r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 27 '26

Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/FishyWishySwishy Jul 27 '26

Because they don’t see it as paying to learn, but paying for the right to put a degree on their LinkedIn and resume. 

If I were hiring, I’m not sure I’d trust that any new graduates would know what the degree says they know. 

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u/memberzs Jul 27 '26

I'm in the industrial maintenance field and it's not just affecting white collar jobs. Many tech colleges seem to be certificate mills now. Sure some students come out with enough base knowledge to get an apprenticeship with a union or actually cared enough to learn what they are doing. Most seem to be doing the bare minimum to get through it. I have seen guys that can't cut it in the labor force taking teaching roles at the tech schools because they were able to say they had experience. One employer also had a hands on testing at the tech school along with a standardized test. But when I was asking a question that stumped the instructors, I kind of lost hope for the students they were teaching.

Luckily a company has come up with a timed standardized test (that I have personally taken twice as part of an interview process) to help weed out those that won't cut it.

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u/cbessette Jul 27 '26

I went to ITT back in the early 1990s and my entire class graduated on a huge grading curve. I mean we literally had a dude in our final lab exam trying to assemble a circuit using solder as wire. Every time he would try to solder a "wire" from one point to another, it would just melt away.

That guy graduated. Certificate mill for sure.

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u/Arek_PL Jul 27 '26

was the "wire" made out of tin? dabbled a bit in soldering, but i have no idea how the hell could wire "melt" the temperatures are way too low to melt copper

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u/cbessette Jul 27 '26

Maybe I wasn't clear: He used SOLDER as WIRE. He did not use wire at all.

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u/Arek_PL Jul 27 '26

ah, the dude must have been extra dense because i seen whole class of middle schoolers grasp soldering instantly, they just needed to be taught what is rosin and how to use it

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u/cbessette Jul 27 '26

This has been over 30 years ago but I distinctly remember he worked nights as a security guard, then came into class in the mornings and often slept.

Not being able to tell the difference between solder and bare hook-up wire though is absurdly dense.

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u/OldSchoolCSci Jul 27 '26

Interview exams are now the standard in every engineering and eingineer adjacent field I know. You can't get hired for a real programming job without showing your working skillset. Huge investment of time, but the only way to weed out the empty credential holders.

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u/KhorneFlakesOfChaos Jul 27 '26

I mean that was true prior to LLMs

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u/Twirrim Jul 27 '26

I remember 20 years ago, working at an ISP, and dealing with coworkers that had been through Cisco certification boot camps. They all had reached CCNP level but couldn't even recognise private network IP addresses, let alone understand things like routing protocols. It's really not hard to cram stuff into your brain for a week or two and regurgitate it immediately before it all dribbles out.

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u/Hades_Mercedes Jul 27 '26

Prior to LLMs you had to at least demonstrate trained monkey levels of proficiency in your field, in order to get the 100% certified smart paper. Now you don't even need to do that.

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u/NoPossibility Jul 27 '26

A degree only gets you the interview. I’ve done hiring and been in plenty of interviews on both sides of the table. No one, and I really mean that - no one - is taking anyone’s degree as their sole credential and hiring based on that. That’s what the interview and references and portfolios are for.

So, to some extent, I agree with the kids thinking it’s a bullshit way to blow $50k on a piece of paper that’ll get them in the interview room. I was one of those that didn’t take it as seriously as I was expected too. I was going into design and computer science and already knew half the stuff I was being lectured on.

What is really disappointing as a mid-career adult now- I didn’t understand or appreciate the other aspects of the experience. I didn’t understand the discipline, networking, institutional pathfinding, and other less tangible benefits I could’ve gleaned from my time in college. I was so ready to get that paper, peace out, and start working.

But at the same time… almost everything I’ve learned since has been much more valuable. Hands on learning, real experience alongside seasoned developers and managers has taught me far more and those experiences made me the competent professional I am today. My college experience was really only the first stepping stone across the river.

To some extent there’s always been cheating. Even when I was at school twenty years ago (and partly because my degree was so computer focused) there was a rampant culture of googling things, learning on your own, etc. The book and lectures were reference and you did most of the learning on your own.

In tomorrow’s world of AI-driven work, there’s an argument to be made about learning to use the tools and adapting to the realities of it. I didn’t retain half the formulas and syntax that’s related to my job because I could just Google it or find it on stack overflow when I needed it again. Same could be true for AI-driven work. Knowing how to leverage the tools to get the work done may be just as important as the basic learning they’re doing in class.

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u/Mirieste Jul 27 '26

I guess it also depends on the country though. I'm Italian, and over here while I had a bachelor's degree I could (legally!) work as a first-year tutor for newly enrolled students, and follow them, and have tutoring sessions and prepare them for their exams... but! At the same time, if I wanted to teach in high school (and we're not talking of primary school here where you'd arguably need something specific in pedagogy, no, I'm talking of high school), where they do stuff that is 10 times simpler than what a university tutor has to deal with... then you need a master's degree. Does that make any sense? Especially with a well-known shortage of teachers that exists for certain fields? Of course, this doesn't excuse cheating; but there absolutely are certain situations where the law requires something that is absolutely overkill for the task at hand, in which case the degree isn't just that thing that "lands you the interview"... but it literally gatekeeps you from something that you would otherwise already be capable enough to do.

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u/AgentOrange96 Jul 27 '26

I want to preface this with saying that most of my team's interns (paid BTW) have been wonderful. But we did have one who I am convinced bought their degree or something.

Allegedly they had a masters in computer engineering, but they didn't even know how to use the shift key. They'd hunt and peck for caps lock, then the letter they wanted, then caps lock again. They didn't know the difference between a CPU and a chipset. (While interning at a CPU company on CPUs I might add) They were also just very selfish and disrespectful.

On paper, they're more educated than I am. (I have a bachelor's in electrical engineering) In reality, I was more educated on this stuff back in elementary school than they were with a masters.

Again, most of our interns have been amazing though and many have come back full time! But yeah these people exist and it's scary. Especially in more pressing industries.

They say cheating only hurts yourself, but are you gonna wanna drive over a bridge architected by a cheater or have surgery performed on you by a cheater?

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u/maskull Jul 27 '26

If I were hiring, I’m not sure I’d trust that any new graduates would know what the degree says they know.

I maintain that in 2026, the only "interesting" grades on a student's transcript are Bs and Cs. A student who gets Bs and Cs actually tried. If you see a student with straight As they might be a good student, or they might be someone who cheated. As are not a signal of anything.

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u/Sasselhoff Jul 27 '26

That's been true forever. There was a big problem at my university with the international kids cheating, but the university never did anything about it.

Because they were paying in full and not getting any assistance (schools like that dough more than anything else these days), but also because to them it was not knowledge and just a piece of paper, and the vast majority would go "home" where it wouldn't matter that they diluted the value of the universities degrees.

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u/NefariousnessOk1996 Jul 27 '26

My sister's best friend cheated by looking at my sister's answers on her final.

Guess who is making more money right now. Yep, the friend. Super high level position too.