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

kylenessen

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.

cmiles8

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

rabid_0wl

I think there is a vast difference between leveraging a tool and outsourcing your cognitive functions, which is what seemed to happen in this specific case. Are schools failing students? How do you instill a desire to learn? I hope someone smart is trying to solve this because the ramifications on society are bleak. One anecdotal case isn't proof but it follows general trends I've seen across campuses.

acmnrs

I wonder if any of the three other students did use AI, but removed the Madagascar signal? So many students not proofreading suggests that they just want to make it look like they did the work but don't care about the grade, which is surprising for a midterm. It's also a little ironic that he's showing all of this while wearing Ray-Ban Metas.

Cider9986

I would say any AI generated output, from a student who didnt notice Madagascar in their prompt, would have been extremely easy to detect based on basic llmisms anyway. But I suppose it's much easier to just search for "Madagascar". Also, the professor should see the history of the student writing in the document editor. I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it because I know how to remove llmisms and prompt effectively. Here's an article on llmisms from people on the front lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

hatthew

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?

deliciousonion

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.

arealaccount

When I was in college we had a professor that would assign a 20ish page paper due every other Saturday. One of the students was certain the reports were not reviewed and just given a vibes grade based on the student. So he handed in pages of literally “blaah blaaaah blaaah…” and got an A Somehow feels relevant to this article

mvkel

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 is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

epolanski

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

Cider9986

The text would have been visible once copied into the AI interface, right?

miki123211

If you do this sort of thing, for the love of God, test it with screen readers. And Reader mode. And probably a bunch of other things neither I nor you can think of, but that students will absolutely use, and then be falsely accused of cheating. As a screen reader user, I have seen plenty of real world examples of people trying to be clever with white-on-white. The Joke is on them, I got their ID numbers and the secret instructions they gave to their coworkers. I even got my IP banned because of this once (from Arxiv I believe), back in the day when they had a "please don't click this" link on their website as an anti-crawler measure, which was accidentally made visible to screen readers.

JumpCrisscross

> Gibson did say he wasn't using this as an opportunity to mock his students. He added that after he confronted them about the cheating, he gave them the opportunity to contest their grade. Only two did, though the fact that any of them tried to argue their case is pretty surprising. This it the root of the problem. Gibson is concerned about mocking his students? How about failing them on the course for academic dishonesty? If you treat cheating as an oopsie in school, that attitude continues into the real world.

jaggederest

This is going to sound about as dated as "VBScript virus catches 32/35 accounting students cheating with Excel" in a few years, I think.

rootusrootus

I don't see a problem. Fail them. This is college, a paid program, not something like K12 where we want kids to learn so they can be productive adults. If someone wants to pay to fail, that's on them. I get that the school doesn't love what it could do to their graduation stats, but c'mon, it won't take long for the following cohorts to learn that the school will just fail them right out of the program for cheating, and they'll stop.

paxys

“These students have no critical thinking skills!” - large group of adults on HN believing random ragebait on TikTok while applying zero critical thinking.

baud9600

One workable approach is for AI to conduct a viva voce exam with each student: after the student answers a question on a topic, the session prompts with another question which digs deeper. This goes on for say 8-12 questions, getting deeper each time. I checked this idea by asking ChatGPT to examine my understand of 1970’s CPU history, assuming I was a CompSci student. After it asked me a series of 8 questions on Intel’s devices from the 4004 onwards, ChatGPT assessed me as a 2nd year student and graded me with a Credit. The experience was quite convincing and at the end it summarised the gaps in my knowledge, which I agreed with. It was also able to say what criteria it was using to assess me. So why can’t AI-viva voce be a method to help students and professors with teaching and learning? Try it out, in a subject or language you know well. Adapt this prompt: Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 8 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction? Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?

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

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...

asdewqqwer

Cheating is only fully unethical under two radical assumption: 1. School is perfect. 2. With a diplomat from a perfect school, the society's employment process is perfect. I don't think either the definition of perfect nor the way of achieving such perfection can ever be agreed upon. There has been extensive criticism on meritocracy in recent years, such as The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel.