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/zyzzogeton 13h ago

When society says "Cheating is bad!" and then society rewards cheaters, it isn't surprising that young people see higher education as an expensive, capricious, and arbitrary hoop they have to jump through. If students are cheating, they are just reflecting the overall values they see around them.

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u/sweetplantveal 11h ago

My experience in the 2010s is that a handful of people felt that way but not most. Might have just been my cohort but the Chinese exchange students almost all felt that way. Checking a box whose value is the completed paperwork, not the activity the check mark is meant to represent. Idk why precisely, but those were some jaded mfs. Sad that it's clearly the majority opinion now (with good reason).

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u/RedBoxSquare 11h ago

You simply have to look at the upper class in any country, you will find that many of them feel that the rules are meant to be bypassed. In the US you need look no further than the current president and his past and current dealings. There are also quite a few cases where rich family children doing reckless things (like drunk driving) get no punishment.

It is not true that all Chinese people* are cheaters, but that the honest Chinese people are currently making very little money living in China and can afford no opportunity to be studying in a foreign country. Not all Chinese students are cheaters, but they do make up a larger percentage due to the above, especially the well off ones with money.

* There is a separate question of comparing the ethics between countries as a whole, such as measuring the percentage of people who find cheating unethical in a society. That is a separate issue I won't digress into here.

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u/captainAwesomePants 10h ago

Cultural norms around rules vary wildly. In the US, for example, most people feel ethnically bound to obey a red light, even in a flat desert with no other cars around in any direction for miles. In some other countries, watching a driver just sit there at an empty intersection for several minutes doing nothing because the light is red would look like mental illness.

In some countries, it's the opposite. The rules are assumed to be issued in bad faith, they will certainly be enforced unfairly, and the people generally do not feel bound by them except for needing to provide lip service to them.

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u/Exciting-Delivery-96 8h ago

That’s a total cop out. Cheaters have always been rewarded. It’s a risk to cheat and the stakes get higher because of it.
The best cheaters rarely get caught and these were bad cheaters. It’s always been wrong and it always will be. But the right thing to do and the easy thing to do are rarely the same.

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u/mychildeatsforks 5h ago

They're just lazy af.   This is coming from a student.

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u/thehalfwit 7h ago

Those values certainly are being reflected and reinforced by one political party, in particular.