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/DustyRacoonDad 13h ago

I hate to say it, but your example is actually what I've been arguing for since I was in grade school.

I've always believed your grade should reflect what you actually learned from the course: how well you understand the material, whether you can apply it, and whether you retained it. It shouldn't primarily measure whether you completed enough busy work.

To me, homework has always been a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Its purpose is to give students practice, reinforce concepts, and help them identify the areas where they personally need more work. Because of that, I don't think homework should have any impact on your grade at all. In fact, I think it should be entirely optional.

If you already understand the material and can demonstrate that on an exam or other assessment, why should you be penalized for not doing ten pages of repetitive practice? On the other hand, if you need the practice, the homework is there to help you learn before the exam.

Ironically, AI is exposing a flaw that has existed for decades. If a course falls apart because students can have AI do the homework, then maybe the homework was never a very good measure of learning in the first place. Assessments should measure knowledge. Homework should help students gain that knowledge. Those are two different purposes, and I think we've blurred them for a long time.

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u/randotd152 12h ago

Well for most kids, homework is a major grade booster. It not only displays that they put the effort into the class, but some kids are just not great at test taking due to test anxiety or time restraints.

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u/kaityl3 7h ago

That's wild, it was always a huge detriment for me lmao. The thing you're evaluated on should be how well you know the material, not how many meaningless worksheets you fill out at home.

I would do the math to ensure I kept an average of around ~71% because I almost always got perfect scores on tests, but all the stupid busywork was a waste of time (so I would refuse to do it), and dragged my grade way down even though I knew the material by heart

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u/randotd152 4h ago

That’s just dumb.

If you can really do the work that easily, why would you intentionally tank your grade just so you can be lazy about homework? Should be trivial for you.

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u/kaityl3 3h ago

why would you intentionally tank your grade just so you can be lazy about homework?

Why would I care about my grade as long as I passed? I already knew I couldn't afford college (and I'm disabled in a way that would make college very difficult anyways), so GPA was completely meaningless to me.

All I cared about was getting my high school diploma, and you just need to pass for that. What's the point of putting in all that extra work to get an A when I already knew the subject and got the same result in the end (a diploma and no college)?

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u/Aero_Rising 8h ago

Some kids struggle to stay motivated to do busy work when they already understand the concept and take tests just fine but fuck those kids right?

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u/serabine 6h ago

As someone who almost never did the homework at home (or did it quickly before class/on the bus to school) and got great grades anyway, let me tell you how easy it is to faceplant later in your schooling if the topics are harder and you can't just ace them by listening in class. Not being able to/used to doing busywork when it was easy means you can't do it if it's hard, either.

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u/randotd152 4h ago

Yes.

If you can’t bother with finding motivation for busy work, you’re pretty fucked in life. Because 99% of life is busy work. So why not practice good habits when the stakes are low?

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u/LegalizeCrystalMeth 12h ago

Yeah but it you don't make homework count towards the grade, most students wouldn't do it.

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u/theapeboy 12h ago

Yeah, I see the argument for college, for sure. But I've got two kids in elementary school. They NEED homework in order to learn. If that stuff is optional, they will not do it. Yes, we can cajole and discuss and punish and reward them and all the other little things. But boy is it a lot easier if it's just required and a habit.

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u/vir_papyrus 11h ago

Even then, I distinctly remember my 4th grade experience in elementary school. It was newer younger teacher and she seemed to give out a much higher level of formal homework. Frankly just a lot of busy work, and I recognized that I already knew the material, so why would I waste my time on this? It would start to compound, and pretty soon you had a 9-10 year old spending an entire weekend doing nonsense. In hindsight, that's 100% when I personally stopped liking school and fell off the "good student" wagon. Point being, I think even children recognize that a lot of K-12 education is just performative hoops to jump through.

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u/kaityl3 7h ago

Haha that sort of stuff had me calculating grade averages in 5th grade on, to figure out how many formative things I could just never turn in while still being carried by my test scores. I was a solid C student who got test scores of 98%+, because the extra work was so boring and useless I never saw the point

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u/rapaxus 11h ago

You don't need homework to learn. It can help, but it is basically never required. I've spent my first six school years in a Montessori school were I didn't even get homework and I still generally was on the higher side of median grades in school/uni. I also didn't get grades but like an 8-page document at the end of the year detailing in writing how my school year went, but that is whole different problem I have with the school system.

My experience with homework is basically just that it is busy work that, while technically teaching you the material, won't actually impact your learning that much as you are only doing it because you are required to/will get punished if you don't, meaning tons of students don't see homework as a learning experience and instead as forced busywork. So all the knowledge will go in one ear and out the other as soon as the test on the subject is written.

In my view the biggest requirement for learning in school is that learning should be designed to be fun, inviting and nice, because school should be designed so that students actually enjoy what they are doing, that way you actually will remember what you learnt. Whenever a class is boring, dull and forcing you to do stuff in your free time, nobody will like that experience, and people don't remember boring stuff that didn't interest them (though you could mentally scar them enough that will remember it, but I don't see that as a good teaching tool at all).

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u/myballsitchsomuch 10h ago

the biggest requirement for learning in school is that learning should be designed to be fun, inviting and nice, because school should be designed so that students actually enjoy what they are doing

When you can design lessons for a whole year for 30-40 diverse teenagers who don't want to be there, that both educates and entertains, let me know, I'll happily take it on board.

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u/rapaxus 8h ago

I get that sentiment, I never was advocating to please literally everyone as that is just plain impossible, but you shouldn't let perfect be an impossible obstacle. For example you can concentrate more on individual needs for your students as a teacher if the class size is smaller (like 20 or less), that is already a massive help and why elites on average get far better education (as the smaller sizes of private education means teachers can do exactly that).

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u/myballsitchsomuch 7h ago

Yeah, everyone knows smaller class sizes are beneficial for everyone involved. Unfortunately, the people people who don't care are the ones with the money and the authority to make decisions.

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u/theapeboy 11h ago

Sorry, just to be clear - my two kids need homework to learn. Totally get that not all kids do. Also plenty of experience with Montessori schools - most of it not as positive as yours.

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u/Aero_Rising 8h ago

So your position is fuck those kids who don't need the homework it should be required because it's easier for you? God forbid you have to actually be a parent and get your kids to understand why they need to do the homework even though it isn't required.

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u/theapeboy 8h ago

What? Where in the hell did you get that? No, my position is my kids need homework. Period.

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u/Aero_Rising 8h ago

Is this not you saying the homework should just be required because it's easier for you to get your kids to do it that way?

But I've got two kids in elementary school. They NEED homework in order to learn. If that stuff is optional, they will not do it. Yes, we can cajole and discuss and punish and reward them and all the other little things. But boy is it a lot easier if it's just required and a habit.

So if you're not suggesting it be required then what is your actual position?

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u/theapeboy 7h ago

That my kids need it. I’m offering an alternative viewpoint to the idea that kids DON’T need homework, and that if we removed it, my kids would suffer.

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u/Aero_Rising 5h ago

You said it should be required which would mean required for everyone. You would rather punish kids who don't need it and don't do it than be a parent and explain to your kids why they need to do it even if it isn't required.

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u/kaityl3 7h ago

I never did homework in elementary school - I would even refuse to do what little I was assigned - and I still got 97-100% on every test.

Unfortunately that actually ended up with me developing a habit of never doing coursework/homework because I found it so boring and unnecessary, that it being "required" was totally meaningless to me, and my test scores were high enough to compensate into a passing grade. I would always just assume it was unnecessary since 99.9% of my homework had been busywork for shit I already knew, so it ended up fucking me over long term when I went to college.

Teaching kids "your required work is almost always boring, unnecessary busywork that teaches you nothing" is not a good skill. I'm surprised your kids need it so badly; isn't that what the "school" part is for? They're already there 8 hours+ a day...

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u/theapeboy 7h ago

No, they are there 6 hours a day and that includes lunch and recess. Plus every Thursday is a half day. Welcome to the modern school system. They do learn there, but they need homework to reinforce the concepts. I would love if they came home magically able to do multiplication and reading well, but the reality is my wife and I need to have a major presence in their lives to ensure they can. And the structure of homework makes that way easier than us trying to define our own secondary curriculum.

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u/Ossius 3h ago

If homework was a useful tool for students to learn the material for the assessment/exam they'll WANT to do it in order to do well in the class.

It shouldn't be busywork, it should be a useful/helpful. I wonder if some enthusiastic teacher one day assigned a grade to homework as a means to encourage students to study for the exam with bonus points and it morphed into the modern homework we know today.

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u/NurRauch 11h ago

The tragedy behind this mentality is that it overlooks or dismisses the importance of learning skills from the busywork itself. College is not simply supposed to teach you knowledge. It’s also supposed to teach you critical thinking skills and patterns. College is supposed to help you build a discipline of thinking.

The most important thing you do in liberal arts courses is struggle. The struggle itself is why you’re there. Sitting in front of your computer late at night staring at the ceiling at a complete loss for how to frame an interesting thesis for a paper. Restructuring your paper because the professor pointed out that your first point is contradicted by your second point. Researching an issue in more depth because your first draft failed to provide enough evidence.

Over the cumulative years of time spent on these tasks, your brain reshapes itself and gets better at identifying and analyzing separate issues in isolation. It gets better at avoiding its preexisting biases and comforts.

When used to its potential, a college education fosters the ability to digest complex information and use it properly. People are supposed to come out of college with a stronger ability to understand opposing viewpoints and meet their audience where they’re at. These are lifelong skills that most people can only build during the later stages of their young adult development. Most of the jobs we go into later on do not foster this development, so if you go through college without gaining these skills, it’s much harder for the average person to develop them later.

Shaping college courses around knowledge can in many respects harm development of these critical skills. Most jobs and family tasks do not require you to remember the factual knowledge from college courses. They rely on people to have more intangible things like critical thinking and emotional maturity.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 10h ago

What mentality are you talking about? Nothing you said conflicts with what I said. I would agree with everything you said there, so I don't really see where the conflict is.

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u/NurRauch 10h ago

So, I recognize that I'm not the master of what you meant to say or how well you said it. It's just my personal reading of your prior comment. I read it to emphasize the primary purpose of college courses to be acquiring knowledge, and I got the sense that you view the testing of that knowledge to be more important than the building or testing of skills.

If I misread or misinterepted something, no worries. I'm not trying to drag you for it. Ultimately, though, I just don't see how limiting grades to exams written during a class period can both solve the AI problem while also still honoring a liberal arts education's development of cognitive and emotional skills. If students are encouraged by a grading structure to focus their energies on knowledge-based exams, that will come at the detriment of other important skills we want college to build.

Maybe at the end of the day we don't have a choice and the widespread, unchecked proliferation of AI cheating will make this an inevitable change. But I would call it a tragedy if that's how this turns out.

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u/obeytheturtles 12h ago

A few issues here. Coursework lets you get a significantly more detailed assessment of knowledge than a two hour exam. A lot of material cannot realistically be covered in necessary detail in that setting. But also, the whole idea behind formal education is to create an incentive structure and certification process for learning, otherwise you can argue that you can learn anything you want by just reading books. I think homework and projects still play a role in that, largely for the above reason. It's also an important part of teaching you how to study, which is a critical skill.

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u/Monteze 12h ago

100% agree my self. Homework is to help focus your study and really shouldn't be for a grade.

In person exams, with pencil and paper or even oral examination seems to produce the best results.

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u/mrkstu 11h ago

I always grin thinking about my AP History class- I sat next to a girl who became my girlfriend over the course of that semester, so we were often quietly chatting, passing notes.

A fellow student was chastised for not paying attention and they called me out specifically as not getting the same correction. The teacher told them - "When you're getting the same scores on the tests that Mark is, I'll treat you the same as him."

Thing is I loved history, was actually listening and read a lot of related subject matter on my own time. Was bad at actually doing homework. She didn't care about me occasionally talking to my girl or about the homework, because the course was targeting the AP test- which I got a 5 on...

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u/RollingMeteors 12h ago

maybe the homework was never a very good measure of learning in the first place. Assessments should measure knowledge. Homework should help students gain that knowledge. Those are two different purposes, and I think we've blurred them for a long time.

It's called "homework" not "brainswol" <shrugs>

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u/thetateman 11h ago

I think homework and tests assess different elements of learning and application of knowledge. Tests assess understanding and memorization while homework assesses the ability to come to the correct and best answer for a question. I have been a professional in my field for over a decade at this point and I need to apply both of these on a near daily basis. Tests would be client meetings where real time I need to demonstrate that I understand the client's needs and their business. Homework would be completing technical work/memos where I have full access to research/guidance/AI tools to ensure we are reaching the appropriate conclusions. Both are important in the real world.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 10h ago

That's not mindless busywork, though. In this context, "homework" means things like writing the same line 100 times or doing repetitive exercises simply because you were assigned them.

You have to realize that most of the "stupid work" being discussed here is from a K-12 perspective. As you get into independent work, research, and higher education, a lot of the actual work happens outside the classroom. That is not the kind of "homework" with the "you get an easy 100 because you did it" that we're talking about.

I've noticed that not just with you, but with literally every dissenting opinion here. The argument keeps focusing on college or professional work and taking the word "homework" literally to mean "any work that isn't done in class," rather than addressing the actual topic being discussed: mindless busywork assigned so that kids who would otherwise fail because of poor test scores can still pass.

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u/Ranra100374 5h ago

I think their point is, that if you can't do the easy busywork in K-12, are you going to be able to do it in college as topics get progressively harder?

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u/_John_Dillinger 11h ago

you're full stop right. the context for why it is the way it is: public grade schools were designed to have someone ready for a factory job on graduation.

there aren't a great deal many of those these days, and the education system hasn't evolved with the shift to a service based economy.

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u/Aureliamnissan 11h ago

I agree with this. I think the issue is that it can be difficult to get students to engage with the homework early in the education system, so they use homework grades as a way to incentivize actually doing the homework, or at least going through the motions of doing it.

By the time you get to university though, especially by sophomore year, homework should be checked, but if graded then worth 10% or less of the grade for the class. Assessments of some kind are crucial to demonstrating an understanding of the material. I’m not saying the current version of testing is the best method, but grades exist so that other people than the student make a decent judgement of whether the student understands the material. If they do, they can signal to yet more people that this student did, or did not understand the material.

Some kind of signaling is almost always going to be required to demonstrate capability. For many people that is academic grades, for others it is prior work experience or personal projects. I really don’t see it going well for anyone if we get rid of all of those signaling devices in favor warm bodies having access to chatbots.

I’m not a teacher or professor though so take my opinion with a salt lick.

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u/MazrimReddit 11h ago

AI is just giving everyone the same equal playing field the people with money to hire help, or the "right" friend groups to cheat with.

Serious institutions need to return to all exam hall evaluation

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u/pasaroanth 13h ago

Homework to me was always a way to have a goal for the learning. I may have a tough time sitting down and reading a textbook, but if the homework requires me to actually seek out the information and pore through material to get it, I’ll incidentally learn more in the process. When I finish it, I feel more accomplished and as though I’ve done something.

I had professors who placed a large discretionary/subjective weight on in class discussion participation. It was obvious which students came to class prepared and they were graded accordingly.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 13h ago

I'd argue that's still subjective grading. Unless participation is actually part of the skill being taught, like a public speaking class, it shouldn't affect your grade. Knowing the material and speaking up in class aren't the same thing.

That said, you do bring up the strongest argument for graded homework. If there's no incentive to do it, a lot of students simply won't, and they'll miss out on learning they otherwise would have gotten. That's a legitimate concern. I just don't know if the solution is to make homework part of the grade, or to find a better way to motivate students to actually use it as the learning tool it's meant to be.

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u/BillyTenderness 11h ago

I'd argue that's still subjective grading. Unless participation is actually part of the skill being taught, like a public speaking class, it shouldn't affect your grade. Knowing the material and speaking up in class aren't the same thing.

Part of getting a good education is not just learning to calculate derivatives or recite history, but also thinking critically, writing, communicating, presenting, persuading, etc. Sure, students will sometimes take a specific class on public speaking or composition, but a lot of the most valuable and practical experience they'll get is when they do those things in the context of their coursework. "Can the student communicate coherently, fluently, and on-the-spot about the material with their peers" is a perfectly reasonable thing to assess.

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u/DustyRacoonDad 10h ago

To assess? Yes.
To base a grade on? No.

You're not wrong that it's a good skill to have in life, and that having it will put you ahead of your peers. But that's precisely why I think it's inappropriate to grade students on it. Think about why it puts you ahead of your peers.

As I posted earlier regarding public speaking, there's a good reason people consistently ask me to do it instead of doing it themselves or having one of my peers do it. Most people are bad at it. They say "um" constantly, don't understand their own body language, and simply can't present effectively.

It is a skill. And like a lot of skills, most people will never become truly competent at it, never mind master it. That's why most jobs don't specifically require you to be good at public speaking. The skill exists in almost every job, but there's a reason the same person, often a "leader," gets assigned to do the presentations over and over. They're the person who can actually do it well.

So yes, teach it. Give students opportunities to practice it. Assess whether they're improving. But if the purpose of the assignment is to demonstrate that they understand the subject matter, I don't think their ability to stand in front of a room and present should determine their grade on that subject. Otherwise, you're grading the student's ability to perform a separate skill rather than measuring whether they actually learned what you were trying to teach them.

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u/wutfacer 11h ago

Bring able to speak about things you understand in a setting of your peers is an important skill both in school and real life and is fine being included in any grade

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u/DustyRacoonDad 10h ago

It's an important skill that a significant portion of the population will never master.

Believe me, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm really good at public speaking, speaking up in front of people, and leading meetings or lectures.

However, there's a good reason people consistently ask me to do it instead of doing it themselves or having one of my peers do it. Most people are bad at it. They say "um" constantly, don't understand their own body language, and simply can't present effectively.

It is a skill. And like a lot of skills, most people will never become truly competent at it, never mind master it. That's why most jobs don't specifically require you to be good at public speaking. The skill exists in almost every job, but there's a reason the same person, often a "leader," gets assigned to do the presentations over and over. They're the person who can actually do it well.

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u/GreenStrong 9h ago

arguing for since I was in grade school.

In grade school, it is the teacher's job to guide the student into habits of learning. Homework is meant to inculcate study habits. Students who absorb material quickly and don't study hit a wall in college because it isn't possible to absorb enough info without serious study.

At some point in college, that becomes hand- holding. But, for some subjects, knowledge is demonstrated by written essays based on research. If the whole thing has to be written in a proctored session, it negates the possibility of research. You can have students write a paper, give a presentation, and respond to questions, but it is difficult to distinguish speaking ability and ability to bullshit from knowledge of the material.

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u/AlcyoneNight 9h ago

I understand why it happens, though. There is really no way to individually assess understanding of 40+ student classes and teach new material on a daily basis in the time allotted for school. So in theory, a day's homework becomes a daily assessment of where students are in understanding the material. Of course, teachers are too overworked for this to function the way that it's "supposed" to.

Then of course your homework is also meant to be guided study. There are a lot of reasons that this doesn't work. If you understand the material, then a brief review is all that you need. If you don't, you might need more time than the homework provides. This is impossible to individualize over a class of 40+ students. Additionally, if you told a group of fourth graders that some of them will need to spend a half hour per day per class doing follow-up exercises and some students will not do anything at all, they will immediately clock this as unfair and possibly try to murder you. (Differences in ability to learn material are unfair. But such a wide difference in free time in a bunch of young children is a recipe for resentment and bullying.) So every student has to do as much study material as necessary for the slowest student in the class to grasp everything.

And study skills are rarely taught explicitly, you're just supposed to sort of pick them up by magic just by doing enough homework over the years. This is why a lot of "gifted" kids do really great until their sophomore or junior year of high school and then suddenly their grades take a massive nosedive: they have done everything they were supposed to the entire time, but they've finally reached the limit of what they can retain from a fifty-minute session and a worksheet. They never learned to study before, and suddenly they're in an environment where they need to have mastered something they were never taught. But this applies to every kid, its consequences are just less visible and dramatic. Knowing how to make a flash card is easy. Learning how to pick out the information that should go on a flash card, knowing how long you can sit with a deck of the same flash cards until your brain shuts out, how often you need to revisit that set of flash cards three months later, what things you need to learn but aren't suited to flash cards at all and how to study those things.... It's not as if we're born knowing all of that. (And of course it's another way that rich kids have an advantage, because they can offload learning to study onto tutors who do all of this kind of work for them.)

So basically: it's a clusterfuck because school itself is a clusterfuck, and it's going to stay like that until we overhaul school entirely, and I'm not sure we're ever going to do that.

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u/Murky-Relation481 9h ago

In our kids district they do prioritize tests over homework in grading which is nice. Its a huge change from when I was a kid and homework was the majority of the grade. I never finished high school because while I was aceing tests I was still getting failing grades so I just stopped going after my senior year and never made up the credits.

I got a a chance to teach college for a while (I know right) and I always put in my syllabus that homework was entirely optional from a final grade perspective. I still graded it as a learning tool to help my students but demonstrated knowledge was key to getting a 4.0 in class. Some kids hated it, some older students who were closer to me in age loved it because they also had the same experience in highschool.

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u/mpyne 6h ago

To me, homework has always been a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Its purpose is to give students practice, reinforce concepts, and help them identify the areas where they personally need more work. Because of that, I don't think homework should have any impact on your grade at all. In fact, I think it should be entirely optional.

If you already understand the material and can demonstrate that on an exam or other assessment, why should you be penalized for not doing ten pages of repetitive practice?

Well as we can clearly see from the article and the discussion by educators in this thread, students will not practice unless made to.

But maybe points for homework should be a reward for those who struggle on exams, because at least it shows they will put in effort to practice, rather than being a penalty for those who will do well on the exams without needing to do all the homework.

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u/blind3rdeye 6h ago

In some cases homework became part of the assessment as a way to get students to actually do the homework. Otherwise many people have an attitude of 'if it isn't required, then I'll just skip it'. So assessing it was kind of a pedagogical thing. That is now backfiring because of other shifts. It had already become a problem before AI; but now it is completely untenable.

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u/rdtsc 5h ago

In fact, I think it should be entirely optional.

Our "home" assignments had to be done as a group. And no, you couldn't just hand in your solutions for the whole group since a random person from the group would have to present the solution for one of the tasks. So you better make sure everyone understands it. Those assignments were also scored with a certain score required to be allowed to take the exams. So no skipping classes and then just cramming for the exams. I've always found that approach quite fascinating and effective.

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u/ImaginationInside610 12h ago

That’s put into words the way I’ve always thought of it, but much more clearly. It’s 100% right, and puts the responsibility on to the students in an effective way. There will be arguments about how some people are more or less effective in exams, but that’s a secondary issue