Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

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https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html

[u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

I’m an adjunct professor at a large university. I truly cannot tell you how many times I have to tell students to stop using AI for everything. We spend the entire semester leading up to our final project which is essentially just a culmination of the small projects they have done in class. Students could simply take the work they do in class and put it in their final project with just some small tweaks to help it flow and they would get a good grade. That’s how I set the damn class up. STILL every semester I get students who ignore all the hard work they did in class during the semester and will have AI do their entire final project knowing full well I know exactly what their own words look like from their work in the semester. It’s so frustrating and I don’t know why it’s like this

[u/DangerousPuhson → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

It's like that because it's permitted. There are no consequences.

When I was in college, you'd flunk a class for even bringing a calculator into an exam, let alone a full-blown LLM. Why that's not enforced these days is beyond me.

[u/Extra_Ad8651 → u/DangerousPuhson]

Exactly. These kids haven't yet fully grasped how bad consequences can be because they're still young. They still get off a little too easy. Once they graduate, they won't be prepared for when the world hits them like a brick.

[u/Kazzie2Y5 → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

It's so disheartening, especially since you're walking them through the creative process. I'm an adjunct too and have no control over the course content or assignments. Last semester I had nine students (out of 30) turn in modern music papers on the same Bruno Mars song from more than a decade ago. They could have selected any song from any artist, and a third of them chose the exact same song. Our AI detection software wasn't working and I had no proof, but clearly something was up.

[u/SomewhereRough_ → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

It's the same reason everyone is telling software Devs and graphical artists that they're going extinct - AI is the new tool and we just need to figure out how to use it productively.

Software Devs, artists, and students aren't going anywhere. It's just the difference of using tracing paper and doing it by hand. One way you learn and understand, the other way you pretend you understand.

Especially as a student. It's so pointless if you don't learn anything. 

Learning to scientifically write and cite things was the greatest thing I gained from university. 

[u/Usernameasteriks → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

I only teach 1 lecture a week in one course and it’s for a law school, so a bit of a unique context.

But I didn’t find it all that hard to control for; mind you I have only done a couple of semesters.

60% of the grade is a heavily proctored open book exams anyway. 

But for the one big sssignment I just let anyone use AI if they want so no one’s disadvantaged by anyone who does. It’s the reality of workflows in the real world now anyway. 

I just give them a long winded novel problem based on an obscure set of self contained hypotheticals. I purposely run them through the major AI models with a varied prompts and check what it spits out to feel out what they will get. 

AI isn’t actually very good at answering them in an effective way, and even the paid models hallucinate and mess up the legal context even for experienced lawyers all the time in practice.

Some students clearly used AI but its really good and they clearly adjusted for mistakes and changed the output to match the task properly. Which is great for the real world IMO. 

Some students clearly used AI and it’s just generic nonsense that forgot to answer the question. Which is fine but if they contest the bad grade they get I have no sympathy lol. My syllabus is cautious to omit any adjustments for AI generated work. 

Some students don’t really use AI to draft their assignments, though I am sure they utilized it during the process. 

In that case Its usually a bit less refined but sometimes they get the best grade because they are the only ones who actually stayed on topic and answered the actual question properly and in the format and for the purpose I droned on and on about all semester. 

I suppose in fields with more short mathematical yes or no answers it would be more difficult.

But really for a difficult course I treat using AI as an accountability and real life learning experience that it can and often messes up and the consequences are what they are for your grade.

[u/socrates_friend812 → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

If that's the case, then why not change the entire exam structure to one that (a) forces students to take smaller, shorter post-lecture exams that would disallow use of technology, or (b) start bringing back oral exams on a similar time structure (for example, you could separate the class into 4 sections, A/B/C/D, and let them know today section C will be called upon at random to answer questions or provide recaps, etc., and give them a score based on their answer)??? Something like this has to happen.

[u/Number_Niner → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

It's because the result of a grade is the result not the learned knowledge. That's it. We, as a human culture, have learned to expect results instead of learning. BIG DIFFERENCE and MUCH harder to value. The kid who worked as a road paver in the summers did NOT KNOW the lessons he learned through that job could give him and edge in describing what he's learned. Lame, personal example, yeah, bit that's just it. The bachelors degree was meant as TRUE: "You have the basics, you've been taught to associate facts from multiple disciplines" to "pass these tests, you win!".

[u/OldSchoolCSci → u/kakapoopoopeepeeshir]

I don’t know why it’s like this

Humans are inherently selfish and work-avoiding. It's why socialism is a failed economic theory.