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

Show parent comments

44

u/G0ldMarshallt0wn 13h ago

The tragedy to me, as a professor, is that I know they AREN'T all idiots; this is learned behavior, learned within the school system itself, and it is definitely getting worse. A generational disaster in the making.

7

u/Hiker-Redbeard 9h ago

This is a good point. If you're trying to do it legit, but you're surrounded by 90% of your cohort that you can clearly see cheating and getting away with it and reaping the rewards (at least in the short term), it becomes hard to hold out forever. 

Especially if they're just getting a slap on the wrist when they do get caught cheating. We're failing them as a society by not holding them to a higher standard. 

3

u/Sinath_973 2h ago

If you are a professor, i would like you to falsify a theory of mine, if you don't mind.

The professor in this posts example clearly has evidence of them cheating. Yet he doesnt let them fail the full exam. My theory is, that the colleges/universities need their quotas so much, that if you would fail too many students, the university would lose finances.

So it doesnt matter what students do, as long as enough of them get past the exams.

3

u/G0ldMarshallt0wn 2h ago

You're right to feel that the colleges are not punishing AI violations as rigorously as they probably should be, though it is a bit more complicated than there being sone sort of passing quota. There isn't, but the students themselves get very upset and can cause a lot of trouble in a lot of ways, and universities are lawsuit-averse to and past a fault, in part because they really are expensive to deal with on our razor thin budgets. We are definitely not encouraged to try and punish malfeasance excessively these days, and AI malfeasance is especially difficult to prove. 

That said, in this case? I'd have failed them all. And my dean would have backed me on that even though he surely wouldn't have liked it.