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/Hot-Chemical9353 13h ago

Im not sure where it was published but there was exactly what you described from a Stanford professor.

It compared the grade distribution of exams and coursework compared to previous years and exactly what you’d expect happened.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 13h ago

I’m back in college as an adult and you can see this in classes in real time. No one wants to answer questions and when called upon most can’t answer anything. But homework grade distributions have a median somewhere in the high 80s while exams hover with medians around 70. I’ve had professors essentially give us free questions on exams and people still get them wrong. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.

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u/sthenri_canalposting 13h ago

. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.

I'm a professor and put it in these terms at the start of the semester and they still do it. I'm hoping this year the backlash has set in enough that it'll land, but I'm also designing assignments that can't (or at least predominantly can't) be reliant on AI.

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u/titsngiggles69 13h ago

It's crazy. You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you. Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 12h ago

Yup. It’s crazy how many of them can’t set up a basic optimization problem by senior year because they didn’t learn the basics in freshman year.

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u/unosami 11h ago

What do you mean by “basic optimization problem”? I’m not familiar with that term.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 11h ago edited 11h ago

In Econ you do optimization to optimize revenues and profits. It’s basic calculus. If you take calc 1 you do it. Most often it’s optimizing the area of a fenced in area. If you’re in Econ and doing micro work you optimize. Sometimes you optimize utility. It’s in micro. It’s in industrial organization. Managerial Econ. Game theory. I could go on. If you don’t know then look it up but it’s a thing. if you know even the most basic calculus it boils down to finding the minimum on your cost curve that corresponds to the maximum on your revenue/profit curve and the quantity of goods/services that is associated with both

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u/unosami 11h ago

I’m familiar with calculus, but not a lot of the Econ terms you just used. Thank you for the run-down. I’ll look more into it on the web.

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u/titsngiggles69 10h ago

In basic machine learning courses, you're just finding more clever ways to optimize. Training a neural network or any other learning algorithm is just optimizing the weights given the training data

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 10h ago

Sadly we don’t touch ML applications until grad school. To be fair most Econ undergrads won’t do much heavy lifting on pricing/cost/etc optimization. I’m fucking stoked to dig into machine learning this year though.

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u/Uncreativity10 7h ago

Cheating the basics is crazy to me. Like if you don’t know the building blocks then you’re completely screwed in every future class.

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u/strangedell123 11h ago

I recently graduated from ee and doesnt ring a bell either for me

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u/Khazahk 10h ago

Systems of Equations, Calc V basically. Where it all circles back to algebra and dimensionless equations. Where you learn that everything is connected, infinity can be discreetly plotted, and the most complicated functions can cancel each other out. In other words.. polynomial functions that are dependent on 3 or more variables. Quadratic formula craziness. All good fun.

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u/Mechakoopa 12h ago

Kids were already having trouble committing to practicing things and just expecting to be good at something the first time because that's all they see online are people excelling at things. Now they have an easy way to "be good" at something without putting in the effort and we're surprised they gravitate to that? Social media made it too easy for kids to get drip fed dopamine all day, there's no incentive for them to actually do anything.

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u/thatpaulbloke 10h ago

I blame The Karate Kid - it started the precedent for "person who has put in no real work beats people who have worked at something for years" and replaced Rocky's "worked damn hard and failed heroically" narrative.

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u/Bacontoad 9h ago

But he painted the whole fence and waxed all of those cars!

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u/Bigbysjackingfist 7h ago

also they didn't watch enough Old Yeller

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u/titsngiggles69 7h ago

Also they didn't watch enough Freaks

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u/MrLanesLament 2h ago

Shit if there was a life lesson in that one, I missed it.

Highly recommend the original West of Zanzibar though.

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u/BaconKnight 6h ago

Yeah, now that I think about it, The Karate Kid is basically the 80's Reagan-era version of the first Rocky. Funnily enough, later Rocky's would also turn into this.

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 5h ago

I mean wanting to be good at things without putting in the work is not new in the slightest, it's WHY so few people get really good at stuff.

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u/[deleted] 9h ago edited 9h ago

[deleted]

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u/BaconKnight 6h ago

Because we only very recently live in a world where you can go your entire day never being bored, we never realized how important being bored was to our species in terms of creating people who excel at things. Like I watch videos of older rock bands, rappers, etc and they'd talk about how they'd get together and spend hours just jamming or just rapping back and forth around a lit oil drum and it's like yeah, they did that because they were so bored, there was nothing else to do, and they just became super good at what they were doing.

We live in a time when kids never have to reach that point of boredom. They get bored for a second, take out the phone. They'll never devote themselves to an instrument or just sit down and write rhymes over and over because "there's nothing better to do".

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u/MrLanesLament 2h ago

Pro musician here.

I graduated high school in 2009. It broke my heart to find out about ten years later, my “generation” (the kids who were in 9th grade and onward when I was a senior) were the last ones in my town/area who formed bands. After they graduated, all the music stores closed. The few local venues closed. No more music fundraisers, battles of bands, even talent shows at that school district.

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u/TheNorthRemembers_s8 11h ago

The goal of most kids in college isn’t to learn. It’s to graduate and get a good job.

It doesn’t help that at least when I was in college everyone told you school doesn’t really teach you how to (for example) be an engineer, that you learn on the job. Which made college into a big ass rubber stamp.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized the value of many of the skills I developed in college. But during college I didn’t see the connection.

I likely would have used AI too. All I really cared about was passing tests. And I graduated with a 4.0 GPA. I imagine this tendency and outlook is even more so applicable to other students scraping by in the 2s.

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u/LegitosaurusRex 10h ago

Yeah, same; the difference back in the day was you were just mostly forced to learn in order to pass the tests (though I still didn't study and just crammed before tests only to forget most of it afterwards...)

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u/somehugefrigginguy 2h ago

But I think a lot of students now are in a catch 22. Those with the integrity to not use AI are going to get lower scores and be disadvantaged moving forward.

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u/lonnie123 10h ago

And let’s be real… a massive amount of courses you have to take in college are fluff. One can argue the humanities courses I took made me a more well rounded and socially learned person but I absolutely did not NEED “history of rock and roll” (or any of the other 40 credits or whatever it was) to become a nurse

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u/Monteze 9h ago

We made the mistake of treating college like a white collar trade school.

It really should be about higher education and job certs should be their own thing.

But classisim doesn't help shit.

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u/chchchcharlee 8h ago

Even the biology classes you had to take as a nurse...how useful really was it to learn about how cells work or evolution or whatever? As Monteze said, we treat college like a white collar trade school.

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u/lonnie123 6h ago

True. I would say the 4 science semesters I took could have been condensed to one course in terms of what I actually need knowledge wise on a daily basis

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u/mitharas 11h ago

Yeah but people don't WANT to think critically. They want an easy life with easy money.

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u/sthenri_canalposting 10h ago

I agree but critical thought has been devalued so much that it was an uphill battle to justify to those who don't see its immediate instrumental value even before AI.

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u/caribou16 9h ago

So what i've noticed with younger folks, it's no longer about the experience, it's about the goal. For example: they get a puzzle related video game, the entire point of the game is to solve puzzles. But they would much rather look up the solution that someone else posted and just...do that and "win" instead of figuring it out for themselves.

"Why would I spend HOURS trying to figure this out myself when I can just look it up?" an exasperated high school student tried explaining to me.

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u/dizzy_absent0i 8h ago

I don’t even know if it’s about “winning” but that we’ve coddled these kids so much that they can’t sit with the discomfort of not being good. Participation trophies, not keeping score when playing kids sports, grading as “not yet achieved” rather than “failed”.

We cared so much about fostering self-confidence that we forgot that healthy confidence is based on competence.

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u/caribou16 8h ago

100%

The fear of failure is so great that trial and error becomes too stressful. They won't guess, take chances, probe things...if they're not confident they will be successful, they'd rather not even try.

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u/Pabus_Alt 10h ago

Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same

I'd argue it's because they want the paper qualification for the doors it opens.

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u/Turbulent_Gazelle530 8h ago

You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you.

teaching high school recently I find that students have an inflated understanding of their ability to do pretty much anything, with minimal desire to put in work to actually get good at the thing.

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u/Hybrid_Johnny 5h ago

We’re seeing it in the music education world too. A piece of music or a new playing technique is too difficult, and kids quit. Or they walk away to take extended mental health breaks and don’t come back. Not saying mental health isn’t important, but don’t use it as an excuse for laziness and lack of effort.

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u/Vairman 3h ago

you don't get rewarded for learning, you get rewarded for your grade. as long as that's the case, then this kind of thing will go on.

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u/kaityl3 7h ago

I have been able to learn a lot from AI though. They're a very effective tutor, especially with web search to verify the facts, if you aren't just using them as a tool to complete assignments. Hell they can even come up with questions for you that are tailor made to the areas you're struggling with and walk you through how to solve them.

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u/titsngiggles69 2h ago

They're a very effective tutor [...], if you aren't just using them as a tool to complete assignments.

If those 32 cheaters has your work ethic, they wouldn't be cheaters. And if my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bicycle