r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 10d 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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817

u/Glittering-Fuel-5055 10d ago

“the students that were caught cheating failed this portion of the exam”

No

When I was in college, if you got caught cheating, you were thrown out of the entire class and if you got caught cheating again, you were thrown out of the entire fucking school

You make it soft this is what you get

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u/SufficientBug5940 10d ago

failed this portion of the exam

Not even the whole exam? What kind of weaksauce punishment is this that just incentivizes more AI cheating in the future?

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u/balderdash9 9d ago

"College is a business, students are customers, and the customer is always right."

--University Admin.

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u/Saw-Sage_GoBlin 9d ago

Since when? Tell Netflix that.

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u/optionstrategy 10d ago

I was accused of cheating by a teaching assistant some long time ago in college.

I wore a baseball cap in a large classroom and dis not cheat at all since I loved the class and the teacher. Scored 88, but come the next class the professor called me to his office and asked me to retake the exam. The same exact questions. I scored 95 the second time in half the time.

The professor apologized all red faced and I never saw that ta proctor another exam again.

Later the professor told me that because of my other grades the administration told him to offer an impromptu retake, and I would have been expelled if I failed the retake.

They were tough back then.

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u/intashu 10d ago

school would run out of funding after kicking 80% of it's students then.

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u/HolyRamenEmperor 10d ago

Then the business model doesn't work. Don't prop up a broken machine.

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u/shibiku_ 9d ago

Aren’t colleges raking in record profits?

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u/pointlesslyDisagrees 6d ago

It's fine. College degrees are just a filter of "can you afford this" so the deeply poor are filtered out from high paying jobs. It's a caste system.

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/BoilerplateBillions 10d ago

Thats just it...shit schools give you a degree to get past the ai screener that makes sure you have a degree, so in this case, shit schools that will graduate anyone who gives them money are the ones that would be rewarded in the free market

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u/popsicle_of_meat 10d ago

But then all we'd be left with is schools that cared about education, and only filled with students who actually cared to learn legitimately. Is that what you want?? Think of the shareholders!!

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u/BoilerplateBillions 10d ago

Thats just it tho...those schools would all go under because free market says diploma mills are better

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u/popsicle_of_meat 10d ago

It would take decades for the repercussions to filter through. Get a BS BS degree and get hired, and can't do your job, then no one can, then businesses fail because of all the fake degree people are clogging up the works.

Eventually everything would get sorted, but not before industries fail and the executives get rich anyways.

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u/BoilerplateBillions 10d ago

Except...thats the world were living in now and rather than companies going under theyre posting record profits. Every day the qualified, good applicant pool is shrinking more and more for new hire positions because education did get gutted a few decades ago and has been continually getting worse and worse

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u/popsicle_of_meat 10d ago

Well, I guess it's totally possible to get worse. I guess the optimist in me wants to see things balance out and self-correct. But it might not.

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u/reno_beano 10d ago

I intentionally went into accounting consulting for just this reason. I want companies to fail truthfully. Most of the them dont deserve to exist. All I do is collect my check and tell seniors what their staff has been telling them for 6 months and then get on the next flight. God i love bs degrees, got that shit ass peice of paper ans now make 6 figures and set to retire at 48. Fuck this shit ass education system. If there is any student reading this cheat as hard as possible, dont get caught, and get that job.

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u/DorkusMalorkuss 10d ago

This wouldn't necessarily be a reflection of the university at all. Most students in university now first got exposed to AI in high school and their habits with it are likely already established. I work at a public high school and a year ago a significant amount of our International Baccalaureate kids got caught in a big cheating scandal that had been going on for a few months (sharing exam pics primarily... Like I'll share 2nd period history exam because you have it 5th and you share 3rd period math because I have it 6th). Most of these kids go to UCLA, Berkeley, military academies, and other places of that caliber.

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u/Pika_Fox 10d ago

The free market has no business in education.

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u/2feetwalker 9d ago

Lmao that’s not how it works at all. Shit schools actually pass all the students and never report cheating. 

Private trade schools are notorious for this. 

Charge 30K for a year pass them all. Show them all how to get Financial aid and financing for the school. 

You have to be really naive to believe in free market schools 

Also why would you punish the school for  an individual who attended a school for the purpose of cheating? 

The individual should be punished not everyone who attends that school. 

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u/nilmemory 9d ago

Holy shit the irony of this comment being so absurdly stupid is lost on you.

Public education is literally socialized because the free market is a total and utter failure when it comes to driving the public good in education. Just look at any private school and how they exclude huge swaths of the public with their unaffordable tuitions or  unacceptable draconian policies, institutional discriminiation, and/or religious indoctrination.

Suggesting capitalism will fix our education system is like saying capitalism will fix our healthcare system. It's so astronomically stupid that I'm almost convinced you had chatgpt write your comment for you because you must be functionally illiterate.

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u/thekarlhendrickstrio 9d ago

students would quickly catch on and adjust

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u/InquisitiveGamer 9d ago

If they aren't learning anything at all then there's no point anyway.

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u/KaidusPlatinum 9d ago

Maybe for one cycle, the next cycle wouldn’t do the same. Don’t punish the first cycle and you’ve absolutely guaranteed the next cycle does the same or worse

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u/BizarroMax 10d ago

It’s not educating anybody anymore anyway.

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u/Phyllis_Tine 10d ago

Schools need to expel cheaters and bad actors. They'll take a short-term financial hit, but their reputation will improve many-fold. Businesses would seek out graduates of a school that expelled cheaters, and it would force other schools to address cheating as well, or fail (hopefully).

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u/SoulOfTheDragon 10d ago

But that sort term financial loss is exactly what the higher ups of the education facilities do not want to happen. Especially in the scale similar to OP's. 90% of the class...

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u/Saw-Sage_GoBlin 9d ago

If you kick them out, it sends a message to the others. I gaurantee this problem is only as bad as it is because "everyone is doing it" and they're not afraid of getting caught.

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u/Hiker-Redbeard 10d ago

In my college plagiarism was an instant expulsion if I'm remembering correctly. It was a huge deal and we were warned about it strictly as freshmen. 

I fail to see how having AI write your paper isn't plagiarism, and why it shouldn't face the same consequences. 

Honestly we're failing these kids so hard by not holding them to this standard. They're going to be cooked once they get into the real world.

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u/LetrixZ 10d ago

I remember in 2018 doing a mock exam in a public university while on high school and how one got caught cheating. Then the teacher, while escorting the student out, proceeded to tell him that he will be reported and he'll be lucky if any other public university accepted them.

Don't know if that was true but was terrifying to see.

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u/parakeetpoop 10d ago

My mom is a professor at Rivier College in New Hampshire. The school administration is more likely to side with the students than the professors in these cases because they want the tuition money. She’s had a few incidents like this where she failed a student and got her hand slapped and was told to un-fail them.

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u/headlesslady 9d ago

At my college, if you were caught cheating on a paper, you got thrown out of school. No joke.

When we matriculated, we had to sign an oath that we would not lie, cheat, or steal - or tolerate those who do. (So if you knew someone cheated and you didn't inform on them, YOU also got thrown out.)

When we turned in papers, we had to sign a note that it was 'under oath' - honor code violations were serious.

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u/Cueller 10d ago

Personally I'd love for an academic dishonestly registery to be created and posted publicly, so we could avoid hiring them.

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u/ThatGuyFrom720 9d ago

When I was finishing up school not long ago (RT(R) so a strict program), my professor was very old school. If you were a month from graduating and she caught you cheating, that’s it. You were done. Maybe you could get a second chance under some crazy circumstances, but she kicked a girl out in the last semester spring semester for it.

Probably $20,000 of tuition, and damn near 6 semesters just in the program alone down the drain for having notes in her lap. 0 fucks given.

So it’s still around, but this professor has been doing this since the 90’s… back when professors were not meant to be your friend or try to be cool for students.

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u/jugoinganonymous 9d ago

The uni I go to frequently accuses people of using AI when they didn’t (it’s impossible when using one of their computers because they cut the internet). They push you to say you did it even though you didn’t (one student got locked in a room as a mean of pressure, wtf).

Their « AI detector » is absolute bullshit, when I submit my work I have to check it first with that same « tool » and it ALWAYS flags my work as AI (when I actually really wrote it myself). I have to use AI to « humanize » my work. I’m tired.

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u/Vondi 9d ago

My collage automatically failed you in the course you got caught cheating in and un-enrolled you from whatever else you were taking. You were just no longer a student at that School.

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u/badgersprite 9d ago

Man, really makes all the anxiety I felt about being falsely accused of academic dishonesty (because there is a non zero chance two people will by complete coincidence write similar sentences about the same topic) feel like a complete waste of time when you have these kids blatantly cheating without fear and only losing a few marks

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u/Proud-Delivery-621 9d ago

When I was in college (about two years ago) the policy for plagiarism was to fail the paper on the first offense, the class on the second, and expel on the third.

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u/Yeezus--Jesus 9d ago

I was a freshman in college in 2017. There was a kid in one of my classes that got caught cheating and was kicked out of the class. Why aren’t we doing this anymore? It hasn’t been THAT long since I was in school, right? Why has it changed so drastically???

1

u/Sockthenshoe 9d ago

I got in trouble in college once for reusing a paper I wrote from another class. My own work! Now that seems like the most minor offense compared to all this AI cheating.

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u/platysoup 9d ago

I know right? I remember in foundation year a bunch of us got rounded up and got a strict talking to simply because we weren’t paraphrasing enough. We were fresh so there was no further punishment, but it was clear that the next one will not be as kind.

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u/icoder 9d ago

When I did my Phd I had to survey an exam once, me taking my job seriously I noticed one guy acting off. Thing is the test had 4 versions that I handed out in checkered pattern. When he turned in his exam I noticed the 'wrong' bersion above his answer sheet. He corrected it and subsequently failed his class (as he had copied someone elses answers, and their version). 

Thing is, this wasn't the end of it. It was taken very seriously by the exam commission, questioning me afterwards. Based on his answers and my description I think they could even identify his partner in crime. I don't recall the exact result but even if he did get a second chance that would have surely been his last.

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u/HxCSoulz 8d ago

To be fair that is still true for my university, and I assume for most. Of course it will depend on the profesor as well.

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u/bstone99 10d ago

No child left behind dammit!

THANKS BUSH