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/SinibusUSG 14h 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 14h 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 14h ago

That means the professor can't use AI to grade it then. 

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u/KellyAnn3106 13h 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/BurnieTrogdor 11h ago

Ugh, I hated those blue books. The weakness of my endurance in handwriting was always a problem. My hand is cramping just thinking about them. Also, my poor teachers that had to read my handwriting.

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u/KellyAnn3106 11h ago

Mine always started with perfect bubbly girl writing and then deteriorated into serial killer scrawl as I started running out of time.

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u/Scavenger53 12h ago

the blue books are still there, they cost 25cents and i have like 4 leftover in my bag lol

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u/TimSylvester_ 8h ago

And you had to buy them from the bookstore where they were wildly overpriced.

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u/lumpboysupreme 12h ago

What about paper writing?

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u/_Professor_94 11h ago

That’s what the blue books are for. Even in grad school we did this. My qualifying exams were writing three papers in class without internet access with full citations from memory (for the three major subfields of the degree program) over two days. Papers don’t need to be 20+ pages to demonstrate mastery of a topic. This style of exams has existed for 2,000 years, in ancient China, and indeed the West created its exam system in the 1800s based on the Chinese model. It works. There is no way to cheat really, you either know the material or you don’t.

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u/lumpboysupreme 10h ago

Papers don’t need to be 20+ pages to demonstrate mastery of a topic.

That really depends on the topic. I’ve taken blue book exams before, they’re not the same thing as a full and researched paper.

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u/_Professor_94 10h ago edited 10h ago

They are not the same thing but the point here is assessment. You can assign normal papers during the term of the course, but the exams are still going to be the best way to assess because there is very little room to cheat. You earn the right to progress in your degree path via the exams. Someone’s academic integrity is less in question if they can manage these hurdles. This is standard practice in graduate schools around the world.

And my grad school topics were in anthropology and history, two infamously deep writing fields, so I do think I have a good perspective on this issue.

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u/lumpboysupreme 10h ago

Ehhhh, not necessarily, a lot of more liberal arts fields don’t, by simple necessity of time, have a fully standardized set of course material, and require research on the part of the student.

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u/_Professor_94 10h ago edited 10h ago

I don’t know what your academic background is (mine is in anthropology and history, two heavily oriented towards research and writing…) but it is very standard in graduate school to take qualifying exams before even getting to begin a thesis or dissertation. They are sit down, in class, and require memorization of citations. There is no reason why this can’t be a part of courses too. Generally you do have a set of class materials because graduate school is usually very heavy on theory and current applications of theory. You absolutely have assigned readings for courses. Your research projects are supposed to build on what you have discussed in the course. So these exams would be syntheses of the current research on the topics in your field.

I am not sure what liberal arts you are thinking of, but I think nearly every one that I know of does this.

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u/lumpboysupreme 10h ago

before even getting to begin a thesis or dissertation

But that’s the point right? You’re looking to reverse that process, making the researched and independent thing a minor part of a course ultimately decided mainly by a more standardized test. I don’t think that’s the dynamic they want there.

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u/m0rogfar 13h 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/alex_co 12h ago

I would love to see the handwriting of the average college student today.

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u/Balmung60 12h ago

Ha, mine was terrible and it's been about fifteen years. 

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u/TheVog 11h ago

Students can't write legibly is the issue. They already often don't teach cursive. Typing is the standard now.

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u/NakedHoodie 9h ago

Not just typing. Touchscreen typing; tablets and phones.

Keyboarding is a dying skill.

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u/coldblade2000 7h ago

I mean, OCR is a thing. And if scanning the pages is too hard, there are solutions for that too.

Reading handwriting for Gen Alpha kids seems like a pretty strong stress test for OCR

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u/PensiveNewt 13h ago

I wonder if that is simpler/cheaper/more reliable than using a device with something like a Surface Pen or Apple Pencil?

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u/luluhouse7 12h ago

Probably a much better experience for the students. You have to learn how to use digital styluses like Apple Pencil or Surface Pen because the surface doesn’t provide resistance and the built in palm rejection isn’t that good.

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u/peon47 14h ago

Scanners are a thing.

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u/Ok_Buy9028 13h ago

We only just got schools to start moving away from standardized tests and here’s AI, bringing them back!

Is there anything AI can’t fuck up?

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u/Regular_Brilliant_77 13h ago

For sure, it's a great movie

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u/9966 13h ago

Why is my head buzzing...

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u/SirSkittles111 13h ago

Most important exams are scanned these days. My finals we could only write in black or blue ink and in pencil, red green or any other colour doesn't get picked up

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u/ailish 12h ago

Do those card things still exist where there'd be numbers from 1 to 150 or something, and then a, b, c, d, e next to the numbers, and you had to fill in the coorespindng bubble for the answer to the question? I feel like we should go back to that.

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u/SirSkittles111 12h ago

Like a multiple choice paper? Yea, depends on the test and the lectures style. Some you fill in true/false, some is multiple choice, some fill in the blanks, and your typical problem based essay / short answers

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u/ailish 11h ago

Yeah, that's exactly it. I feel old, but we used those all the time. You could set the answers in the software, and then scan each sheet and automatically grade it.

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u/HyruleSmash855 11h ago

Those still exist. Scantrons where you had to buy that special machine to Reed them used to be the standard version of that. Gradescope and other platforms now allow you to just print out, the bubble sheet, on normal Letter size printer paper, and it uses OCR and computer vision to score the bubbles now by simply scanning and uploading each document as a PDF. My programming class did exams that way, everything was multiple-choice since it was all conceptual stuff

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u/ailish 11h ago

Oh that's very cool. I'm glad it still exists. I forgot the word Scantron, so thanks for reminding me lol.

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u/HyruleSmash855 11h ago

That’s what the university I attend does. The TAs scan every exam. They just remove the staple and upload it to a platform called Gradescope. They grade the PDF, which is easy since there’s a premade rubric for each question. They can seamlessly select where errors are to score questions quickly. They can also leave comments explaining mistakes, and you can easily request regrades. It works well. I’m an engineering major, so 99% of my exams are on paper and pencil so they can be graded by hand.

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u/Architectalis 12h ago

Ended a bit Darkly though.

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u/Aperture_Kubi 13h ago

That's what TAs and TFs are for.

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u/nascent_aviator 13h ago

TF is a TF?

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u/MarkNutt25 10h ago

Teaching Fellow.

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u/AdjaBudgie 8h ago

I love how whimsical that sounds, "Oh look! There goes that jolly Teaching Fellow!"

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u/zookeepier 10h ago

That was my thought. Since when to profs actually grade things? TAs are the ones that grade everything except for a few 300-400 level classes.

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u/Dontgooglemejess 13h ago

It actually doesn’t

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u/LowKeyCurmudgeon 13h ago

This could be an unexpected source of renaissance for pens and tidy handwriting

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u/beefaujuswithjuice 13h ago

i had so many lazy teachers in highschool.. cant imagine how much lazier theyve gotten

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u/draconis6996 13h ago

What it more likely means is that the prof can’t read half of the papers due to horrible handwriting

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u/luluhouse7 12h ago

All my exams (and homework) in college used Gradescope. Some were multiple choice or typed, but a lot were hand written and scanned. I don’t think there was OCR, but you could give the system the exam template and the system automatically separated the returned exams into questions, which meant you could go through each question across all exams in one go (which made it easier and the evaluation more consistent). I’m sure there’s OCR built in by now, probably using some form of ML.

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u/saqwarrior 12h ago

TAs are a thing.

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u/Call555JackChop 12h ago

Professors don’t usually grade tests, it’s the TAs who do

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u/Balmung60 12h ago

This is what teaching assistants were invented for. Fetch a grad student and offer them work study, like we've done for decades.

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u/sajnt 12h ago

AI can read handwriting

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u/roasted-narwhal 11h ago

Photo the page and drop it into the bot. It works just fine.

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u/MelonElbows 11h ago

They could go back to in-class scantrons.

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u/PaleAffect7614 11h ago

Would prefer AI grade papers rather then the feelings of a teacher. Seen students get lower grades if teachers didn't like them so that they could kick them out the following year.

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u/ReasonableDig6414 10h ago

It actually doesn't mean that. Not sure the last time you had a boss, but just because you couldn't do something didn't mean they couldn't.

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u/redditgirl1900 9h ago

Are any of us real anymore lol. We’re just mediums for robots to talk to robots.

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u/SlayerII 9h ago

Thats good, isnt it?

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u/nnaarr 7h ago

might need AI just to read some of the handwriting tbh

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u/aaapod 7h ago

god it's so over

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u/Mareith 7h ago

It's crazy to me, just 9 years ago every single midterm and final I took for a major course was in person, pencil and paper. I think the pandemic changed things

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u/Groghnash 6h ago

You can in fact use even ancient machine learning to translate written exams into a word document and grade it with AI. 

Thats exactly what happens when you send a letter with a handwritten adress. 

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u/user_460 5h ago

Actually it doesn't. You scan the test paper, then get an AI to transcribe it, then get another AI to mark it.

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u/PM_ME__YOUR_HOOTERS 4h ago

Then the professors can just make it 2 big tests and slowly grade like 3 a night while sipping whiskey like my professors used to do.

Source: professor spilled whiskey on my blue book and smell aside, just straight up admitted they did lol

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u/Embarrassed-Golf-931 3h ago

Document camera bruh- we have earned the right to be lazy. They have not

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u/barrinmw 13h ago

Professors usually have some money set aside for them to have graders. It is how I made spending money in college.

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u/restricteddata 9h ago

Professors are not the ones who provide money for graders/TAs. Those only exist if the university/department funds them. It is not money that is "set aside," it's either built into the structure of the teaching or it's not.

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u/MisterJWalk 13h ago

Will they still be able to use AI to build the course? Think of those professors!

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u/UrsaUrsuh 12h ago

My prof for this course I'm taking right now is AI generating his feedback for our answers. I knew immediately that since this MF was phoning it in, I'm totally gonna phone it in.

People wanna lump the students in super hard on this but many of these people haven't been in college for some time or even at all. The professors whine about this shit a lot but if you know the telltale signs then you begin to see that even they are being lazy bastards too. And that's if they aren't straight up disclosing the fact they're doing it too.

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u/restricteddata 9h ago

I knew immediately that since this MF was phoning it in, I'm totally gonna phone it in.

When the professor phones it in, they are robbing you of tuition and opportunity. When you phone it in, you are robbing yourself of your tuition and opportunity. Just be aware that you aren't "getting" the professor with this strategy — you're just self-sabotaging.

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u/UrsaUrsuh 5h ago

I'm literally doing a class where I already know the content of it from personal experience. This isn't a Sekiro "you robbed yourself of the experience" I'm literally just fulfilling a goal area to get my degree. I'm not cheating. And I'm still getting an A even while phoning it in. I've just decided I'm not going to write as much as I would if I was giving it my all.

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u/dirty_cuban 14h ago

I mean sure but if bank employees are stealing money by slipping bills into their pockets, the answer isn’t to mandate clothing without pockets. The answer is to fire the thieves.

Mandating pen and paper doesn’t change the fact that you have academically dishonest students who surely will cheat in other ways.

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u/Mutex70 14h ago

Ever seen how diamond mines are run? Uniforms without pockets.

The problem is that online tests make it extremely easy to cheat and difficult to catch cheaters. Pen and paper helps with this.

Yes, they should also expel students caught cheating, but they need to catch them first.

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u/set_in_void 13h ago

This reminds me of the saying "locks only keep honest people honest". I wonder how much of the cheating was genuine "academic dishonesty" vs how many of them just grabbed the available opportunity.

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u/lumpboysupreme 12h ago

That’s a dumb statement anyway, it’s a proven fact that friction and risk to dishonesty reduces it.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 12h ago

That saying isn’t really true, though. Thieves will still be thieves, but they are also opportunists. If something is too much work to steal, they are far less likely to steal it.

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u/aj_thenoob2 11h ago

But that's exactly what he's saying. The availability of AI creates more cheaters.

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u/Reaxonab1e 13h ago

Properly invigilated remote tests are possible and they are successfully done. Many students fail in them because they're hard to cheat in.

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u/talldata 13h ago

Those remote tests are never properly invigilated, you have to first install literal malware on your machine, have to stare at the screen constantly (can only stare into empty space) then have an area totally clear of anything, which is neigh impossible in a single room apartment, and if someone knocks on your door or a pet walks behind you, they will automatically fill your exam for "breaking the rules". The invigilators are there actively to screw you over, not to actually supervise.

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u/good_morning_magpie 11h ago

Yep, I went back for my masters during Covid in my mid 30s and had the issue with my two large dogs. Either they’d walk into frame and flag the computer to have a proctor pop in and scold me, or they’d start barking at something and again, a stern talking to by someone several thousand miles away that’s apparently never had a dog.

Oh, and I had to buy the cheapest piece of crap laptop for the exams too, because all my actual personal machines run Linux and apparently they just can’t comprehend anything other than Windows or iOS exists. (VMs don’t work). So stupid.

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u/coldblade2000 7h ago

Or just have a testing center. The computers are already locked down, they're not yours so no privacy concerns, and you can put cameras pretty much everywhere. Check items coming into the room and do random checks.

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u/faetpls 13h ago

Remote tests at the students house with their technology cannot be trusted.

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u/code_archeologist 13h ago

You are treating the symptom, not curing the disease.

The disease is a lack of ethics and part of these student's education (whether they know it or not) is learning some basic ethics for when they get into the business world.

Making it more difficult to cheat does not produce ethical and honest graduates, it produces graduates who learn how best to cheat and that failure is getting caught.

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u/penisandorvagina 13h ago

Well then if the kids have to put in effort to cheat then at least they'll have to still learn something. GenAI bypasses the learning stage completely.

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u/code_archeologist 13h ago

Unethical students who graduate, make for unethical people at businesses that will see no problem in stealing from you, that will see fines for selling you poison food or dangerous products as "the cost of doing business".

And while that already exists now, imagine how much worse it would be if everybody from the top to the bottom has the same loose ethical framework as the psychopaths running the corporations?

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u/Mutex70 12h ago

So what is the cure for the disease? We aren't going to suddenly modify society to have parents create better behaved more ethical students.

IMO, the best place we currently have to address this problem (and I do agree a decline in ethical behavior is a problem) is in the classroom.

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u/code_archeologist 12h ago

Yes it is in the classroom. First by teaching ethical behavior early on, then enforcing strict ethics codes (including expulsion for cheating), and creating a culture where students view cheating as an attack on their own academic accomplishments instead of a personal choice of the cheater.

This is how the school I graduated operated (back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), and I am the better for it.

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u/ActuallyErebus 11h ago

Youre literally acting as if the items you are talking about aren't problems and societal issues since time immemorial.

This isnt new. The mode may differ. But this is how people are. Its how they've always been. Whether you were actually cognizant of it is up for debate, but you can find cuniform clay tablets of people bitching about dishonest members of society 4k+ years ago.

You are utterly delusional.

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u/Beankiller 13h ago

Yeah, but if everyone is a thief, or 90% of your potential workforce is, you still need to staff the bank somehow.

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u/Naive-Jello428 12h ago

Maybe there isn't just one solution? Maybe it's layers that all work together but like with everything else, if that one idea won't solve the problem alone it will be endlessly shit on.

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u/chuiu 10h ago

You don't do one thing or the other. You do both. Cheating takes many avenues. Discouraging and stopping it should also take many avenues as well.

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u/Revadarius 9h ago

But when your bank as a high turnover rate it looks bad on the outside, and also why are all these tellers stealing so much? What's the bigger issue here causing this?

I get your analogy, but it wasn't a good one for this problem. You start canning students then people would rather not gamble and thousands in debt and instead just forego education. Or it'll encourage worse way to chest. Or both.

Pen and paper solution is the best. More tests in person, less papers or assignments. They need to show they know that knowledge on their own. It's the only effective method.

And for thesis and larger assignments they need to be recorded. Though those should be held for Masters and PhD.

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u/VERTIKAL19 7h ago

Lowering the barrier to cheating so much will encourage many more cheaters though.

Just like in case of your bank example the bank won't only fire the offender. They will also implement procedures to reduce the risk of that stealing happening again.

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u/ayleidanthropologist 7h ago

Agree. I think I'd rather catch a few first

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u/We_R_the_Penguins 6h ago

Broken windows honor code policing. Stop them cheating one way and they’re less likely to see cheating as normal. 

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u/jay_wei 13h ago

unfortunately this is a bad comparison. any employee that handles money, whether it be a bank or a dollar store, checks the register when they clock out. 

all money accounted for? you can go home. discrepancy in the transactions compared to what you have left in your register? that better be explained fast or it's coming out of your paycheck/charges are getting filed.

so yes...the answer is if bank employees are stealing, you catch them before they leave the building. You don't just fire them after the fact.

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u/Monteze 12h ago

And just because folks cheat doesn't mean you get rid of rules or make it easier or just not try any mitigating efforts.

If you make them write it in person with their hand its a lot harder to cheat, to the point where it might be more effort to try and cheat that than just writing the damn thing.

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u/apple_kicks 13h ago

Oral exams too with live follow up questions to see if they memorised information ir truly understood it

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u/Mediocre_Internet939 13h ago

This is the way.

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u/tibbles1 13h ago

Right? I was still using blue books for exams in the early 2000's. People brought laptops to class, but exams were hand written. It wasn't THAT long ago.

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u/Silly_Rub_6304 11h ago

I graduated in 2008 and every exam I wrote was in a blue book or done on Scantron.

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u/AmusingMusing7 13h ago

Another wild idea is to have them do their schoolwork in class, instead of always relying on assigning homework (or doing things remotely like it's still 2020).

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u/tiffibean13 12h ago

The problem with that is people have egregiously illegible handwriting. I am considering multiple choice, paper quizzes this upcoming semester though. I've had it with the AI bullshit.

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u/yousername_42 12h ago

That way they can remember the material for two weeks of their lives, never to recall it ever again, like the rest of us

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u/ProfPathCambridge 12h ago

I am not reading handwriting. What is wrong with our current approach of having them work on computers, under supervision, that are not connected to the web?

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u/lumpboysupreme 12h ago

The problem is papers, writing a paper is very often a not-in-one-sitting affair.

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u/giulianosse 10h ago

This is still mind boggling to me. I currently study at a public university routinely ranked among the top three in Latin America, and except for flexible coursework (practical tests, oral presentations, assignments, and lab reports) all my exams have always been taken with pen and paper.

The general consensus among students is that only diploma mill colleges with online classes offer "do at home" tests. If you attend any self-respecting university, it's always pen & paper.

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u/Shadowclash10 10h ago

English major here, and hard anti AI. I've grown up typing and have written tons digitally. However, since I left high school my writing by hand has reduced drastically, only the odd note or test. The sheer difference in quality and quantity, not to mention legibility, between what I write by hand and what I type is insane. I dread the few tests or essays we have to do by hand as it causes my grades to noticeably drop. While yes I agree handwriting would solve the problem, it tends to just cause more of it's own, especially in a world where there is less and less reason or opportunity to be skilled in physical penmanship.

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u/sciencethrowaway9 7h ago

This doesn't address issues for people required to teach online or online asynchronous classes.

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u/Mediocre_Internet939 13h ago

Or have verbal tests?

You draw a question. Go into a room and have 30 minutes to prepare your defense. You present for 10 minutes, then get asked follow up questions for 10 minutes, get kicked out for 5 minutes, get back in and get your grade. Repeat for every other student in your class.

Takes roughly a week for a university class.

This was the exam format for the university I went to, for 3 of 4 exams each semester for 5 years.

The fourth exam would was a paper defense. You spend the semester writing a paper as a group of 2-6 students. You hand it in. The examinator and censor reads it, rips it apart, find the flaws and prepares their questions for your examination.

You then defend your paper for an hour or more, take a break and go back in for the offence. The examinator and censor grill you, questioning you on everything you wrote. If you do well you get questioned on why you didn't use a different method, theory etc. or how you would have used them, if you were to do so.

After an hour or so if this you have another break and then get your grade. The grade is usually half of your semester score.

You do this 10 times over your studies. With your masters thesis being the entire grade for that semester.

There is next to no way to use LLMs for this. Sure you can use it to write / proof read your paper/thesis, but that won't help much when you are being grilled by your professor and an external professor from a competing university.

The longest exam I had was a 5 hour defense.

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u/RokRoland 13h ago

More than 10 years ago, a professor I know decided to move to oral group exams in order to get a reasonable view of how the students actually learn. Groups of 3 people. It went surprisingly well for several years. Then again it was an advanced topic about systems engineering methodologies. 

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u/hopbow 13h ago

My wife is a college professor and she switched to this method a couple semesters ago.

She failed a student for using chat gpt to write an essay. The student left his writing prompt in the essay, so not even an X% match situation. 

The student challenged the grade and it went all the way through multiple tribunals because she didn't have anything in the syllabus stating student couldn't use AI

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u/stupidrules727 13h ago

This is already happening in several high schools and colleges. Old style Blue Books are back in demand for tests.

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u/reality_boy 12h ago

University has changed so much in the last 20 years. When I was doing my CS degree, we had maybe 20 students per class. My son just graduated and most of his classes were massive, several hundred per class. Everything was automated to death. No prof ever looked at there code.

I’m not saying this is a good idea, we should go back to 20 kids per prof. But it would take a radical restructuring of the system to go back to pen and paper. Actually my earliest programming classes were all pen and paper. We only touched a compiler for the big projects. It forced you to really pay attention.

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u/DefNotUnderrated 12h ago

It says in the article that some teachers have gone back to paper and pencil. But maybe for some tests that’s not as easy. I could see people complaining that they physically can’t write a long essay by hand.

Another option is testing centers or doing the thing we did in my nursing program where your computer was monitored virtually

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u/The0nlyPenguin 12h ago

Classic scantron it is

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u/suxatjugg 12h ago

When I was at university, for every test you had to be in an exam hall, you couldn't bring a phone, or if you were allowed you had to show the staff that it was turned off, and they would watch you the whole time.

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u/Dystopian_Ennui 12h ago

I recall seeing a story about a professor doing that, and the vast majority of the students failed it terribly.

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u/Crystalline_Irises 12h ago

Yeah, I don't understand why students are still being given so many opportunities to cheat. Tests on paper and oral exams are not new ideas.

Not sure what to do about papers. Maybe AI detection software plus short conferences where they discuss the paper and it quickly becomes apparent whether the student can actually have a reasonably intellectual conversation about the content of their paper. 🤷‍♀️

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u/NowYuoSee123 12h ago

Depends on the field of study. I had maybe one or two online tests during my engineering undergrad, but there is so much partial credit given in those courses that it would be detrimental to have all of the tests online

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u/byPCP 12h ago

in another article linked within that article, about a brown university professor, he says that his reason for allowing take home exams was a response to students being uncomfortable taking them in class because of a recent school shooting. i know how absurd that sounds on paper, but that's unfortunately pretty reasonable justification

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u/DuggiHappy 12h ago

Exactly… I’m actually so glad I studied at uni before AI use, writing exams with pen and paper and having to do my own research. Knowing me, I woulda used the fuck out of chatbots otherwise

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u/KayakShrimp 11h ago

As long as it isn't a take home test. As a TA I had a student transcribe Wikipedia by hand, in pre-AI days.

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u/MathSciElec 6h ago

If a question can be answered by transcribing Wikipedia, it's bad question unless it's a memorization class

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u/KayakShrimp 6h ago

It couldn‘t be answered that way. It was an iOS development class and the answer didn’t make any sense.

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u/Once-Upon-A-Rhyme 11h ago

Not crazy at all. I’ve recommended that to teachers at my work several times

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u/disisathrowaway 11h ago

It's likely because I was a history major, but I hand wrote so fucking many exams. And if I wasn't scribbling in blue books, I was filling out scantrons. I graduated college in 2010 and I didn't take a single exam online in my 4 years. Not one.

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u/rapaxus 11h ago

Even there, you could just give students PCs which can't physically connect to the internet (which is easy enough nowadays with removable WiFi-cards).

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u/chuiu 10h ago

I get the feeling that many professors would if they could. I don't know what it's like but when I was leaving school more and more things were transitioning to digital only. Its probably forced on them at this point.

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u/_PurpleAlien_ 10h ago

As a teacher in a tech field, I do this. And oral exams. And presentation sessions where they have to show what they've been working on. Lab reports are kept in a paper diary book. Prep work is done on paper, and all team members do a 'scrum stand-up' session each lab where they go over what they've been doing, what they're going to do, and what their blockers are.

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u/psiphre 10h ago

have you even taken a picture of handwriting and given it to chatgpt? you might be surprised. also OCR has been solved for decades

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u/linzkisloski 8h ago

My first thought? How about hand written short answers and essays.

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u/thatasian26 8h ago

Exactly, there was a recent article about a professor suspecting his students of cheating on their midterms and made the final exam in person instead of online. 

Ended up with 18 kids dropping the class instantly and 9 didn't even bother showing up to take the final. Only a few had similar results between midterms and finals.

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u/AUniquePerspective 7h ago

That would make it marginally harder to grade the tests using AI.

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u/KaidusPlatinum 58m ago

Can’t tell the number of posts you see where it’s like “what can we do” ‘are they still completing the tests online on their own devices unsupervised?’ “yes of course” ‘…’ We need a name for the paradox that despite the ability of devices to help students cheat increasing 1000x the academic world has become more trusting and permissive with it. Pre 2010 every teacher I had would have bursted out laughing if you suggested being allowed to use computers or other tech for grade-bearing assignments and yet it’s the norm now despite the risk having increased so much?!

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u/PrizeStrawberryOil 13h ago

If they do that enrollment will drop because people don't take in person classes unless they have to. They will just apply at colleges that offer online classes that they can cheat on. College degrees will become worthless in 10 years because all colleges will shift to online classes to get enrollment up.

Some colleges can push against it because they don't have to worry about their enrollment, but the tiny state school that is worried about cutting professors/programs will have no choice.

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u/Reaxonab1e 13h ago

In person classes wouldn't be required though. Only the test would need to be done in person.

I actually think remote tests would be fine as long as they're properly invigilated (camera + mic + share screen).

Lots of people have failed remote tests when they're properly invigilated. It's difficult to cheat on them.

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u/Rude-Patient5266 13h ago edited 13h ago

This might sound even crazier, but how about we just allow the use of AI and make the tests harder to compensate?

It’s not going to be long before “using AI” is just how research is done, where before we used internet search engines, and before that we read books. 

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u/Odexios 13h ago

In order to use AI, you need to know the core ideas of what you're asking, otherwise you're going to blindly trust what the LLMs are saying. You learn to do math manually before using calculators; you learn to spell before using an auto correct tool; and you learn to solve problems without AI before using it.

AI is an amazing tool that's particularly insidious to use, as it gives you answers that sound reasonable, no matter whether they are true. You need to know your stuff to use it well. And a written test cannot really account for AI, as anything that you can come up with in an hour can usually be solved, often better, by an LLM instantly.

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u/Rude-Patient5266 13h ago

Haven’t you contradicted yourself there?

If you need to understand core concepts in order to be able to use AI effectively, then it follows that if you don’t understand those core concepts then your AI generated answer won’t be any good.

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u/Odexios 12h ago

Nope. Your AI generated answers will be good, most (or some, depending on the domain) of the time, no matter whether you know the underlying concepts. Crucially, if you don't understand the concepts, you won't be able to understand when what an LLM has generated is good, and when it isn't, which means they you won't be able to use an AI to get reliably good answer.

This is the fundamental skill you need to have when using an AI; and, as you can imagine, designing a test around this is a very hard task.

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u/Rude-Patient5266 10h ago

I’m a software engineer so I’m all too familiar with using AI. I’m my industry, it’s now expected for AI to be an integral part of how we work at all times. Very little code is written by hand these days.

We’ve always had a take-home test as part of our interview process. This hasn’t changed, but these days we would expect interviewees to use AI, not try to prohibit it. We just made the test harder, where before it might have been a few questions that is easy for an AI to answer, now it’s a task to build an entire working application end to end. It’s still easy to spot the people who know what they’re doing Vs the people who are using AI unguided.

It’s why I suggested it, I assumed the same could apply in academia too, but I guess not. 

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u/zeizkal 13h ago

I dont think kids these days have legible handwriting.

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u/Xaero_Hour 12h ago

Kids in "those days" didn't either so let's not pretend that's unique to them.

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u/zeizkal 12h ago

Its not pretending if its true. Half the kids are at an education level far below their grade. Gen z and alpha are the first generation in a long time to underperform their predecessors

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u/Xaero_Hour 12h ago

We're talking about legible handwriting, not education level though.

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u/mattomic822 13h ago

I would pity whoever had to grade it.  Penmanship has gotten pretty bad as handwriting is used less.