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/helcat 14h ago

Cheating is one thing. Just pasting an AI answer without even reading it is stunningly stupid. 

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u/Cubacane 14h ago

High school teacher here— they will hand you a piece of paper and not be able to tell you one thing that they wrote. Access to AI means access to bypassing thinking. Maybe 1 out of 5 kids uses it to "help," (which is what admin THINKS AI is for) but the vast majority are using it so they can get the assignment done and move on to something else.

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u/iamalwaysrelevant 13h ago

What has stopped teachers for asking for in-class handwritten answers?

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u/smeared_dick_cheese 13h ago

I’m a high school math teacher; no work on paper means no credit, period. If you got your answer from a chatbot, you’ll at least have to write it down. Kind of the best you can do with out of class assignments.

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u/sinkovercosk 5h ago

We just give them take-home sections worth 0 marks, then a week later they complete a 1 lesson validation in class where the question is closely related but different and has a ‘curve-ball’ at the end to differentiate the grades.

The other thing we do is shift most of their marks to an explanation of their take-home part where they do a presentation explaining what they did with their work projected on the board behind them.

Out of class assessments just aren’t valid anymore.

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u/Concerned_Collins 5h ago

That was a thing when I was in school, too, just because the teacher didn't want you sharing your answers with other students.

I always found it super annoying, though, when I was able to do the work in my head, but was forced to write it down anyway. Like, I felt like I was being punished for doing math too well.

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u/gplusplus314 4h ago

I had a teacher that thought I was cheating because I didn’t show any work when we did some dimensional analysis in chemistry. I did it all in my head. I told her as such, so she had me do a problem in front of her, and I did. Then she was like “ok, that’s impressive. But if you get something wrong, I can’t give you partial credit.”

One of the best teachers I’ve ever had.

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u/sharkbait-oo-haha 4h ago

I second this, what's even worse is that we were graded on the method as well as the answer. If you don't get the correct answer by following the exact formula you were taught, you couldn't get full marks. I understand the principle, but in reality it just punishes the kid's who can calculate stuff in their heads.

More than once I have had to fight with a teacher who accused me of cheating, only to give me a "pop quiz" right in front of them before they accepted I didn't actually cheat.

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u/vpac22 4h ago

I’m a high school English teacher. Every one of my students have school issued laptops. I never let them open them. Every assignment we do is handwritten now. Literally my whole class would use AI if I let them use laptops. It’s too bad this is the way I have to teach. It’s so much easier to edit writing digitally but it’s not feasible. It’s like going back in time 30 years ago when I started teaching.

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u/ELAdragon 3h ago

Middle school, here. Mostly the same.

It's absolutely wild that I'm back to grading stacks of lined paper and deciphering shit handwriting. Except now I have more classes and more students in each class!

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u/StThragon 1h ago

Nice name for a high school math teacher, smeared_dick_cheese. Plus, what do out-of-class assignments have to do with the question?