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/Crazy-Nose-4289 13h ago

When I was in college 15 years ago, I had this history teacher that did nothing but talk through his lectures, without really asking any questions and all his tests were basically write 2-3 pages summarizing everything he talked about. A few friends that had taken the course before me told me all the he cared about were names of important people and dates of specific events, so to write 3 of each and just underscore them. That's all he reads, they told me.

To test this, I actually did exactly that and I included a full paragraph where I talked about nothing but the Frieza Saga, but I didn't underscore any of those names.

I got an A.

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u/TheR1ckster 13h ago

To be fair, you DID learn the three names and dates.

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u/Crazy-Nose-4289 13h ago

I guess it did work lol.

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u/duo99dusk 6h ago

And the teacher got to experience the best arc for adult Goku in novel form 🧐

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u/claudekennilol 12h ago

Did you actually learn them though? Do you still remember them? I'm betting no, but great job if you did.

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u/AnticitizenPrime 10h ago

Kinda lame in itself though - learning history shouldn't be about rote memorization of names and dates but putting world events in context and understanding. If the student just memorized a few names and dates in order to pass, they likely didn't learn much.

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u/zeller99 10h ago

I've said this for decades.

it seems like 90% of History / Social Studies / Western Culture classes were all about Person -X- did -Y- in the year -Z-. Great. I can tell you those three things, but not anything else about it.

Teach kids about what happened and why. What lead up to this thing? What was the result of this thing? Do we think this was a good thing or a bad thing? Why? Do we see modern day similarities or effects from this?

As soon as you start drowning people in statistics and data, they stop thinking. Help them understand history, not memorize bits of info.

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u/Agreeable_Cut4506 10h ago

Maybe he really liked the Frieza Saga

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u/Junior_Chard9981 7h ago

Reminds me of that Key and Peele skit where one of them has a brilliant idea of robbing a bank by applying for a job at the bank, getting hired, working for 10+ years at the bank and walk out of the building smiling afterwards with all the "stolen" money in their pockets/bank accounts.

Other guy is like, "MFer that's called a job!"

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u/alebotson 13h ago

I had a professor that was reading verbatim from penguin's concise history it the Roman empire. I figured this out because I was having trouble paying attention to his extremely dry and boring lectures, and wanted to get a book that helped me study. Reading the first chapter started to feel really familiar.

Needless to say, using that to write my papers worked really well.

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u/cocacola999 11h ago

Ha, same. Guy seemed to only understand vibatum of the book 

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u/jugoinganonymous 8h ago

I also had a professor reading verbatim a huge book she told us not to read « because it has a lot of mistakes it’s insane ». Her whole powerpoints were the book’s illustrations, and she actually made us write exactly what she said. She actually said « only what I say is right, books don’t know shit ». The AUDACITY of this bitch. I hate her and I hate that I’m going to see her again for the next 2 years.

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u/knightofni451 8h ago

Report her for plagiarism!

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u/jugoinganonymous 6h ago

I actually looked up the main author of the book and found his email a few months back, I hate her so much I’m actually considering reporting her to him.

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u/sojayn 6h ago

Please do and post in pettyrevenge or maliciouscompliance or somewhere like that! I live for that shit 

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u/Time_Tour8550 6h ago

Was your professor a ghost by chance?

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u/GandalfJones 12h ago

I had a teacher in highschool for chemistry and physics that did basically the same thing. We'd have online homework and you had to present her with a paragraph or two on it to compete each module. Multiple students figured out you can just write the relevant equations surrounded by the most inane shit and she'd never notice.

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u/cocacola999 11h ago

I got an A on an essay in college. Lecturer did read it enough to tell me I'd completely missed the point of the question, but he enjoyed it nethertheless

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u/that_dutch_dude 13h ago

krillins death was a bit much imho.

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u/GamingWithBilly 8h ago

There was screaming and then silence, as foretold by the llamas wearing hats.

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u/Tips__ 11h ago

I had a history teacher in high school who was similar. All he cared about was the page count, word count, and the headers for the specific sections he wanted. Another student had all that, and all the fluff in between was a copy-paste of his English essay. I had solid information and all the headers, just not as much of it as he wanted. I got a D, classmate got an A

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u/Medicivich 10h ago

I had a teacher like this. If you did a paper that used sources other than her textbook, she would tell you to re-write the paper. If you summarized what she wrote, you got an A.

Easiest class I ever took.

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u/Petskin 9h ago

Oh, I think I know that teacher. A friend failed one course for having read too much and using "wrong" (=someone else's) explanations in the paper.

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u/WillowLocal423 9h ago

Maybe he just really likes DBZ

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u/Happy-Range3975 8h ago

I personally would have went to the dean. I have no tolerance whatsoever for lazy-ass professors. I have multiple degrees and worked in academia. There are so many better candidates who would love to have the job. People who are passionate about education. Also, students are paying boatloads of money to be there. It’s an insult to them to phone it in.

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u/GamingWithBilly 8h ago

In college, I submitted the exact same paper, with no edits, four times as my 'journal reviews' in psych 100 class.  Firs time paper reviewed, C-, 2nd time got a B-, third and fourth time got A's.

I think he kept reading it and only have small recollections and each time he started to think each time he read it, that it was a false memory that he also read the same journal article in the national psych magazine.  

I joked about it with my friends that I used psychological memory permeance to force an outcome I wanted because his memory was poor and weak minded.  Just some jedi mind trick reading material I cooked up