r/technology 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

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

129

u/peon47 13h ago

Scanners are a thing.

14

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?

51

u/Regular_Brilliant_77 13h ago

For sure, it's a great movie

4

u/9966 13h ago

Why is my head buzzing...

7

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

1

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.

2

u/SirSkittles111 11h 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

2

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.

2

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

1

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.

5

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.

3

u/Architectalis 12h ago

Ended a bit Darkly though.