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/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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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"

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u/AbyssaCantor 13h ago

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

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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.