Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#101

Post by abathur » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #67

abathur wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast. There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.

If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say, May it will stand to you. That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.

Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argument?

I would prefer not to be confrontational here, but I am having a hard time imagining that you've deeply considered the pedagogy of how to teach and evaluate students on squishy skills like this.

Knowing a bunch of facts about something is a world apart from structuring a compelling in-depth argument about it.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#102

Post by kayo_20211030 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

reshlo wrote: post #96

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you design a system to assess knowledge, avoiding the distortions of AI on weekly submissions, according to the general case or the exceptional case? Accommodations are part of the fabric already. It doesn't seem inconceivable that we couldn't deal with them in exceptional circumstances in a similar way to how it's done today.

How it’s done today is that they rely on your other marks from earlier in the semester to inform how your exam grade should be adjusted. That doesn’t work if there are no other marks to use.

Yes. There will be no other marks available for adjusting a final grade. One test, one mark. One knows the stuff, or one doesn't.

Accommodations are real and necessary, but applied at the end.

(Experimental sciences are an exception)

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#103

Post by DrewADesign » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

I got diagnosed with cancer just before finals in the first semester of my senior year. Sure, it kill my chances at graduating Summa Cum Laude, and I didn’t make the Dean’s list that semester even though I worked my ass off, as usual. Frustrating, but that’s life. I should not, however, have failed that semester, which I would have if only the final week’s assignments were counted. People have bad weeks. In most white collar jobs I’d have probably been able to take some time for myself, maybe given someone else my most urgent tasks, and likely been given plenty of leeway. Even doctors, lawyers, etc. People deserve to have bad weeks without losing months of work.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#104

Post by delichon » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

I was exploring ai porn, for science, and noticed another perverse incentive. I tried to prompt for a naked man and woman standing next to a pool, but could not get it to generate that image. Instead it insisted that the two characters must be having enthusiastic penetrative sex. A dozen prompts could not escape that strange attractor of porn.

It turns out to be built into the training data. The diffusion model just doesn't have many references of naked people not embedded in porn tropes, so it autocompletes porn.

Online moderation of generated images have the same weird incentive. Since real people seldom film themselves having sex, a naked person not having sex is a red flag for a possible real person, and gets moderated more strongly.

So in the new world, well written sentences are a handicap and nudity is generally accompanied by an exchange of fluids.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#105

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

lich_king wrote: post #83

Zigurd wrote: post #66

The core of the problem the article is about isn't AI or LLMs, it's about scam software that claims to catch cheating. It's crap for the same reasons that crime predictions software is crap. It's selling a panacea, and that kind of product inherently attracts scammers. If your school uses software to detect AI writing, that's a problem with the quality of your school. The people choosing that software are too stupid…

I'm always startled about how HN approaches these topics. When we have a press release from a university about how researchers can detect thoughts via fMRI, we have no issue with the claim. But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading. The problem isn't that AI detection doesn't work. State of the art…

>> But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading.

That's what fortunetellers do. The problem isn't guessing correctly about AI content in writing. The problem is false positives. That's what puts it in the same category is predictive policing scam software. And fortunetelling.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#106

Post by tl2do » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

Training students to write a single theme in multiple styles—including intentionally "bad" writing—is "originally" a great educational method. It teaches real composition by helping students understand what works and what doesn't. It builds good criteria in students.

But, the article's focus on writing "worse" for AI detectors misses what is important. Trying to distinguish humans from machines does not develop student capability. In fact, it's a fleeting technique because AI writing styles will vary and improve over time.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#107

Post by ipcress_file » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

with wrote: post #90

nobody's asking who profits from false positives. these AI detection vendors have a direct financial incentive to flag aggressively. more flags = "more value" = more school contracts renewed. same playbook as selling antivirus to your grandma. sell fear, charge per seat, and make the false positive rate someone else's problem.

Do you have any evidence to back this up or is it speculative?

My institution subscribes to TurnItIn's AI detector. The documentation is quite clear that the system is tuned in a manner that produces a significant number of false negatives and minimizes false positives. They also state that they don't report anything under "20% AI-generated" content.

So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations.

That being said, I have no idea whether the marketing claims are true. The software is a black box.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#108

Post by abathur » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #100

ipcress_file wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the assignments and the exam cover the same material. That's not always the case.

That would be really poor course design :-)

There are many disciplines in which students work on effectively distinct projects.

For example, the life-changingly-well-designed newswriting course I took in college assigned every single student a different story to spend several weeks reporting out so that we wouldn't all be out harassing the same poor people for interviews.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#109

Post by armchairhacker » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Why not multiple exams? In fact, why not many exams?

Sure, it requires more resources, but it shouldn't require much more:

- We've had multiple exams before AI, and I don't see how AI makes it any harder. Obviously these are closed-book

- Schools should already be banning phones in class (and colleges have insane tuitions, they can afford more exams)

- The students who go out of their way to cheat - as long as they're a minority, let them. Why not? Either they'll fail later in life, or they didn't need to learn the material because they're pathological fakers (even if you won and forced them to learn the material, they'd probably still fake their way out of using it). Then, I doubt you need much proctoring to ensure that most students don't cheat, because most of the smart students are generally smart enough to know that actually learning the material is probably important (or if the material is probably not important, it doesn't matter if the students all cheat...)

Meanwhile, downsides of one exam:

- Disadvantages students who get overly stressed about unrecoverable exams, or have a particularly bad day on the exam

- Many students will blow off the (ungraded) assignments and put off actually learning until the end

- Less graded content (especially if the exam isn't overly long, which would disadvantage some students)

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#110

Post by ipcress_file » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #11

Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt. As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't).…

AI only uses big words to engage in elegant variation, not to compress information. If someone calls an article like this a "jeremiad" I know they're a human.

Interesting. I'll have to keep an eye out for this!