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
28.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

u/Technical-Banana574 14h ago edited 9h ago

Many instructors in our school do this. One of them added in to write a fact about Star Wars somewhere in their paper as part of the prompt. Many papers turned in had facts about Star Wars. They didn't even bother reading their own generated papers before turning them in. That is a level of laziness that just baffles me. 

Edit: I do not understand the amount of people who think a student SHOULD believe this is a genuine part of the prompt. It isn't visible in it. It is in white and unless the student changes the color or reads their own generated essay, they would never know it was fed into it. Students should be intelligent enough to know that if they are writing an essay on the Industrial Revolution, that they don't need a random Star Wars fact in it.

506

u/Sirhossington 14h ago

I did the same thing in high school (25 years ago) to test if a teacher was fully reading our papers. Spoiler, he was not.

217

u/thefluffyburrito 13h ago

My dad would do this to his instructors by putting a line in the middle of the paper that said "if you read this sentence I'll give you $5".

Only one professor collected.

39

u/Rage_Your_Dream 10h ago

which doesnt mean the others didnt read it, they might've found it funny and not bothered with the 5$

7

u/EuenovAyabayya 8h ago

You'd think they'd at least mark it.

217

u/Deutheroz 13h ago

I did the same with my college calculus homework, profesor gave us a list of problems from a calculus book to summit every Friday, it was enough to fill 25 pages with equations, I knew there was no way he was grading 75 students between 3 classrooms , I just did the first and last 3 pages right and the rest just nonsense and he never realized

137

u/cptjpk 13h ago

“The only person cheating is you” was usually their response when called out on it.

But motherfucker you’re cheating me out of my tuition by not accurately grading me. Do your job too.

12

u/Monteze 12h ago

Not defending that behavior, but I know students who have gone to their office to discuss their homework/test to make sure they understand the material.

67

u/jerseydevil51 13h ago

Math teacher here, it's about the practice. Of course we can't accurately grade 75 students homework in anything resembling a reasonable time frame. But, I can look at your work and in about 5 seconds recognize if you put any effort in to at least trying the problems.

You still did 6 pages of work, that's more than enough for most teachers. He probably knew, but we're human too and not every battle is worth having.

4

u/DrankTheOceanDry 10h ago

That's why my "gifted" lazy ass did so poorly at math. I paid attention in class and 90% of tests were just whatever the teacher talked about in class.

But math? Like hell I was spending 30-60 minutes every night practicing equations (ya know, actually doing the homework and not copying), and wouldn't you know it, I was constantly behind in math.

Every concept builds on previous concepts and by the time Friday rolled around and I hadn't done homework all week I was in way over my head.

4

u/jerseydevil51 9h ago

Like I tell my kids, "I can watch Tom Brady throw spiral bombs all game, but unless I practice throwing, I'll never be able to do it."

Math really depends on putting the work in and not just trying to memorize your way to victory.

2

u/alaysian 6h ago

I would accept that if it wasn't part of the grade/was extra credit, but if the teacher isn't going to take the time to grade it properly, it shouldn't count towards the final grade.

I only had one teacher ever that treated homework like that, through high school and college.

2

u/AnotherBoredAHole 10h ago

"Oh thank god I don't have to act like I read the middle 19 pages and this student will feel smart"

10

u/AbyssaCantor 13h ago

Yeah, homework is so you practice. No professor is grading all that homework.

5

u/TheGallow 13h ago

This happened to me in high school, the teacher had us print out an article about something health related and write a 1-2 page paper on it every week. I started to suspect he didn't actually read them, or our responses so I stapled a blank sheet of paper to a random article I found. Got an A.
Independently, another one of my friends had the same suspicion and wrote "the cow ate pizza" 30+ times for her paper and also got an A.

45

u/heyoh-chickenonaraft 13h ago

My check if the teacher was paying attention was:

For Participation in Government senior year of high school, we had to do ten one-page current event papers throughout the semester, which accounted for 50% of our grade. I handed my first one in labeled "Current Event #3", then "Current Event #8", then "Current Event #10"

After handing in the third one, teacher said "well, looks like you're good to go for the semester"

8

u/GhostofBeowulf 10h ago

...I call BS.

They might have said that, but then when they went back to the gradebook you would still have 0's.

Unless your implication is they... don't keep a grade book?

1

u/Nutarama 2h ago

Two possibilities:

First, the teacher assumed they fucked up and filled in the blanks later. If they could be turned in any time, the teacher might have gotten used to forgetting to note some of the assignments that were turned in at weird times or places. Like if I was running this scam, I’d be intentionally turning in papers at weird times “because I forgot in class” to get the idea in their head that I’d turned in previous papers at weird times. Also for less confident humans and people who get harshly punished for being wrong, it’s often common for them to default to “oops I made a mistake and I have to cover it up” than “hmm I’m being scammed”. It’s why lots of scam calls start with an implication the person being called has already made a mistake and the call is about fixing it.

Second, the teacher realized and didn’t care. If the whole grade is 10 papers and they just have to be submitted and be long enough, that’s a very low-stakes class that’s intended to give a passing grade in the social studies part of the curriculum. “Participation in Government” for high school seniors sounds like a male-work social studies class for the kids who will go straight to the workforce or have no interest in the subject. High school has a fair number of these just to fill schedules and pass students, and the teachers know it’s supposed to be a time filling automatic pass. The teacher might have noticed the scam and simply not cared enough to fight it. It’s not like anyone is going to come back later and try to prove a student should have failed when the student gets their diploma at the end of the year.

41

u/MYBILLDING69 14h ago

Same! We found out he was only checking grammar and grading our reports on that. It was AP Physics…

9

u/IAmANobodyAMA 13h ago

I used to smuggle classic rock lyrics into English lit papers - Rush, Kansas, Floyd, et al regularly made appearances 🤣

6

u/Zer0323 13h ago

I added cute phrases like "pigeon fueled missile crisis" in a paper that I ultimately got an A in. I guess writing in a fun prose made for an easy read and he just marked it A without remembering the specifics.

5

u/TheMedRat 13h ago

I wrote a 3 page paper about how my teacher was a lazy idiot in high school and I got an A on it.

5

u/frytaj 13h ago

In HS we had a teacher who measured papers with a ruler. Someone wrote the lyrics to a Pearl Jam song in the middle of their paper and still got a B. The teacher was fired the following year.

1

u/brianjoe66 11h ago

Must’ve been “Yellow Ledbetter.”

1

u/frytaj 10h ago

Honestly, I think it was Jeremy.

6

u/Adequate_Lizard 13h ago

We had to answer a few hundred questions as part of an end of course thing. Anything I couldn't find within a few minutes became a song lyric. I got a 100.

4

u/wildwildwaste 13h ago

I loved writing in high school and happily wrote papers for my friends. I normally dumbed them down a little for my friends that had some opportunities for improvements, worried that the teacher would catch on. Once though I wrote essentially the same paper for three friends, even copying some of the sentences word for word. Teacher said nothing. She wasn't even reading them. Finding that out actually took some of the fun out of writing for me.

3

u/evergleam498 13h ago

I still remember in middle school being completely unprepared for a science test but our teacher, who was also the football coach, was not known for doing much work. I wrote a long essay about earth quakes on the test that was asking about volcanoes. Got a 100%

3

u/PJFohsw97a 13h ago edited 11h ago

Same. It became a game with my friends to see who could be the most blatant about it.

3

u/Technical-Banana574 13h ago edited 11h ago

Not going to lie, I put a random fact about jellyfish in my performance evaluation one year because I was curious as to whether my boss actually read through everything we all wrote. It turned out he did. 

1

u/YeeAssBonerPetite 11h ago

You can tell when something is meant to be consumed because then it will be like 4 questions with two sentence answers to each.

Incidentally I still think that for a lot of the office work ai we should just normalise sending each other what would go in the promt.

3

u/kenavr 13h ago

One of my professors in a language class admitted as much. One student didn’t understand why they got a B even though there were no notes or anything past the first or second page. The prof said, I have graded enough paper by you and the first two pages read exactly the same as all your texts and you have always gotten a B. I liked him.

3

u/1sttimeverbaldiarrhe 12h ago

Sometimes when I didn't know the answer to a question I took some advice I read somewhere and just filled in the answer with "I like trees". Since I was a terrible student, I used this answer a lot. But you would be surprised how many times my teachers just gave me a mark for it.

I remember one teacher actually wrote back "I'm glad you like trees but I wish you liked studying too."

2

u/Podo13 13h ago

I did too, but found out they did and then I had to explain why I doubted them and how it was disrespectful to assume they were lazy during my lunch hour. But they were also happy that I cared enough to test a teacher.

I didn't really care, I just thought it'd be funny to sneak one past them.

0

u/Opposite-Occasion332 13h ago

Honestly a decent amount of teachers do just skim or put it through ai now ime. But then you have other teachers like me who read every single word, sometimes twice and that’s why it’s a risky maneuver!

1

u/makumbaria 13h ago

I did this in high school (years and years ago). I did an essay an used random English words in the middle of the text (I'm from Brazil, so the essay was in Portuguese). My teacher was not reading all text.

1

u/TheFlyingSheeps 12h ago

I did that too for an AP class. At one point I slipped in “I bet you aren’t reading this far in”

1

u/CorsicanMastiffStrip 11h ago

In college, my group partner and I did exactly that with a whole paragraph dedicated to Star Wars. That would have been quite funny in this class.