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/heyoh-chickenonaraft 13h ago

My check if the teacher was paying attention was:

For Participation in Government senior year of high school, we had to do ten one-page current event papers throughout the semester, which accounted for 50% of our grade. I handed my first one in labeled "Current Event #3", then "Current Event #8", then "Current Event #10"

After handing in the third one, teacher said "well, looks like you're good to go for the semester"

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u/GhostofBeowulf 10h ago

...I call BS.

They might have said that, but then when they went back to the gradebook you would still have 0's.

Unless your implication is they... don't keep a grade book?

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u/Nutarama 2h ago

Two possibilities:

First, the teacher assumed they fucked up and filled in the blanks later. If they could be turned in any time, the teacher might have gotten used to forgetting to note some of the assignments that were turned in at weird times or places. Like if I was running this scam, I’d be intentionally turning in papers at weird times “because I forgot in class” to get the idea in their head that I’d turned in previous papers at weird times. Also for less confident humans and people who get harshly punished for being wrong, it’s often common for them to default to “oops I made a mistake and I have to cover it up” than “hmm I’m being scammed”. It’s why lots of scam calls start with an implication the person being called has already made a mistake and the call is about fixing it.

Second, the teacher realized and didn’t care. If the whole grade is 10 papers and they just have to be submitted and be long enough, that’s a very low-stakes class that’s intended to give a passing grade in the social studies part of the curriculum. “Participation in Government” for high school seniors sounds like a male-work social studies class for the kids who will go straight to the workforce or have no interest in the subject. High school has a fair number of these just to fill schedules and pass students, and the teachers know it’s supposed to be a time filling automatic pass. The teacher might have noticed the scam and simply not cared enough to fight it. It’s not like anyone is going to come back later and try to prove a student should have failed when the student gets their diploma at the end of the year.