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Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

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Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#71

Post by quuxplusone »

mvkel wrote: post #38

I'm not disputing that students cheat using AI, and that professors catch them and enact consequences. But this video is a little suspicious. The fact that none of the 32 students bothered to even read the generated output feels strange. Or that those students didn't notice the extremely obvious white text at the bottom of the question when copy/pasting the assignment. Combined with a TikTok account of a person who i…

> Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

Yep, from the context, 100% this is fake. Also, while this Jason Gibson claims to be a history professor at Alcorn State University, it seems to me that Alcorn State doesn't have a history department, and no "Jason Gibson" appears anywhere in the faculty list of Alcorn's College of Arts and Sciences. https://www.alcorn.edu/academics/schools-and-departments/col...

Maybe I'm sheltered, but I've never seen a university professor without a departmental web page and a list of publications. Or a RateMyProfessors.com listing.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#72

Post by dd8601fn »

switchbak wrote: post #56
NDlurker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't imagine cheating like that and then not even checking/editing the output.

I’ve just had the displeasure of interviewing a batch of candidates over zoom. ALL of them were cheating with AI in realtime. If you have so little scruples, I can imagine you wouldn’t think twice about doing that with an assignment.

I absolutely would not, and I’m concerned that my conviction on that is going to make me unemployable in the near future.

I’m simply not built for the “puzzle based memory trial in front of a live firing squad”. It will not measure my ability.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#73

Post by welshwelsh »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #3
kylenessen wrote: post #2

The trap was hidden text instructing the AI to use the word “Madagascar” in a nonsensical way. The assignment was about the Industrial Revolution. “Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game” is an example of what a student turned in. The instructor says it was the midterm, but looks like it was more of an online discussion. Anyway, I knew cheating was bad, but this is just flagrant.

It always amazes me that people don’t even check the output of the AI. I am at the moment going through a codebase where the dev told me that he had AI write the tests and that the project is finished. Turns out that some tests are totally nonsensical and a lot of the real world edge conditions aren’t tested at all. I am all for AI but you can’t just blindly let it do its thing and think you are fine.

Test cases being nonsensical and not testing any real world cases was extremely common even before AI, in my experience.

When teams rely on metrics like code and branch coverage, developers will write tests that only serve to satisfy those metrics. I've seen tests that end with "assert true == true"; they don't test anything and only exist to "cover" a branch.

The situation has improved vastly because of AI. AI agents frequently write good tests that have a real chance of actually catching bugs and improving the reliability of the application.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#74

Post by LtWorf »

deliciousonion wrote: post #36

This particular implementation of the test seems flawed. The “invisible text” which would be read by a screen reader or visible if the problem statement were copied to some persistent scratch space while drafting a response would specify the inclusion of the word whether or not the author is an LLM.

Yes because people are identical to llms and cannot see through that.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#75

Post by epolanski »

rootusrootus wrote: post #65
epolanski wrote: post #43

Oral exams seem the only way to prevent wastes of time. Anything else can easily be cheated in many ways.

Text exams like the old days should also be pretty easy to prevent cheating on. But I have had similar thoughts on oral exams -- I think elite universities may start doing it in order to preserve/improve the perception of their degrees.

Text exams have been cheated since centuries in countless ways before computers were a thing.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#76

Post by bogzz »

mvkel wrote: post #38

I'm not disputing that students cheat using AI, and that professors catch them and enact consequences. But this video is a little suspicious. The fact that none of the 32 students bothered to even read the generated output feels strange. Or that those students didn't notice the extremely obvious white text at the bottom of the question when copy/pasting the assignment. Combined with a TikTok account of a person who i…

For what it's worth, this is anecdotal as well, but a close friend of mine teaches math at a community college in NM and he routinely catches most of his students cheating on online multiple choice tests like this. He adds a sentence in white and tiny, tiny, text to the questions that either flip their meaning entirely or simply make one of the wrong answers seem correct. When I was visiting him at the end of last semester he was quite depressed when ALL of the students in one of his classes were caught cheating like this.

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#77

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

The thing is, one could probably create a specially-prompted "agentic homework cheating" harness that catches all of these professors' trick attempts 100% of the time while also making the response look more human.

The only solution imho is 100% course weighting on in-person proctored exams

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#78

Post by zugi »

Students have cheated for as long as there have been tests - AI is just the latest tool. The only thing that matters in deterring cheating is the consequences. As a society we've become more tolerant of cheating, so we get more of it.

As anectdoal evidence, Westpoint has a famous honor code, with various cheating scandals over the years:

* 1951, 90 cheating students expelled

* 1976, 153 cheating students expelled

* 2020, 8 cheating students expelled, 50+ cheating students forced to repeat a year.

References: * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/16/west...

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#79

Post by Ekaros »

cmiles8 wrote: post #4

I fear for this generation of folks that are losing the ability to think. They have a very sad existence ahead.

It will most likely cause issues. On other hand it really might be existence that quite a lot people prefer. Not having to put any effort into anything at all...

Re: Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

#80

Post by hatthew »

alcidesfonseca wrote: post #44
hatthew wrote: post #25

Every few weeks I see a headline about a teacher catching 80%+ of their students cheating with AI. I wonder how much newsworthiness selection bias is taking place here? Out of all teachers that do this type of experiment, do 90% of them them find that most students cheat, or do we just hear about the 1% that have the biggest numbers?

Professor here. Every single one of us that looks for it, finds plenty of examples of students “cheating”. Learning takes effort, and humans (some more than others) are designed to minimize effort. We have designed education around exams and evaluation. If I design an exercise that does not contribute to their final grade, students don’t even look at it. If I design a 30min tutorial on a programming subject, students…

I think my primary curiosity is: does "rampant AI cheating" mean "most students in most classes" or "a few students in a lot of classes"? The latter is my expectation based on my perception of pre-AI cheating, so I'm wondering if AI has made it 1.5x worse or 10x worse?
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