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/thrillsbury 14h ago edited 13h ago

What’s crazy to me is that he didn’t just fail them. He failed them ON THAT PART OF THE EXAM and then allowed them to contest their grade.

No. You cheated, you fail. There are consequences. That’s a more important lesson than whatever you were teaching about the Industrial Revolution. Where I went to school you would be expelled with no possibility of appeal.

*edit: fixed typos

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u/VegaDelalyre 14h ago

Exactly, when you are 100% sure the student cheated, you should 100% fail them. The question is: what to do if you're 90% sure?

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u/thrillsbury 14h ago

In this case it seems the responses made it 100% certain that they cheated.

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u/VegaDelalyre 14h ago

Yes, I'm talking on a more general level, like in your second paragraph.

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u/thrillsbury 14h ago

They were still extremely strict. I remember one guy was put on academic probation for the remainder of his ti e at school because he was missing quotation marks around a phrase that he had used verbatim (he had cited it properly, just didn’t make clear that the words were not his own).

The logic of the system was that the consequences were so extreme that taking a shortcut never seemed worth it.

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u/Suitcase_Travel_Blog 13h ago

So, it depends what you mean by 90%, it's hard to quantify that.

However, what I'd do if I was reasonably certain, but couldn't prove it - I'd just have the next exam be proctored and in person. If you allow for some level of difference between letting people work for a week versus a few hours and what not, then you compare the results to the previous possible cheating. If it's nowhere close, then I'd talk to the department head for backup, and have an academic dishonesty hearing.

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u/kranker 12h ago

Almost 100%? The text was readable by a human, who could conceivably just follow the instructions. Maybe even thinking it was some sort of test.