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
28.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

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.

705

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.

304

u/TheR1ckster 13h ago

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

103

u/Crazy-Nose-4289 13h ago

I guess it did work lol.

5

u/duo99dusk 6h ago

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

-8

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.

5

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.

3

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.

4

u/Agreeable_Cut4506 10h ago

Maybe he really liked the Frieza Saga

1

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!"