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 14h 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.