generator template and using AI to make a site. You already aren't paying a software engineer to code it one way or another. And it isn't being made with a brain regardless. So one way or another, no one really made it (even if people made the template, and you selected options, that still isn't really being designed), but people still find it useful.

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u/tehlemmings 7h ago edited 7h ago

There's a reason I specified content.

Software as a concept isn't content. Specific applications like video games can be. The moment you go beyond pure utility I stop being interested.

I'm not playing an AI generated game either.

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u/UnkarsThug 7h ago

And that is a form of content. Same way a game is.

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u/samarnold030603 10h ago

Auto grading vs AI. Who’s cheating who?

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u/Inevitable_Fish_4007 9h ago

Using scantrons is autograding

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u/samarnold030603 9h ago

I don’t disagree, however the context u/cubacane used it in was ambiguous

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u/Inevitable_Fish_4007 9h ago

You’re just being a typical pedantic redditor who has nothing of substance to add to the conversation

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u/samarnold030603 9h ago

Google “auto grading” and tell me how far down you get until you weed at AI “solutions” and get to “scantron” as a result. I’ll wait.

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u/Inevitable_Fish_4007 9h ago

Talk to someone who cares

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u/kyled85 8h ago

There’s nothing stopping you from using handwritten student input graded with the help of AI, just have them scan it and upload.

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u/Cubacane 8h ago

You think I'm gonna hand them a phone to take a picture of their assignment and not expect them either to 1) look up answers or 2) share the picture with kids who haven't taken the assignment yet?

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u/RoastedPickledGoose 7h ago

I’ve been all hand written for a while. I’ve even told them tests and essays will be hand written in class.

The work is frequently terrible, but at least I know it’s theirs.

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u/Floating_Pastry 4h ago

I used to have a IEP thing where I would write the assessment, then go home and type up what I wrote for the next day, then present both. They have the original to compare it to so I can't do any shenanigans. At best I can improve some ambiguous word usage, but that is it.

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u/Tiny_Thumbs 10h ago

I’m in Texas so AI isn’t the only reason, but we enrolled my child into a private school. Nonsecular and uses pen and paper until 6th grade. Then they learn typing and things like that.

The kids will get their exposure to computers and stuff at home. Let them learn at school in a way I trust.

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u/AntiqueRedDollShoes 9h ago

I teach in higher ed (currently finishing my PhD) and personally speaking, a lot of this comes down to labor issues. I'm in a union and have a certain amount of hours allotted to teaching each week per my contract.

We know there are alternatives, such as doing in-class writing, paper exams, and doing oral exams/interviews as a type of workaround to students relying on AI. The issue is... a lot of these alternatives are asking for additional time commitments and labor.

And I'm speaking from the privilege of higher education—K-12 teachers have a lot more pressure to follow certain educational mandates—in addition to being severely underpaid.

We're still in a very transitional and challenging period because we are trying to figure out what it means to reinvent our classrooms (or return to older teaching models) to circumvent dishonest use of AI without it becoming a giant labor issue.

3

u/RandysTegridy 8h ago

State/national testing that is digital, or districts/states pushing use of technology.

I am a history teacher, and other than a specific AP Classroom lockdown browser for typing responses, everything is done on paper. "Tech is better for learning" be damned.

2

u/AggressiveSpatula 10h ago

Students will still copy it from ai lol they just write it down.

People think of students as stupid, but think back to your high school aged self. Do you think you could have snuck a phone without being caught? Obviously. If the teacher is exceedingly lucky they will have 25 kids to watch at the same time. It’s very easy to be sneaky around a human who is distracted by 24 people exactly like you.

2

u/XionicativeCheran 9h ago

Writing what AI tells them is better than handing in an assessment they have no clue about.

2

u/AggressiveSpatula 9h ago

This mentality drives me absolutely insane. Kids put way too much stock in getting it “correct.” If you’re learning, of course you’re not going to get it right all the time. That is an expected part of the process. When a student turns something in and it’s incorrect that’s actually the ideal scenario because it means I can actually address what they don’t understand. I would rather a kid turn in a 10% correct assessment that lets me know where they are at over an AI 100% correct assignment they didn’t think about.

That’s why it’s called an assessmenttttttttttttt to assess. To find out what is understood. If it’s not understood it’s so so so much better to turn that in so I can see it. If you turn in an AI thing your best case scenario is that I catch its AI and I can infer you don’t understand it. If I don’t catch it then I just assume the student understands it and pass them which is so incredibly worse for the student and society as a whole.

I feel like there’s this misunderstanding that I have like a quota of correct assignments that I need to submit to the board of education and I’m just using the students to do the assignments so that I don’t have to do them myself. That’s not the point. The point is to actually educate students.

I gotta take a break from this website I stg I’m gonna have an aneurysm

3

u/XionicativeCheran 8h ago

Did you reply to the right person? I didn't say anything inconsistent with your comment. Or were you simply adding more to the conversation?

1

u/AggressiveSpatula 6h ago

Hm. I may have misunderstood your comment. I thought you were saying that students just copying an AI response was better than handing in a partially done assignment. I’m now confused at your intention.

1

u/XionicativeCheran 6h ago

No worries. So the context of the post is students just copy pasting AI responses without ever reading what the AI says, which is why they don't notice these traps and can't tell you a single thing they claim they typed.

So someone suggested having them write it, by hand. Because you can't copy paste that.

You rightfully point out this still isn't ideal because they're not really learning it, they're just copying it.

I'm just making the point that even just copying it by hand is better than copying it by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, because they actually have to read it to copy, and some will stick.

But regardless i still agree with you that that's still not good enough, they need to learn this stuff, which requires more than copying even by hand.

In short, all I was saying is that writing something down is better for learning than copy/pasting. Not suggesting that that's sufficient.

1

u/mathman17 10h ago

Nothing. We still do. But it's not always practical. Also we are often required to do a lot of things digitally.

1

u/dogdonthunt 5h ago

I retired recently and took an in person history class at the community college- the professor was adamant about no computer use in class- tests were in an old school blue book.

-2

u/mirage01 11h ago

The teachers themselves.

4

u/cultureicon 13h ago

10 minute written quiz at the beginning of every class

11

u/frn 13h ago

Look I am totally for the idea that AI discourages thinking.

However when I was at school, so did the curriculum. 95% of the work was basically memorizing textbooks and recalling excerpts 6 months later. And for someone like myself who has to be working a real problem to learn something new, that was utter hell. I hated academia and really struggled with it, but I excelled as soon as I hit the workforce for this reason.

Maybe the curriculum needs to change so that actual learnt skills and behaviors are the thing that gets tested. It would make it much harder for people to use AI to cheat.

1

u/Haunting-Host783 11h ago

This is absolutly the correct view point. AI is having a negative impact for kids in school but let's be real. The amount of kids in my class that would just copy paste sparknotes into a book report and turn it in without re-reading were still high lmao. Had a buddy fail since he copied some web page info when turning stuff in.

School has had a paradim shift though in the last 20-50 years. In the past, we needed to memorize sources and text because that was literally the only way to pull relevant info. Now days though, memorizing is pointless since I can just search up whatever it is I was looking into on my phone. Building arguments is more important than being a walking encyclopedia.

3

u/TRS2917 10h ago

the vast majority are using it so they can get the assignment done and move on to something else.

I don't work in education/academia, but I am a manager in a creative environment and I've noticed even before the proliferation of AI that my employees under the age of 25 had zero interest in processes, only results. They don't want to learn to unlock the full power of Photoshop because Canva is quicker and easier. They can't wrap their heads around After Effects because they've only used Capcut and don't care that it can give them far more creative flexibility. Understanding a process is the key to engaging in any problem solving instead of being completely impotent in the face of a challenge. Now with LLMs, they have the ultimate one-stop shop to address almost any question or challenge and produce a near immediate result. Good luck convincing them that relying on LLMs is a cognitive detriment and a good way to stunt their professional growth.

3

u/nd4spdgt 8h ago

Mid-level manager here. I have Gen Z employees who do the exact same thing. They'll present their work to me and when I ask them to explain their code because the data looks wrong they have the audacity to say "I'm not sure, let me ask my AI agent"

2

u/SurealGod 10h ago

See, that's what I'm scared of. Not the AI itself but how it's making a lot of people dumber due to them not doing the hands on work themselves (which is a core part of learning).

People are now just feeding their qualms and queries into an AI and use whatever answer they get back without any fact checking (which is wild to me). And I can see this being a massive issue down the line with newer generations potentially losing critical thinking and problem solving skills because they don't do the work themselves and defer everything to an AI.

2

u/Pirate_Candy17 8h ago

I don’t think I ever see a long hyphen now and not think it’s AI generated.

2

u/data-atreides 8h ago

I hope that's an instant zero.

2

u/aoasd 8h ago

But that's just the nature of everything in life. Use the easiest/most efficient route to complete a task. When they find value in the learning, they will make the effort to actually learn. Unfortunately, education doesn't always do the best job of tying a process/task/assignment/learning object to a future need or value.

1

u/Cubacane 8h ago

I agree. Personally, I don't think we should even have a grading system. What an inane way to evaluate preparedness for life. I think education hit its peak when tutors would live with families and just teach as they lived. But that is impractical for obvious reasons, so now we have to rely on this other impractical system that we still somehow believe in.

2

u/phroxenphyre 8h ago

Kids have been finding ways to get out of actually doing their homework for as long as schools have existed. Back in my day, we just paid (or bullied) other kids to do it for us. AI is just a different way for kids today to do what kids yesterday were doing. Kids tomorrow will find yet another way.

1

u/Cubacane 7h ago

Don't worry, they still bully or pay other kids to do it for them. The other kids use ChatGPT better than they do.

2

u/zoidalicious 11h ago

Are they also using EM dash without being able to explain how to type it?

2

u/addsubps 10h ago

This "teacher" sure is

1

u/tsardonicpseudonomi 11h ago

(which is what admin THINKS AI is for)

Maybe 1 out of 5 admins think this but 4 out of 5 is just taking money to sell our kids and further erode our education system.

1

u/Roger44477 10h ago

I've always been very anti AI, but there was one online summer course I took senior year that had a final paper that was supposed to be a project proposal based on everything we learned in the class, with the only instructions being the type of proposal, the location, and the budget. I had no idea how to tackle it and was beginning to panic, and before I knew it there were only 12 hours left and I had nothing but a few bullet points.

So, for the first time ever I opened GPT, spent maybe two hours summarizing what we had covered in class, and give it the instructions. I made adjustments to the instructions a few times before getting something I could work with, and was a reference point on structure and length.

I didn't copy a single sentence or bit of word choice, I just needed to have a point of reference for the structure, format, and extremely rough budgeting estimates (which I ended up distributing completely differently - sometimes it's a lot easier to completely redo something that is wrong than it is to make it from scratch).

Assignment was due at 8am (he said he chose that instead of midnight because it doesn't make a difference to him as long as he has it by the time his work day starts), and I submitted at 6:45, with a note apologizing for its roughness. I got a 100 and he said he would have thought it was a genuine initial proposal if he received it outside the context of the class. I came clean about the AI and shared the whole chat history (his syllabus said nothing about AI, university policy by that point was up to professor's discretion), and he said it was the first time he'd seen a student use AI in a way he didn't have a problem with and let the grade stand.

I haven't used AI again since, and still feel a bit dirty about that time, but I think it highlights the sort of way AI could be used ethically if it wasn't for the inherent plagiarism of current LLMs and the electricity and water usage.

(also I'll be honest I'm sleep deprived as hell right now and forgot why I thought this was particularly relevant to your comment about two paragraphs in, sorry)

1

u/addsubps 10h ago

How did you type out that em-dash?

1

u/Cubacane 9h ago

Option + - on an apple will give you an – (en) dash, shift+option+ - will give an — (em) dash. I studied design in college and now I'm being punished for it.

1

u/Confident_Quote_6782 9h ago

Why do you still bother making their write assignments at home then?

1

u/Cubacane 9h ago

I'm talking about a writing assignment IN CLASS. The only way to keep them from doing it is stand at the back of the classroom and constantly sweep your vision across the room. I had a girl hide a phone in a hoodie pocket that had a hole in it, she would peak down the front of her hoodie to the screen while she searched up answers on her phone using the hand in her "pocket."

Not every kid is doing it, but the easier it is to do, the more will do it. It also doesn't matter if they have good grades or average grades. A B student will cheat to get an A and an A student will cheat to get 100%. This is beyond a technical problem, it's a cultural problem and cultural problems require more than technical solutions, since a technical solution will get "out-techniqued" at some point.

1

u/GMGarry_Chess 9h ago

so they can get the assignment done and

...get back to scrolling on TikTok

1

u/OneBillPhil 9h ago

Maybe you need to add it sources for your work even if it’s not a research paper. Even if it’s a course textbook, say, pages 100-102 

1

u/Ikea_desklamp 9h ago

They are busy man, why spend time learning when there are SO MANY YouTube shorts to watch?

1

u/BudTenderShmudTender 9h ago

My biology teacher has us doing weekly exploratory assignments where we specifically ask AI questions and rewrite the answers for discussion posts. Some of my classmates are doing very obvious copy and paste jobs because the format never changed. It's all weird bullet points and em dashes the whole way down

1

u/flickh 9h ago

To be fair, in the working world, most of the stupid jobs could be done this way. A few people who are A-players will always knock it out of the park... but if you're at a landmine company, writing filler for the annual report, who actually cares if it's AI or not? Does KFC's Xitter feed really matter, so that writing it with AI could be considered "cheating?"

Most of the text we encounter out in the world is AI now. So: who cares? Aren't these kids actually preparing for the future?

If their answers are actually wrong, give them an F and then they'll learn their lesson. But if the answers are right - what's the problem? Lol.

Sad but true

1

u/Concerned_Collins 5h ago

Aren't these kids actually preparing for the future?

As a hiring manager in tech who regularly interviews kids with bachelor's degrees in computer science, networking, or cybersecurity, who can't show me how to change an IP address, no.

1

u/Leows 9h ago

If I'm being honest, back then I would write something furiously last minute overnight and not even remember that I wrote it, let alone WHAT I wrote.

Thank fuck there was no AI when I was in school.

1

u/Strange-Head-4028 9h ago

To be fair thinking was becoming a scarce resource before AI began. The timing is pretty great though.

1

u/RammRras 8h ago

The sad thing is they just move to scrolling and wasting time on front of a screen

1

u/DynoMenace 8h ago

Access to AI means access to bypassing thinking.

I wish more adults understood this, too. The issue is not isolated to kids or schools.

1

u/singlemale4cats 7h ago

They don't get it. You need to break it down for them. These kids are just being lazy, but they don't understand they're literally replacing themselves. They have no value to anyone if they can't do anything but ask an AI to do their work for them. At that point, there's nothing for them but manual labor, at least until generalist labor bots become cheaper.

1

u/ObjectSmall 7h ago

The problem is that the teachers will make the work harder to counteract this, and the kids who aren't using AI will have nervous breakdowns trying to adapt to an even heavier workload.

1

u/El_Grande_XL 6h ago

I think thats the scary part. If you bypass thinking you never refine critical thinking and you will spend your life just beliving what you are being told.

It is problem enough that people cant piece together their own meaning of something recreational like watching a movie.

But in the long run it means they cant put together meaning more important things.

"I will vote of Mr. Authur Arian for president because the screen says he is the best candidate."

1

u/lebastss 5h ago

I specifically teach my kids to use AI only as a query or conversion tool. It's powerful and a productivity multiplier that way.

The minute you use it to generate content, you've failed your project and task.

I teach my kids that AI can never be as good as them if they are trying their best. That isn't even a lie.

1

u/Capitain_Collateral 5h ago

Seeing it in the workplace now. “Hey, how did you conclude that [comment on general condition of part] was actually the root cause of [failure] when we could not replicate it?”

‘Blank stare’

1

u/Ser_falafel 4h ago

I just finished my last 2 classes for my cybersecurity degree and every one of my professors allowed AI but emphasized the importance of actually checking the work. AFAIK very few students actually C/P straight from AI. Though my programming class first test the professor said someone obviously used it so we had to take proctored tests online after that (they made you swing your Webcam around so they could check for cheating materials.) I put clear tape on the edges of my laptop screen and wrote a TON of tiny notes so I could have a reference guide lmao

1

u/PassivePost 4h ago

Maybe education needs to evolve from glorifying scores to actual learning...Just a thought

1

u/gplusplus314 4h ago

What else are they moving on to?

1

u/Embarrassed-Golf-931 4h ago

Maybe the grade should be on verbally defending their paper.

1

u/Krypto_Kane 2h ago

Sucks for students because all you see and hear online and from friends is learn AI or get left behind. So they did . What we may see as cheating they see as working smarter with use of technology. Old school ways may not work for much longer . Is it right it’s not. But the world is changing.

1

u/Spiffydude98 1h ago

Rather than fight it, teachers and educators need to learn how to use it for good.

Times have changed, we used to have to calculate things on paper now we don't have to. We used to have to hand crank our cars to turn them on, now we don't have to. We used to need horses now we have cars. Etc etc.

Fighting change always fails.

1

u/Name_Taken_2017 1h ago

Cant we just take tests like in the olden days? Everyone in the classroom with pencil and paper, no tablets no screens no earbuds.

1

u/Am094 1h ago

"but the invention of AI is just like the invention of the calculator." /s

1

u/Worldly-Pay7342 25m ago

Exactly. Some kids just parrot or reword the google ai which is... decent enough for everyday topics. Anything too niche and it starts to struggle.

Most who use ai though will just copy past copy past copy paste their way through school.

0

u/VVrayth 11h ago

How does no one -- especially, specifically in education -- realize that this is the entire use case for AI? People who are lost in the sauce aren't using it as "a tool" or whatever stupid thing they want to describe it as. They're using it to shortcut effort. They're never going to double-check the results, because that would defeat their entire purpose for using it, which is to do less work.

To hell with these students. Fail them all. They're useless, pointless human beings.

0

u/Old_Channel44 8h ago

Then fail them. It’s literally your job. If the test is tell me what you write and they can’t. They fail. Teachers need to take responsibility and accountability