Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 1001 posts

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#81

Post by tightbookkeeper »

gradus_ad wrote: post #12

Seems like the easy fix here is move all evaluation in-class. Are schools really that reliant on internet/computer based assignments? Actually, this could be a great opportunity to dial back unnecessary and wasteful edu-tech creep.

Yep. The solutions which actually benefit education are never expensive, but require higher quality teachers with less centralized control:

- placing less emphasis on numerical grades to disincentive cheating (hard to measure success) - open response written questions (harder to teach, harder to grade) - reading books (hard to determine if students actually did it) - proof based math (hard to teach)

Instead we keep imagining more absurd surveillance systems “what if we can track student eyes to make sure they actually read the paragraph”

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#82

Post by tightbookkeeper »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #54

The problem is that professors want a test with high sensitivity and students want a test with high specificity and only one of them is in charge of choosing and administering the test. It's a moral hazard.

No. Professors want students that don’t cheat so they never have to worry about it.

This is an ethics problem (people willing to cheat), this is a multi cultural problem (different expectations of what constitutes cheating) this is an incentive problem (credentialism makes cheating worth it).

Those are hard problems. So a little tech that might scare students and give the professor a feeling of control is a band aid.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#83

Post by dot5xdev »

gradus_ad wrote: post #12

Seems like the easy fix here is move all evaluation in-class. Are schools really that reliant on internet/computer based assignments? Actually, this could be a great opportunity to dial back unnecessary and wasteful edu-tech creep.

Moving everything in class seems like a good idea in theory. But in practice, kids need more time than 50 minutes of class time (assuming no lecture) to work on problems. Sometimes you will get stuck on 1 homework question for hours. If a student is actively working on something, yanking them away from their curiosity seems like the wrong thing to do.

On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It's a hard call: teach to the cheaters or teach to the good kids?

I've landed on making take-home assignments worth little and making exams worth most of their grade. I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams. Hopefully that removes the incentive to cheat. If you don't do homework, then you don't get practice, and you fail the two exams.

(Even with homework worth little, I still get copy-pasted ChatGPT answers on homework by some students... the ones that did poorly on the exams...)

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#84

Post by llm_trw »

Gud wrote: post #68
krick wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just USA, it's pretty much universal, as much as I've seen it. People like to pretend like it's some sort of noble profession, but I vividly remember having a conversation with recently graduated ex-classmates, where one of them was complaining that she failed to pass at every department she applied to, so she has no other choice than to apply for department of education (I guess? I don't know what is the na…

In some countries teaching is a highly respected profession. Switzerland and Finland comes to mind.

You can't eat respect.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#85

Post by kelseyfrog »

OutOfHere wrote: post #52

I am glad I am done with schooling. I would not want to be a student in this hellscape. For those going to college, I strongly advise picking a department where such scanning is not performed. For those in public school, sue.

I'm returning to complete a single class: the writing requirement. It's not that bad. You just run your paper through a 3rd party AI checker beforehand and then cross your fingers and hit submit. You're probably at lower risk than people who don't check. You don't have to outrun the bear, just your fellow students.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#86

Post by hawski »

mazamats wrote: post #64
prepend wrote: post #22

My kids’ school added a new weapons scanner as kids walk in the door. It’s powered by “AI.” They trust the AI quite a bit. However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner. I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting th…

I could see a student hollowing out the laptop and hiding a weapon inside to sneak it in if thats the case

That is beyond silly. Unless students go naked they can have a weapon in a pocket.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#87

Post by twoWhlsGud »

krick wrote: post #61
newZWhoDis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The education system in the US is broadly staffed by the dumbest people from every walk of life. If they could make it elsewhere, they would. I don’t expect this to be a popular take here, and most replies will be NAXALT fallacies, but in aggregate it’s the truth. Sorry, your retired CEO physics teacher who you loved was not a representative sample.

It's not just USA, it's pretty much universal, as much as I've seen it. People like to pretend like it's some sort of noble profession, but I vividly remember having a conversation with recently graduated ex-classmates, where one of them was complaining that she failed to pass at every department she applied to, so she has no other choice than to apply for department of education (I guess? I don't know what is the na…

I went to public schools in middle class neighborhoods in California from the late sixties to the early eighties. My teachers were largely excellent. I think that was due to cultural and economic factors - teaching was considered a profession for idealistic folks to go into at the time and the spread between rich and poor was less dramatic in the 50s and 60s (when my teachers were deciding their professions). So the culture made it attractive and economics made it possible. Another critical thing we seem to have lost.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#88

Post by testfoobar »

prepend wrote: post #22

My kids’ school added a new weapons scanner as kids walk in the door. It’s powered by “AI.” They trust the AI quite a bit. However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner. I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting th…

Sometimes suboptimal tools are used to deflect litigation.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#89

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Daz1 wrote: post #71
jmugan wrote: post #18

My daughter was accused of turning in an essay written by AI because the school software at her online school said so. Her mom watched her write the essay. I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI. Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.

>I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI. Anyone who's been around AI generated content for more than five minutes can tell you what's legitimate and what isn't. For example this: https://www.maersk.com/logistics-explained/transportation-an... is obviously an AI article.

It’s impossible to tell AI apart with 100% accuracy

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#90

Post by willvarfar »

prepend wrote: post #22

My kids’ school added a new weapons scanner as kids walk in the door. It’s powered by “AI.” They trust the AI quite a bit. However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner. I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting th…

Do you think it stupid to scan kids for weapons, or stupid to think that a metal detector will find weapons?
Post reply on HN