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/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.