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

Inside the university AI cheating crisis

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#21

Post by falcor84 »

papreclip wrote: post #15
a_bonobo wrote: post #4

TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right). Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly…

The one student who got caught for plagiarism when I was a TA was busted by turnitin. Maybe the tool isn't perfect but it caught this student who had painstakingly replaced every single word in a copied paper with a synonym. I'm talking "perhaps the utility is not flawless, but the use of this utility allowed for the apprehension of a pupil who..." etc. I was surprised at the level of effort

More likely that they used something like quillbot or grammarly for automatic paraphrasing.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#23

Post by papreclip »

falcor84 wrote: post #21
papreclip wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one student who got caught for plagiarism when I was a TA was busted by turnitin. Maybe the tool isn't perfect but it caught this student who had painstakingly replaced every single word in a copied paper with a synonym. I'm talking "perhaps the utility is not flawless, but the use of this utility allowed for the apprehension of a pupil who..." etc. I was surprised at the level of effort

More likely that they used something like quillbot or grammarly for automatic paraphrasing.

This was about 15 years ago

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#24

Post by gixco »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #2

How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?

I graduated before LLMs but after WolframAlpha and I essentially cheated my way through calculus I and II. Lenient grade weighting made 90s on the homework and 60s on the exams enough to slide through with a C. Funnily enough, now that it's over a decade later and I know more about myself and my neurodivergent patterns, I feel much more able and interested in actually learning calculus. I'm looking forward to seeing the pedagogical changes that result from LLMs enabling this sort of trickery for all subjects.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#25

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #18
kelsey98765431 wrote: post #13

> “What if I’m doing an MA, or in a job, and everyone got there just by cheating…” This is absolutely the problem here. The work is done, the answers are right, the report is the best anyone has seen, but oh no a fancy new tool was involved so its CHEATING! This is so friggin stupid. When i get my work done I am responsible that it comes out right. When its right, thats just it. - it's right. No matter how i got ther…

Why do we teach kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand? After all, calculators are basically ubiquitous at this point. Why waste the time teaching a skill that's not necessary as an adult? The reason is because doing arithmetic by hand teaches kids how math actually works, while using a calculator just teaches them how to find the answer. This base-level understanding is crucial for understanding more advanced math.…

This seems like it's replying to a misunderstanding of their comment.

> A doctor "great at using ChatGPT" won't know how to check the results carefully if they've relied on ChatGPT for their entire education.

They didn't rely on ChatGPT for their education; they relied on ChatGPT for finishing homework. If they go over the generated essay and make sure it doesn't have any inaccuracies and they consistently do so correctly, what's the problem?

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#26

Post by krunck »

My wife is an English prof at a local University. She is tired of being put in the position of being an AI cop. She is tired of 10% students whose work was flagged wasting 50% of her office hours trying to convince her that their work is real.

For her literature classes - where the class grade is composed of a participation grade and a written work grade - she is strongly considering getting rid of all written homework. Instead all writing work will be hand written in class.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#27

Post by mmooss »

ars wrote: post #11
carabiner wrote: post #9

I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.

It depends on your goal: Do you just need that piece of paper with your name on it? Or are you going to school to really learn material?

What we do depends on much more than our goals. There's also stress, time pressure and workload, emotional problems, money issues, competitive pressure, fears (of failure, of disappointing important people, etc.), exhaustion, etc.

People don't do bad things because that's their goal but because of these issues. If you give humans an easy way to do bad things, many people under pressure will do it.

Post reply on HN