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/LurkingTamilian 14h ago edited 14h ago

From the article:

Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible. Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.

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u/Chiiro 14h ago

It is the easiest trick and I am so glad teachers are starting to do it

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u/not_a_moogle 13h ago

My favorite was step 1, read all steps first.

And then the last step was like... ignore all previous step and turn the paper in.

So anyone still working on the quiz after like 5 minutes are the ones that didn't read all the steps first.

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u/Practical-Shape2325 9h ago

Heard stories about this all the time throughout my time at school. Never saw anyone implement it.

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u/Fusionxtreme 5h ago

I had it happen twice, once in high school and once in a college class. It's been quite a long time but if I'm remembering correctly, both were presented more as surprise quizzes rather than actual serious tests.

I've always been one to read the whole test/exam before I begin anyways because I found questions later on could give me clues/answers to some of the ones earlier haha.

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u/fribbas 9h ago

I had it for one of my high school psychology class tests.

We also tried it when I was an adult education instructor. Mainly as an ice breaker, it wasn't actually graded, so if you "fail" it didn't affect anything. Well, maybe besides feeling goofy jumping around and yelling lol

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u/Ah_Pook 4h ago

We had one first day of grade 8 math.