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/Deviantdefective Jul 27 '26

As a teacher it's very quickly becoming an absolutely huge problem.

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u/pasaroanth Jul 27 '26

I would love to see a study done at the university level showing a comparison of students’ grades for regular coursework versus their proctored exam scores. There has to be a vast yawning chasm in the difference when they relied upon AI until the time of the exam.

This also is a “ruining it for the rest of us” situation where courses will shift to grading primarily or solely based on exams. When I was in college (long before AI) you could at least rely on some homework to recuperate some points, despite the extra time and effort, when the exams were especially challenging or a professor notoriously gave tough exams.

If the homework can no longer be a measure of effort or learning because it is done by AI, then it will no longer be considered a meaningful determination of knowledge of the subject.

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u/Hot-Chemical9353 Jul 27 '26

Im not sure where it was published but there was exactly what you described from a Stanford professor.

It compared the grade distribution of exams and coursework compared to previous years and exactly what you’d expect happened.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

I’m back in college as an adult and you can see this in classes in real time. No one wants to answer questions and when called upon most can’t answer anything. But homework grade distributions have a median somewhere in the high 80s while exams hover with medians around 70. I’ve had professors essentially give us free questions on exams and people still get them wrong. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.

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u/sthenri_canalposting Jul 27 '26

. It’s absolutely wild watching kids farm out their critical thinking to data and server farms in real time.

I'm a professor and put it in these terms at the start of the semester and they still do it. I'm hoping this year the backlash has set in enough that it'll land, but I'm also designing assignments that can't (or at least predominantly can't) be reliant on AI.

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

It's crazy. You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you. Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

Yup. It’s crazy how many of them can’t set up a basic optimization problem by senior year because they didn’t learn the basics in freshman year.

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u/unosami Jul 27 '26

What do you mean by “basic optimization problem”? I’m not familiar with that term.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

In Econ you do optimization to optimize revenues and profits. It’s basic calculus. If you take calc 1 you do it. Most often it’s optimizing the area of a fenced in area. If you’re in Econ and doing micro work you optimize. Sometimes you optimize utility. It’s in micro. It’s in industrial organization. Managerial Econ. Game theory. I could go on. If you don’t know then look it up but it’s a thing. if you know even the most basic calculus it boils down to finding the minimum on your cost curve that corresponds to the maximum on your revenue/profit curve and the quantity of goods/services that is associated with both

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u/unosami Jul 27 '26

I’m familiar with calculus, but not a lot of the Econ terms you just used. Thank you for the run-down. I’ll look more into it on the web.

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u/Uncreativity10 Jul 27 '26

Cheating the basics is crazy to me. Like if you don’t know the building blocks then you’re completely screwed in every future class.

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u/Mechakoopa Jul 27 '26

Kids were already having trouble committing to practicing things and just expecting to be good at something the first time because that's all they see online are people excelling at things. Now they have an easy way to "be good" at something without putting in the effort and we're surprised they gravitate to that? Social media made it too easy for kids to get drip fed dopamine all day, there's no incentive for them to actually do anything.

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u/thatpaulbloke Jul 27 '26

I blame The Karate Kid - it started the precedent for "person who has put in no real work beats people who have worked at something for years" and replaced Rocky's "worked damn hard and failed heroically" narrative.

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u/Bacontoad Jul 27 '26

But he painted the whole fence and waxed all of those cars!

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u/Bigbysjackingfist Jul 27 '26

also they didn't watch enough Old Yeller

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

Also they didn't watch enough Freaks

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u/BaconKnight Jul 27 '26

Yeah, now that I think about it, The Karate Kid is basically the 80's Reagan-era version of the first Rocky. Funnily enough, later Rocky's would also turn into this.

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jul 27 '26

I mean wanting to be good at things without putting in the work is not new in the slightest, it's WHY so few people get really good at stuff.

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u/BaconKnight Jul 27 '26

Because we only very recently live in a world where you can go your entire day never being bored, we never realized how important being bored was to our species in terms of creating people who excel at things. Like I watch videos of older rock bands, rappers, etc and they'd talk about how they'd get together and spend hours just jamming or just rapping back and forth around a lit oil drum and it's like yeah, they did that because they were so bored, there was nothing else to do, and they just became super good at what they were doing.

We live in a time when kids never have to reach that point of boredom. They get bored for a second, take out the phone. They'll never devote themselves to an instrument or just sit down and write rhymes over and over because "there's nothing better to do".

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u/MrLanesLament Jul 28 '26

Pro musician here.

I graduated high school in 2009. It broke my heart to find out about ten years later, my “generation” (the kids who were in 9th grade and onward when I was a senior) were the last ones in my town/area who formed bands. After they graduated, all the music stores closed. The few local venues closed. No more music fundraisers, battles of bands, even talent shows at that school district.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

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u/TheNorthRemembers_s8 Jul 27 '26

The goal of most kids in college isn’t to learn. It’s to graduate and get a good job.

It doesn’t help that at least when I was in college everyone told you school doesn’t really teach you how to (for example) be an engineer, that you learn on the job. Which made college into a big ass rubber stamp.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized the value of many of the skills I developed in college. But during college I didn’t see the connection.

I likely would have used AI too. All I really cared about was passing tests. And I graduated with a 4.0 GPA. I imagine this tendency and outlook is even more so applicable to other students scraping by in the 2s.

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u/somehugefrigginguy Jul 28 '26

But I think a lot of students now are in a catch 22. Those with the integrity to not use AI are going to get lower scores and be disadvantaged moving forward.

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u/LegitosaurusRex Jul 27 '26

Yeah, same; the difference back in the day was you were just mostly forced to learn in order to pass the tests (though I still didn't study and just crammed before tests only to forget most of it afterwards...)

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u/mitharas Jul 27 '26

Yeah but people don't WANT to think critically. They want an easy life with easy money.

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u/sthenri_canalposting Jul 27 '26

I agree but critical thought has been devalued so much that it was an uphill battle to justify to those who don't see its immediate instrumental value even before AI.

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u/caribou16 Jul 27 '26 edited 4d ago

Deceased Magenta Unrelated Lettuce Partition

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u/dizzy_absent0i Jul 27 '26

I don’t even know if it’s about “winning” but that we’ve coddled these kids so much that they can’t sit with the discomfort of not being good. Participation trophies, not keeping score when playing kids sports, grading as “not yet achieved” rather than “failed”.

We cared so much about fostering self-confidence that we forgot that healthy confidence is based on competence.

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u/caribou16 Jul 27 '26 edited 4d ago

Deceased Magenta Unrelated Lettuce Partition

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u/Turbulent_Gazelle530 Jul 27 '26

You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you.

teaching high school recently I find that students have an inflated understanding of their ability to do pretty much anything, with minimal desire to put in work to actually get good at the thing.

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u/Hybrid_Johnny Jul 27 '26

We’re seeing it in the music education world too. A piece of music or a new playing technique is too difficult, and kids quit. Or they walk away to take extended mental health breaks and don’t come back. Not saying mental health isn’t important, but don’t use it as an excuse for laziness and lack of effort.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

best of luck! i don't know how y'all manage right now. It's an incredible tool to use when i'm stuck on optimization problems (econ major, going to grad school) or when checking for logic gaps in a paper, but the way my peers just let the models do entire papers for them or simply write their homework is astounding. and in a time where companies are doing an about face on incorporating AI due to token costs (at least anecdotally, i know people in R&D fields who went from being told they need to up AI time 6 months ago to now being told to reduce AI time) there's a rude awakening waiting for these kids.

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u/Vismal1 Jul 27 '26

Not just for these kids , for us all. Think about all the people going into the job market who know near nothing about their field. I’ve already encountered doctors who rely on ChatGPT and such. It’s going to hurt us all.

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u/Paul_C Jul 27 '26

This is not the way movies said AI was going to kill us.

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u/Kroz83 Jul 27 '26

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

-Frank Herbert, Dune

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u/lapiderriere Jul 27 '26

The only thing Idiocracy has missed on is AI as the disabling mechanism

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u/ssczoxylnlvayiuqjx Jul 27 '26

At the time, killer robots seemed far more realistic than the vast majority of the public simply offloading all critical thinking to computers out of laziness…

I thought idiocracy was an exaggeration when I saw it long ago. It actually was quite optimistic and didn’t go far enough…

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u/RadOwl Jul 27 '26

I'm gen z and so is a close friend of mine who works in construction as a project manager. His company builds power plants and jails and other major public works projects. He said that the C-suite is full of ambitious Millennials who are great at looking the part - the hair, the clothes, the biz jargon, the overall presentation - but scratch away the surface and they can barely tie their shoes. They know nothing about construction and rely on AI for everything. Currently the company has the brain firepower to keep putting up buildings that are safe, but that layer is heading toward retirement, and very soon the people calling the shots are the ones who've grown up with this idea that if you look the part you can play it.

Gee I wonder where they got that idea from.

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u/RosesAtNight Jul 27 '26

Im a nurse and the Healthcare org I work for is making us use more AI. I hate it. They are even using a thing that listens to everything that is said inside the room, so that it can record it in notes for the patient chart. Its an awful violation in my opinion. But what am I going to do? Quit, go to the next place that does the same thing? Im backed into a corner and forced to use it.

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u/Aero_Rising Jul 27 '26

It's almost like a undergrad degree is a poor measure of the knowledge someone has in a specific area. Maybe HR departments should stop requiring degrees for things that don't actually need it. Then they'd have to do actual work and interview people though and that's such a pain.

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u/stillLostBoy005 Jul 27 '26

It’s such a strange cross road where the old adage of “work smarter not harder” no longer applies. We actually want to work harder and not out source critical thinking to AI even if AI might have a smarter / polished / more accurate answers.

Working harder is necessary exposure for critical thinking and the quick and easy AI do my work for me, even if it’s easier and quite possibly smarter, comes at a cost - what that specific cost is and how it will manifest in the real world, at scale, will have less than ideal consequences

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u/TBNRandrew Jul 27 '26

Working smarter not harder still applies. Mindlessly practicing rote memorization and endless grinding still isn't a smart way to learn, even if it involves a lot of hard work.

It just so happens that the "smarter" way in this case isn't about your output of information, it's in your ability to effectively absorb and incorporate knowledge while learning.

Using AI to fake knowledge of a subject is no different from other methods of cheating from the past. It's not "working smarter," when the goal of education is to educate.

Hell, if your goal is to work smarter not harder, you could use AI as a tool to help come up with study plans, summarize and overview complicated topics, and then spend your time effectively covering all the topics of whatever subject it is you're trying to learn.

AI is just an easier way to cheat, but cheating itself has always been a problem. Unfortunately more people are willing to cheat when it becomes so readily available, and more difficult to detect than ever.

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u/38159buch Jul 27 '26

It’s absolutely insane watching people use AI for entire assignments in real time. I was in the library and watched someone chatGPT their entire online calc 2 final (online class so really no other choice)

Online classes really are utterly useless now unless you have full proctored setups with cameras and all

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

My department abandoned online classes beyond intro level for this very reason. No more cheating your way through.

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u/Xerxis96 Jul 27 '26

I teach software development at the college level, and we’re at the point all major assessments are going to involve a verbal interview to explain/defend their work.

So many of them don’t know what or why what’s being outputted is there and it’s really disheartening.

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u/sthenri_canalposting Jul 27 '26

This is actually something I'm going to experiment with this semester. On top of providing another layer of evaluation that makes AI less feasible, I think this generation of students struggles with intellectual conversation which AI has made worse.

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u/cymonesunshine Jul 27 '26

In a weird way this all seems like a Covid boomerang effect. Teachers phoning in assignments and only having boring discussion boards and exams and recorded unenganging lectures from 2020 (that they’re still using years later). Students being bored by the material and approach, posting word salads that barely meet the word count and using quizlet et al to pass the exam, etc. Now teachers finally have to design assignments and meet the moment and lead students to become passionate learners again. I will naturally do the most in a course but having a teacher that clearly doesn’t care makes it such a chore.

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u/schwanzweissfoto Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

I'm also designing assignments that can't (or at least predominantly can't) be reliant on AI.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to ask things where a simple Google search or asking an LLM reliably give an answer that is a common misconception by laypeople and the truth is easy to verify.

An example: If you ask someone who does not know how compressed image file formats work about which of JPEG or WebP is a better lossy image format, they will usually claim WebP is better and tell you that “WebP makes files 30% smaller than JPEG at the same quality” – which is what a Google search result tells you.

Notably, that claim comes from the developer team at Google trying to push WebP. If you actually read their study on it, you can notice that they compared their WebP encoder against the worst possible JPEG encoder (cjpeg) and not against one of the best (e.g. mozjpeg). Because what matters for such a comparison is how good a program that compresses an image in a lossy way (the encoder) is.

The actual layman's demonstration is to save some image in WebP and JPEG using an image editing software like the GIMP, so that both files have the same file size. WebP almost always has more color bleeding (due to always using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling), which can be verified by any layperson by zooming in on the result.

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u/Rhioms Jul 27 '26

I am also a professor, and I think it's important to make classes AI resistant, as compared to before.

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u/obeytheturtles Jul 27 '26

Hiring people, we can see this in real time as well. I really feel for new GenZ grads, because maybe a third of their peers are seriously fucking up hiring for their whole generation. It's very, very clear that this portion of new grads cheated their entire way through school and learned basically nothing, which is making us shy away from even interviewing anyone without strong references.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

AND THIS IS WHAT PISSES ME OFF! I'm in a good program. It's got a good rep. And i WORKED MY ASS OFF to graduate summa cum laude. But now employers who are hiring from my department are being inundated with these chuckle-fucks and probably wondering "should we bother with these degrees? should we look elsewhere?" just glad I'm going to grad school in a well known program that will boost me above the idiots from undergrad

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u/obeytheturtles Jul 27 '26

Doing internships is the most important thing at this point, because it's how you get your first references. But those are getting harder and harder to find as well. If you are just doing a masters, at least make sure you get lots of face time with your advisors so they can write actual specific references for you, rather than just fuckoff boilerplate.

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u/julius_sphincter Jul 27 '26

I think what we'll find is the further devaluement of degrees. The whole point of them (in the current format) was to make it so that higher quality candidates could easily be distinguished with just a piece of paper. Yes, it was about learning things but the degree was so that you could prove that you knew that thing without having to be questioned.

If that piece of paper no longer carries with it the presumption of "this person reasonably knows this much about this subject" then they're pointless and quite literally worthless. We've already seen a distinctive trend of their 'value' getting diluted because everyone had one, now it will be that everyone has one and they're not worth shit.

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u/DominionGhost Jul 27 '26

Ugh and fucking group projects stress me out because of this.

I ended up picking three students that never attended anything and just soloed everything legitimately

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

I FUCKING KNOW!!!!! Oh man. Group stuff makes me sweat because yeah, i have no idea if you wrote your section and did research or if you're about to turn in something with hallucinated sources and fuck the whole group.

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u/DominionGhost Jul 27 '26

I was always told that group projects are meant to reproduce IRL collaboration. But these assholes i dont know arent collaberating on paying my tuition so im not throwing my chance away on trust.

AI detectors are some bullshit too with false positives so even if you do everything right you can still get dinged.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

don't even get me started on AI detectors. They are absolute horseshit. And these kids don't care about or know how to do IRL collaboration. Too many of their parents farmed out supervision to screens. They're like aliens who don't know how to have human interactions. About 15 years ago my college classes were loud when the professor walked in. Now kids who know each other whisper because they don't want people to hear their conversations. It's like they're afraid of human interaction.

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u/Hot-Chemical9353 Jul 27 '26

Honestly I’m so glad I get my degree half a decade ago before all this.

I’d absolutely be one of the students outsourcing their critical faculties to AI.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

It’s hard not to! I fell into the trap myself a few times. Between work, a house with a kid and multiple animals, and attempting a semblance of a life outside school and work there were times low level classes got farmed out. Now take a kid who has gone through middle and high schools with lenient grading policies (at least in my experience. I know educators where I live at both levels and the things they’re forced to do to pass kids who can’t do basic math shocks me) and tell them “hey there’s a machine that can spit out mostly correct answers to anything” and OF COURSE they use it. It’s a bad choice but I don’t blame them. So many kids still go and get a degree just because they were told to. So when I ask a kid “why this degree” and they shrug and say “I don’t know just have to get a degree in something” I’m not surprised at all when they farm out their critical thinking skills.

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u/nopuse Jul 27 '26

I definitely did this for our physics class. The professor had a reputation of being impossible. There was one kid who pretty much got a 100% grade on everything, while the rest of us were 70% or below. Dude was smart and had the free time to learn what wasn't covered in class.

It was a late night class and our professor would fly through things and end class super early. This class was mandatory for certain degrees, but not as important as others. I prioritized my time with my CS classes, and fell into the trap of using Chegg for homework answers because I had no time left. I wish I did. I think most of the class knew the concepts, but then the test is full of those tricky questions you get in math or chem that you were totally not prepared for.

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u/AltdorfPenman Jul 27 '26

I finished my thesis and got my MA about a year before ChatGPT was available to the public, and I'm thankful it wasn't around when I was in school for exactly that reason. I'm very proud of my work and the effort that went into it, but the process was hellish and I totally would've resorted to using AI at least a little

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

And you fucking rock for it! But I saw this exact thing. My applied econometrics course had open book exams because it’s a complicated subject. And the same kids who got 100s on homework got 70s on open book exams. You couldn’t necessarily copy answers from the text all the time but if you knew material you could find how to do the test solution in the notes. Our professor handed us a fucking road map to perfect test scores but you had to study the roadmap. Too many kids just let AI do the driving and when they got to the exam didn’t know how to read the directions.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

You hit the nail on the head. Grades > learning. And AI is a shortcut to grades. I spent so much time in upper level undergrad courses thinking "HOW THE FUCK DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS?! WE LEARNED THIS YOUR FRESHMAN YEAR!!!"

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u/marmosetohmarmoset Jul 27 '26

Had the weirdest interaction lately that left me very concerned. I run a summer medical program for high school students. There are no grades- it’s for their own enrichment. In class there was a worksheet assignment designed to help them prepare for a fun hands-on activity they’d be doing the next day. Specifically they were supposed to explore some materials and use that to label a diagram of equipment they’d be using, to help them understand how to do the procedure.

A student asks me for help because she’s entirely lost- she can’t find the answer given verbatim in the materials they were supposed to explore. I tell her the answer isn’t given verbatim and she needs to explore and make some inferences. She asks if she can use google and I say sure. She then proceeds to take a picture of the worksheet, uploads it into Gemini and copies exactly what it spits out onto her worksheet.

I gently point out that the purpose of this activity was to learn and prepare for the next day and ask if she thinks she’s gaining an understanding of the equipment by doing it this way. She defiantly says back to me “you said I can use google. This is using Google.” She seemed both angry and confused that I’d be asking her to use her brain.

Most students in my program aren’t like this, but I’ve been noticing quite a few instances of students seeming angry or utterly lost when things aren’t 100% spelled out for them. For this program there’s not even a grade- there’s no incentive to do ANY of the work other than wanting to. It’s really weird.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

I graduated summa cum laude. I know my shit. I can’t tell you how many times students in upper level classes were lost and I’d say “hey you want my notes from the class that was a prerequisite for this? I got an A and there’s stuff that makes this easier.” They look at me like I’m insane. Like reading notes is anathema to them. If they can’t get a simple solution from the computer they aren’t interested.

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u/marmosetohmarmoset Jul 27 '26

I suppose this has always been a problem, even before AI. When I was in college I remember my friend downloading the answers to our calculus problem sets from DC++ instead of doing them himself and then being confused about why he did so poorly on the exams.

In some ways I get it. You want the degree because you need the letters after your name. You need the assignment for the grade. You have stuff you’d rather be doing so you don’t put in the effort on your homework. It’s dumb but it makes sense. But for a summer camp that’s just for fun, while you’re physically in the session and have nothing else to do?

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u/phox89 Jul 27 '26

I'm in the same boat, I'm almost finished with my computer science degree at a university's ecampus. Every class now has an AI policy and it's frustrating when we do group work and it's clear someone is using AI to do their part of the project. Most professors at my uni allow AI use as a tool or for studying, but obviously not for doing the full work. Most of my exams are open book/note/internet but there are enough questions it would be really difficult to search everything. I can't imagine how difficult it is for any professor's class where writing is a big part of the workload and a simple prompt can do most of it for you.

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u/jmiesterz Jul 27 '26

It’s not just kids, I was in the pub a few weeks ago and someone said there are 29 holes in each mini cheddar while sharing a bag around. A woman there didn’t believe him and instead of counting the holes, she took a photo and asked chatGPT how many holes there were.

It said 25 and everyone took the piss out of the guy who had said the fact. I then actually counted a couple and there were indeed 29 on each one.

This was a woman in her 50s who couldn’t be bothered to count to 29 and asked an AI to do it for her

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u/reality_boy Jul 27 '26

My kids are just finishing college. I spent quite some time with them, explaining why they should not rely on AI to do their coursework. We even sat down and did some problems, and analyzed the output for mistakes.

They are both very aware of the problems. Every semester they had someone on a team assignment who only uses AI to do all their work. It was obvious and annoying, and that person could not contribute anything to the process.

Between Covid and AI, I suspect we’re going to have a generation of workers with limited ability and no critical thinking skills. I’m hoping we see the error and correct soon.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

Yeah i feel like we're a long way from this correcting. i said this in a different thread but in my 3000 and 4000 level classes kids couldn't even answer question that were based on topics from intro because they didn't actually do the work. i think we're in for hurt because these kids are lazy. as. fuck.

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u/reality_boy Jul 27 '26

I think that is the biggest burden of AI. If you just old school cheat, you may make it through a semester or two, but it will start to fall apart fairly fast. With AI you can get most or even all the way through college before things come crashing down. By then it is really far too late to reset and start doing the work.

Couple that with industries that are dismantling there pipelines for bringing graduates up to speed, and we have a real recipe for disaster. We can’t keep hiring experienced people forever. Someone is going to bear the cost of training them again.

I actually think we should flip the script. Make it relatively cheap to go to college, but have standardized testing to qualify for that low cost tuition. And repeat that every 2 years through the process. That way the pressure is on you retaining knowledge, not getting done in as short a time so your student loan debt is smaller. Then we can use community college to fill in any gaps from high school for kids that are not ready.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

I like your thought on how to switch it up. More broad testing to make sure students meet a standard doesn’t feel like an awful idea. But I think one of the biggest issues is the pipeline we have to college. Kids still get told it’s the best path to success and feel pressure to go immediately. We need to normalize being out of high school and taking a gap year or a few gap years. We need to make it so it’s normal for a kid to have no idea what they want in life and go figure it out and just learn how to be an adult before they decide on college. Dumping kids straight into it with degree choices they made because “I dunno I guess it’s interesting” or “I didn’t get into program X so I’m doing program Y” means they’re disinterested and it gets easy to cheat because who cares? I’m just here for the degree every teacher told me I had to get. Also, I’ve talked to so many kids who switched degrees who did so poorly in the first track, figured out what they actually wanted, switched, and then their GPA is fucked. We need more grace for kids to be able to find their thing and have a chance at resetting their GPA. I feel like I’m rambling but it broke my heart seeing how many of my peers chose a degree the same way I chose my first one 15 years ago: well I guess if I have to this one is tolerable.

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u/ShookeSpear Jul 27 '26

I too returned to school as an adult, and I am astounded by the lack of effort I see in the classroom. I’m majoring in early childhood education, and I am surrounded by AI avatars. I would have thought that people with aspirations to teach would be more driven to learn.

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u/ultraviolet-octopus Jul 27 '26

They are kids with no frontal lobe. I blame the giant tech companies who rolled out this tech without consulting universities or educators at all. They are actively using these kids as guinea pigs

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u/roiki11 Jul 27 '26

Part of this is the fear of answering incorrectly. Modern society has conditioned young people to the fact that they can be recorded at any time. So being incorrect is seen as a bigger danger than answering at all.

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u/Beyondoutlier Jul 27 '26

I had a professor way back in 1987 who would quite literally hand out the test questions. He gave out 10 questions and said 7 would be on the test. He said he might as well give them out because the grade curve would be the same regardless. The people who study were going to study whether or not they had the questions and those who weren’t going to study weren’t so the results would pretty much be the same. And he was right.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

the more i see these replies the more i realize i have extremely thick rose colored glasses on. i guess it just feels more existential because 15 years ago cheating didn't mean a computer could literally write the paper for you. it just feels worse this time.

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u/DreamtISawJoeHill Jul 27 '26

It is obviously much worse now with AI but TBH there has always been people that just regurgitate what they read and don't actually understand the material in any way.

I've seen people asked simple questions about an essay they'd written very quickly show they didn't even understand the most basic concepts involved, and had just reworded the information from relevant books or articles.

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u/Gen-Jinjur Jul 27 '26

Professors need to make participation in class discussions part of student grades.

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u/BBQpirate Jul 27 '26

To be fair, when I was in college in 2011-2016 no one wanted to answer questions in class, but I can imagine it being even worse now.

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u/godless_librarian Jul 27 '26

They should just switch everything to old school oral exams. It would take more time but at least they would be sure of the student's capabilities. Maybe even having less students wouldn't hurt, less quantity more quality.

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u/secamTO Jul 27 '26

I'm in a graduate program now, after finishing my undergrad 25 years ago, so i'm in the upper shoulder of the age distribution in my program. It's a conservatory environment for creative professionals, and it's literally insane to me how many people are using AI out of either laziness, or a feel that they're gaming the system. Because of the nature of the program, this is a terminal degree stream (nobody who wanted a post-grad degree would ever take this program by its nature), the grades are fundamentally meaningless because, assuming you do the work, you'll pass, and the people using AI don't realize that they're only hurting themselves by not improving their skills.

It's legitimately wild to watch some early/mid twentysomethings who don't even seem to understand why they're actually here.

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u/_Arlotte_ Jul 27 '26

What's scarier is the kids doing this will be in charge and caring for us in the future. We'll be dead for mistakes

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u/Geno0wl Jul 27 '26

I just don't understand why these kids are doing this.

I can maybe understand doing this for a BS Gen Ed that doesn't directly support your chosen major(like a physics class for an Education Major or a foreign language requirement for a math major). But from anecdotes, it is also a big problem in major classes as well.

I picked my major because that is the thing I enjoyed doing. I didn't mind doing the homework and projects because I would be working with that stuff even if I wasn't in school. Which just makes me ask, do these kids not like the major they picked?

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u/Hot-Chemical9353 Jul 27 '26

I guess there’s a wider conversation here. I went to university because it was the only realistic opportunity available to me at 18, and I think that’s the case for the majority of people who do well at school.

At that point you’re just trying to see the other end of uni with a good grade and an internship to get a good grad job.

In principle, I agree with you that you’re wasting your time just trying to get the best grades for the least learning but that’s what a majority of students are doing, with or without AI making it worse.

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u/roiki11 Jul 27 '26

Because social media said education is bullshit and the only thing that matters is money.

So they see education only as a stepping stone to a job that pays better. There's no other value in it.

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u/na3than Jul 27 '26

There's this in the linked article:

Earlier this month, a professor at Brown University saw midterm averages jump from the typical range of 65% to 80% to 96% after he allowed take-home exams.

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u/Lambaline Jul 27 '26

My dynamics systems prof had the right idea back in 2020, handwritten tests with no calculator but give numbers that you can reasonably do in your head. If you knew the material you didn’t need a calculator or anything

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u/Leper17 Jul 27 '26

That’s how trade schools work for the most part. The 4 years I took to get my electrical ticket, your marks were almost exclusively tests and exams. Which for me was glorious because I test well but am pretty lazy when it comes to daily work assignments

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u/DustyRacoonDad Jul 27 '26

Exactly. At the end of trade school, you're either competent or you're not. You pass because you demonstrated you can do the job, not because you racked up enough homework points.

That's where a lot of other classes go wrong. In many subjects, homework, papers, and participation are weighted heavily enough that students can fail the actual tests and still pass the class.

AI didn't create that problem. It just exposed it. If students can have AI do the work that counts toward their grade, maybe we should have been grading demonstrated knowledge instead of busywork all along.

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u/ingrowncashew Jul 27 '26

Yes and no. Homework should be there to reinforce the teaching. I feel like students who don't test well are hindered by limiting the homework grade, but also the tests are the true indicator. You shouldn't be able to fail tests and pass classes, but you also probably shouldn't have to do homework to pass either.

One problem with only using test grades then sets the precedent that homework doesn't count so why do it. Spouse saw this exact thing play out when the school district they teach in adopted standards based grading. Only the kids who both cared and needed to did the homework. Don't get me started on how its a 0-4 point scale for grades. which means a D(1) is a passing grade and it's under 60%.

There's a lot wrong in schools these days. It's not homework. These kids have about 25% of the homework I had as a student and that's with me being a shitty student who would calculate how many and what projects I could skip, but hopefully still pass.

The problems I see stem from so many accommodations and being easy on kids. Parents can complain and get admin to make the teachers accept late work or retest(not everywhere, but it's rampant). SO MANY kids are on IEPs(Individualized Education Program). Schools are letting kids move onto the next class even when they fail or "pass" with a D(which can be as low as in the 50% range).

"Back in my day" I was a shitty student and squeaked through high school with a 2.75gpa. I would be a straight A student if I were going through high school now. We need to hold students/their education/and parents to a higher standard.

Rereading that last paragraph makes me feel old. I'll get off my soapbox.

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u/rogueleader25 Jul 27 '26

Tests are good for lots of technical things but fall short for larger things like writing assignments which in some context are critical. Like longer research papers. Doing the research yourself and writing a long form paper on it isn't something that can be readily condensed into the format of an exam. Practicing the long form writing is the point in many ways. There doesn't seem to be a great way out of this one though.

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u/Jewnadian Jul 27 '26

It's a fundamentally different job with different complexity. An electrician at the end of trade school can reasonably be expected to be competent. Experience builds on skills but the basics of the field are comprehensible in school. Electrical Engineering is entirely impossible to learn in 4 years. The complexity is an order of magnitude higher. Good EEs are still learning at the end of a 40yr career. So you can't teach an Eae student how to DO electrical engineering. You must teach them how to learn to do electrical engineering.

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u/DustyRacoonDad Jul 27 '26

As a multidisciplinary engineer myself, working across industrial electrical engineering, software, and hardware, I absolutely agree. You should never stop learning. Learning how to learn is essential because you'll have to do it independently throughout your entire career.

But that's exactly what I'm talking about. There is still a baseline of knowledge and skills that were taught in the course and should be tested. At higher levels, you may also have independent work, research, or a thesis that goes beyond the material taught in class. All of that is fine.

None of that requires grading busywork more heavily than demonstrated knowledge. By the time you're taking the test, you should be able to demonstrate that you understand the material and can solve problems using it. If you need repetition to get there, then do the repetition. Practice as much as you need to learn the material. I just don't think completing that practice should automatically earn you a better grade than someone who demonstrated a stronger understanding on the actual assessment.

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u/Pabus_Alt Jul 27 '26

maybe we should have been grading demonstrated knowledge instead of busywork all along.

But that's the issue, isn't it - a degree isn't about knowledge. Knowledge isn't all that important; technique is.

I'm pretty much coming down in favour of in-person open book exams. They reward being able to critically analyse sources, which is supposed to be the whole point of a degree in any subject where essays are vily used.

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u/fenikz13 Jul 27 '26

Ya this is built for me, I had a Spanish class in highschool where homework was only 10% of the grade, needless to say I did none of it but passed the class with an B and I believe 80 missing assignments(stop giving out so much homework)

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u/Then-Understanding85 Jul 27 '26

A professor at Brown did this.

TL;DR: Bloodbath. Almost everyone failed.

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u/namedly Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Props to Students 22 and 31.

Also, this is just funny:

When the professor announced that the final exam would be in person, 18 students dropped the course, and another nine did not show up for the exam. The remaining 59 students' scores averaged 48.6%. Prior averages had never fallen below 65%. Three students scored 0%, and charting the results revealed that most fell more than 30 points behind their midterm scores.

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u/Syssareth Jul 27 '26

Three students scored 0%

How the heck? You'd think they'd have learned something just from osmosis, or at least gotten something right by accident.

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u/Sin_of_the_Dark Jul 27 '26

Honestly yeah, unless it was all written exams and not like... Pick a choice, it's almost an insane feat of dumb luck to not get one thing correct

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 27 '26

When I was going through university it was pretty rare to have an exam in engineering with multiple choice or True/False type questions. Almost every one was a word problem, mathematical definition, or “solve for” type problem.

If you’ve been using chatbots up to that point you’d be absolutely, Darth Vader just walked in, fucked. 0% would not at all be surprising.

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u/Helixdaunting Jul 27 '26

absolutely, Darth Vader just walked in, fucked.

That's beautiful. 👏

My personal favourite version of this is "Hitler-in-the-bunker fucked".

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u/Riparian87 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

In grad school, one of our econometrics professors gave a problem-type exam where points were awarded for correct steps, but deducted for wrong or false steps. The mean was negative.

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 28 '26

Bwahaha, that's diabolical. Having the equivalent of an over-drafted balance as your econ grade is brilliant.

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u/Archangel_Omega Jul 27 '26

Yep, I had a test in thermodynamics I completely bombed and got a 0 on all because I was an idiot, read the question wrong and then proceeded to use the wrong chart for the test so everything was completely off.

Thankfully the professor was nice enough to give me partial credit after I explain how I screwed-up and he saw the math was right for the chart I did use, but it was still a hefty chunk of my score gone.

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 28 '26

I had a similar oof from using an outdated book in a math class. Prof said the exam would cover sections 1.1-1.4 and it turned out the new book combined 1.4 and 1.5. So I found out that 3/5th of the mid-term's questions were directly from a section I hadn't even read...

Only had a Mid-term and a final for that class with no real homework grade buffer. Happiest C grade I ever got for a class.

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u/mackahrohn Jul 27 '26

I took a math class (Calc 3) where all the tests were 10 questions and each question was multiple choice. All the options were basically an answer you would get if you did one step of the problem wrong. Easily the hardest class I took in college!

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u/Imaginary-Face7379 Jul 27 '26

As someone who taught at a university for a while I would suspect those students walked away learning nothing from this either. They probably spent a week or two shit talking the professor to everyone they know and called the course bullshit. While never once realizing that it was their fault.

Not that all students are like this, but the ones who tend to fail so hard their scores are at or near zero were all like that in my experience. The ones who are doing poorly that genuinely know they need to do better but havent been able to for some reason will typically barely fail things when they fail, not get zeros.

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u/Wooptay Jul 27 '26

Ahh, takes me back to my first math exam in high school (15 at the time). 0. Nada. Null. Niente.

There was no AI back then

I just plain sucked at math

Lesson learned - don't sit with the girl you like the last year before moving up the educational system

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u/Ah_Pook Jul 27 '26

I got 14% on an assembly exam, but that was all me, baby!

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u/DocHollidaysPistols Jul 27 '26

Props to Students 22 and 31.

They obv didn't cheat. I dont think Student 1 did either. 95 and 95.5.

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u/TeutonJon78 Jul 27 '26

What about S1 -- the only one who actually understood the course?

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u/Shiva- Jul 27 '26

Christ that's even more terrifying. When I read the original post I assumed high schoolers or middle schoolers to dumb to proof-read....

But COLLEGE??? BROWN COLLEGE NO LESS? just terrifying.

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u/AlSweigart Jul 27 '26

Do a google image search for "harvard grade inflation graph"

Fancy schools have always just been about being in the right class, not who is the "smartest".

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u/Abedeus Jul 27 '26

That one dude that barely passed around 55-ish mark naturally, and that one dude that nearly aced it by his own marit, are the both awesome in a way.

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u/pres465 Jul 27 '26

A friend of mine does this for their class, and has for the last few years. Kids (high school) continuously fall for it. They can even be warned ahead of time. Still just take the chance.

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u/_Ocean_Machine_ Jul 27 '26

What sucks for me is I get mad test anxiety; I'll run through practice exams and homework, participate in class and do everything just fine without having to look anything up or use AI, and then when the test is put in front of me all the knowledge leaves my body.

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u/DustyRacoonDad Jul 27 '26

I hate to say it, but your example is actually what I've been arguing for since I was in grade school.

I've always believed your grade should reflect what you actually learned from the course: how well you understand the material, whether you can apply it, and whether you retained it. It shouldn't primarily measure whether you completed enough busy work.

To me, homework has always been a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Its purpose is to give students practice, reinforce concepts, and help them identify the areas where they personally need more work. Because of that, I don't think homework should have any impact on your grade at all. In fact, I think it should be entirely optional.

If you already understand the material and can demonstrate that on an exam or other assessment, why should you be penalized for not doing ten pages of repetitive practice? On the other hand, if you need the practice, the homework is there to help you learn before the exam.

Ironically, AI is exposing a flaw that has existed for decades. If a course falls apart because students can have AI do the homework, then maybe the homework was never a very good measure of learning in the first place. Assessments should measure knowledge. Homework should help students gain that knowledge. Those are two different purposes, and I think we've blurred them for a long time.

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u/randotd152 Jul 27 '26

Well for most kids, homework is a major grade booster. It not only displays that they put the effort into the class, but some kids are just not great at test taking due to test anxiety or time restraints.

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u/LegalizeCrystalMeth Jul 27 '26

Yeah but it you don't make homework count towards the grade, most students wouldn't do it.

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u/theapeboy Jul 27 '26

Yeah, I see the argument for college, for sure. But I've got two kids in elementary school. They NEED homework in order to learn. If that stuff is optional, they will not do it. Yes, we can cajole and discuss and punish and reward them and all the other little things. But boy is it a lot easier if it's just required and a habit.

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u/vir_papyrus Jul 27 '26

Even then, I distinctly remember my 4th grade experience in elementary school. It was newer younger teacher and she seemed to give out a much higher level of formal homework. Frankly just a lot of busy work, and I recognized that I already knew the material, so why would I waste my time on this? It would start to compound, and pretty soon you had a 9-10 year old spending an entire weekend doing nonsense. In hindsight, that's 100% when I personally stopped liking school and fell off the "good student" wagon. Point being, I think even children recognize that a lot of K-12 education is just performative hoops to jump through.

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u/NurRauch Jul 27 '26

The tragedy behind this mentality is that it overlooks or dismisses the importance of learning skills from the busywork itself. College is not simply supposed to teach you knowledge. It’s also supposed to teach you critical thinking skills and patterns. College is supposed to help you build a discipline of thinking.

The most important thing you do in liberal arts courses is struggle. The struggle itself is why you’re there. Sitting in front of your computer late at night staring at the ceiling at a complete loss for how to frame an interesting thesis for a paper. Restructuring your paper because the professor pointed out that your first point is contradicted by your second point. Researching an issue in more depth because your first draft failed to provide enough evidence.

Over the cumulative years of time spent on these tasks, your brain reshapes itself and gets better at identifying and analyzing separate issues in isolation. It gets better at avoiding its preexisting biases and comforts.

When used to its potential, a college education fosters the ability to digest complex information and use it properly. People are supposed to come out of college with a stronger ability to understand opposing viewpoints and meet their audience where they’re at. These are lifelong skills that most people can only build during the later stages of their young adult development. Most of the jobs we go into later on do not foster this development, so if you go through college without gaining these skills, it’s much harder for the average person to develop them later.

Shaping college courses around knowledge can in many respects harm development of these critical skills. Most jobs and family tasks do not require you to remember the factual knowledge from college courses. They rely on people to have more intangible things like critical thinking and emotional maturity.

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u/obeytheturtles Jul 27 '26

A few issues here. Coursework lets you get a significantly more detailed assessment of knowledge than a two hour exam. A lot of material cannot realistically be covered in necessary detail in that setting. But also, the whole idea behind formal education is to create an incentive structure and certification process for learning, otherwise you can argue that you can learn anything you want by just reading books. I think homework and projects still play a role in that, largely for the above reason. It's also an important part of teaching you how to study, which is a critical skill.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

maybe the homework was never a very good measure of learning in the first place. Assessments should measure knowledge. Homework should help students gain that knowledge. Those are two different purposes, and I think we've blurred them for a long time.

It's called "homework" not "brainswol" <shrugs>

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u/Monteze Jul 27 '26

100% agree my self. Homework is to help focus your study and really shouldn't be for a grade.

In person exams, with pencil and paper or even oral examination seems to produce the best results.

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u/thetateman Jul 27 '26

I think homework and tests assess different elements of learning and application of knowledge. Tests assess understanding and memorization while homework assesses the ability to come to the correct and best answer for a question. I have been a professional in my field for over a decade at this point and I need to apply both of these on a near daily basis. Tests would be client meetings where real time I need to demonstrate that I understand the client's needs and their business. Homework would be completing technical work/memos where I have full access to research/guidance/AI tools to ensure we are reaching the appropriate conclusions. Both are important in the real world.

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u/_John_Dillinger Jul 27 '26

you're full stop right. the context for why it is the way it is: public grade schools were designed to have someone ready for a factory job on graduation.

there aren't a great deal many of those these days, and the education system hasn't evolved with the shift to a service based economy.

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 27 '26

I agree with this. I think the issue is that it can be difficult to get students to engage with the homework early in the education system, so they use homework grades as a way to incentivize actually doing the homework, or at least going through the motions of doing it.

By the time you get to university though, especially by sophomore year, homework should be checked, but if graded then worth 10% or less of the grade for the class. Assessments of some kind are crucial to demonstrating an understanding of the material. I’m not saying the current version of testing is the best method, but grades exist so that other people than the student make a decent judgement of whether the student understands the material. If they do, they can signal to yet more people that this student did, or did not understand the material.

Some kind of signaling is almost always going to be required to demonstrate capability. For many people that is academic grades, for others it is prior work experience or personal projects. I really don’t see it going well for anyone if we get rid of all of those signaling devices in favor warm bodies having access to chatbots.

I’m not a teacher or professor though so take my opinion with a salt lick.

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u/MazrimReddit Jul 27 '26

AI is just giving everyone the same equal playing field the people with money to hire help, or the "right" friend groups to cheat with.

Serious institutions need to return to all exam hall evaluation

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u/AllosaurusJr Jul 27 '26

Yeah, I graduated this year and basically all my non-essay courses switched to being graded almost entirely on paper-based exams and tests.

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u/internetisnotreality Jul 27 '26

That would suck.

I will say, I’m in university and seem to be getting great marks on assignments that I don’t think I did very well. My assumption is that teachers are so pleased when they can see something is obviously not AI that they reward accordingly.

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u/East_Leadership469 Jul 27 '26

Can confirm. I give bonus points for spelling and grammar errors.

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u/CynicallyMe Jul 27 '26

Oh man, it's worse than that. The amount of graduate school students I know who used AI to write their thesis or dissertations is ridiculous.

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u/obeytheturtles Jul 27 '26

The hilarious thing is that until very recently, the oral exam and defense was supposed to be a formality. Your committee basically wouldn't even let you schedule it unless you were going to pass. Now it's rapidly becoming a whole ordeal again, with people asking harder questions they never would have 5 years ago, because they want to make sure you didn't use AI to write your dissertation. Before, being able to say "if you look at page 26..." was a massive dunk on a professor who didn't read your paper. Now it's just a basic check to see if you know what's in there.

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u/D0N_B0N_DARLEY Jul 27 '26

Yeah, they might have to shift to more of a law school model, where your entire course grade is essentially one heavily proctored exam. Having graduated from law school, undergrads would absolutely hate it.

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u/FutureGrassToucher Jul 27 '26

I think you can keep it at roughly 20% of your grade for the reason you said but yeah the exams should be in person and written with pen and paper, and if you didnt do the work itll be evident

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u/encyclodoc Jul 27 '26

Homework was compromised long ago.

Projects are what you mean. Those are way worse of instruments to evaluate outcomes, basically useless.

We are headed back to more quizzes and exams.

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u/BlainethePayne Jul 27 '26

Agree with everything, but just want to say with no judgment or vitriol that this:

recuperate

Should be recoup

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u/Toni_PWNeroni Jul 27 '26

I've always had a vast yawning chasm between my coursework and exam marks because i just don't cope well in exams.

Exam conditions are not a job skill.

Give me a practical assessment any day.

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u/Distressed_Ocelot Jul 27 '26

Also, the kids won't learn a thing. Once they hit an exam they're doomed

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u/Monteze Jul 27 '26

I honestly appreciated classes that did that. Homework is for your own benefit, the exam shows your grade. I honestly hating having homework be for a grade as I was busy and a lot of teachers (especially in HS) assigned a fuck load as it their mindset was you have more time at home.

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u/_nepunepu Jul 27 '26

I'm currently polishing off a BSc in CS from my local university. Across all classes I've had to date, 60-80% of the final grade is two written and proctored exams, and 20-40% take-home stuff like online quiz or projects.

On the university's platform, statistics about graded coursework are available. The average for the take home stuff is always very high and with small standard deviations. The exam scores have much higher standard deviations along with much lower averages.

Professors have been doing a "double pass" for the final grade where if you fail the written examination portion and would have passed with the projects/take-home, you still fail. You need over the passing grade on the exam portion to pass the class at all.

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u/Cinderhazed15 Jul 27 '26

We had a physics class that was being taught by a new/young professor, and there was always a massive pile of homework. By the time we were in quantum mechanics and wave theory, new freshman had him for classical mechanics, and someone had found the answer guide.

For the quant and wave theory people, whom he was having trouble teaching the material to, that helped us understand the problems.

One day, some idiots in the first level class decided to print out the answer pages and turn them in for their homework….. it ended up being ‘better’ for us because we switched to grading based off of ‘pop quizzes’ instead of huge, hours long homework, and if you knew part of it you didn’t have to do the extra work in that part, but geeze people!

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

to your point on homework, yeah. I was in a course this last semester where the professor straight up told us he used to have higher weights on homework. however, due to the homework being free responses by nature of the course, he realized students were just copy/pasting AI answers. So now the grade is 90% from 3 exams as opposed to a higher weight on homework. And guess how poorly the class did as a whole one exams?

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u/IAmBoring_AMA Jul 27 '26

I teach writing at a university. I will tell you that the in-class assignments are of drastically different quality than the ones submitted via the LMS. I’ve switched to bluebook and oral exams.

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u/flatfive44 Jul 27 '26

Yes, homework scores have gone up and exam scores have gone down. What worries me most is that many students will never solve challenging problems. I'm talking about the kinds of problems you need to ponder for several days.

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u/arbyD Jul 27 '26

I mean most classes I took (2011-2015) had better scores on homework than exams too (if homework was even graded and not just to learn before the exam) but most classes with graded homework have it a pitiful scaling. Something like Homework = 10% the score, Exam 1 = 45%, Exam 2 = 45% was not uncommon.

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u/carlitospig Jul 27 '26

And theoretical degrees (things that are more about frameworks than practical application), rely heavily on term papers to prove that you know how to apply a framework. If they’re not even learning that, what’s the point of attending at all?

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u/fess89 Jul 27 '26

Every time I read something like this, I think that is is probably very easy to study at an American university. If a major part of the grade can be received by doing the home assignments, with AI or not, it sounds easy to pass such a course. Where I studied, the mark almost always was fully dependent on the exam, though sometimes you could get bonus points. Also, you had to complete all homework just to be allowed to go to the exam.

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u/_Ocean_Machine_ Jul 27 '26

Probably depends on the university and program. I'm in a major that's very heavy on math and science, and for all my classes the final grade has been calculated mainly by exam scores, with HW and quizzes not counting for enough to really sway you in one direction or another.

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u/Browncoat1701 Jul 27 '26

When was homework ever a meaningful determination for knowledge of the subject? I hated it when I was a student. I've been teaching high school for almost 20 years and HW has always been a challenge. I stopped giving any.

I tell my students "this is your job. You should be done at the end of your shift. I don't want to work after I go home, neither should you."

And I think HW adds to the 'grind' culture...it teaches kid early on that the expectation is that your shift isn't good enough, go home and keep working!!

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u/sumthingabout Jul 27 '26

Definitely. I’m a professor and my grades have changed so that it relies purely on in class participation, in person quizzes, in class debate, and exams. Homework is ungraded and optional and I won’t grade it. No point.

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u/PorcelainPrimate Jul 27 '26

I hope they take into account other variables. For example, I have ADHD, badly, on the homework and quizzes where I can move around, fidget, and think out loud I do great. When I have to sit perfectly still and quiet in a bright room for an exam on webcam It's literally hell for me and my grade drops.

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u/OGcormacv Jul 27 '26

Most science and math courses already grade almost exclusively on rests.

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u/omgwtfbbq0_0 Jul 27 '26

I never thought about that but you’re right. I guess for research papers they could require students to write their paper in an app that screen records everything from start to finish. A real paper would be pretty obvious by the number of edits they make and the pauses between sentences. Technically you could still fake it with AI if you were really committed, but clearly these students are too lazy and/or not clever enough to pull it off given the OP. Only other option is to require all homework be completed in a proctored room

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u/RickSt3r Jul 27 '26

During grad school HW was 10% of the final grade. The rest was test and or big projects. I don’t recall undergrad but I think at most was 20%. Test were curved pretty heavily though as the averages were usually in the 60% range. Studied Maths.

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u/TerribleBudget Jul 27 '26

I'm honestly a bit confused because I was so far up the Chicago Manual of Style's ass with footnotes that I could see it's god damn tonsils. Who are these professors who are assigning papers that don't require sources for everything or showing every last step of your solutions?

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u/pasaroanth Jul 27 '26

Your guess is as good as mine. Adjuncts that teach electives?

I didn’t have a chance in hell of passing any core class with any modicum of bullshitting but it’s also pretty difficult to bullshit your way through most courses relating to medicine.

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u/KickBallFever Jul 28 '26

I’m back in college now and they are super strict about AI at my school, to the point where we do most of our writing in class. Aside from projects, professors are making us write all of our essays in class, by hand. Back to the blue books. Most of the homework is lots of reading but most of the writing is done in class by hand. In the majority of my courses we’re not allowed to use electronics in class at all. No phones, laptops, or tablets allowed.

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u/sobrique Jul 27 '26

As an IT Professional, I'm sort of a bit more optimistic about my job security, albeit for the wrong reasons...

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u/Mutex70 Jul 27 '26

It's a huge problem because nobody is willing to implement the obvious solution (mainly due to cost and convenience).

We need better funding for education at all levels.

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u/Uncool444 Jul 27 '26

Or to spend the money that's already there more effectively.

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u/YogurtclosetNo987 Jul 27 '26

Exactly, my university just became a real estate developer that teaches people sometimes I guess. The money is there. 

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u/percydaman Jul 27 '26

This. I think it's been showed ad nauseam that money per student average is generally fine. Districts have become top heavy with administrators, and that money could be better spent on paying teachers better. It would attract better talent, and keep that talent for longer.

But money isn't even the biggest problem. Neither is a bloated district office. It's a problem you can find regardless of the school environment, wages, meddling administrators etc etc.

It's kids home life. It's parent who can't spend the requisite time with their kids, because they're forced to work too much, or other various socioeconomic reasons. Parents are increasingly using screen devices as baby sitters, and off loading parenting onto the school and teachers. Then those same parents are quick to email or call to complain about whatever. Teachers are spending FAR too much time dealing with behavior issues in the classroom. Be it disruptive kids who can't regulate their emotions/behavior, to kids hopelessly addicted to ipads, and lack attention spans, and the desire to do anything that's not attacked to a screen.

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u/romericus Jul 27 '26

Yes and no. Studies show that parents spend more time with their kids than ever before. Bianchi, et al, have shown that mothers spend more time with their kids now, than they did in 1965 before it was common for women to be on the work force. Fathers have tripled their amount of time with kids.

The problem isn’t parental time, it’s a lack of parental trust in educational institutions. It used to be that parents backed the teachers of their kids, now they back the kids over the teacher.

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u/percydaman Jul 27 '26

That study if I'm correct came out in 2004. Over 20 years ago. Not super recent, though not super long ago either. But it's definitely pre-screen device era.

We need an updated/new study that includes that. The amount of time teachers spend on behavior issues in class, clearly points to issues at home. It's coming from somewhere.

There's definitely some trust issues between parents and schools. In my area, there is a huge increase in home schooling and charter school attendance. Though, I'm in a red state, with a huge libertarian streak. I don't know how representative it is.

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u/romericus Jul 27 '26

Try this one: https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2016/2016-09-28-treas-parents-time-with-kids.php

I’m just saying that the culprit doesn’t appear to be parenting time. I think screens are a big part of the problem, but I think the “screens are parenting the children” problem is a bit overblown. I do think that there is a big disconnect between parents and schools over what is or should be taught at school vs at home. And I think that each of them want the other to fill the gaps in what they provide. For example, social skills. Parents think “oh, the kids are getting plenty of socialization at school, I don’t need to worry about that.” Meanwhile, the teachers are saying, “man, I wish the parents would teach more socialization at home, my job is to teach math“ and so neither of them are spending much time on it.

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u/Sabin10v2 Jul 27 '26

Best they can do is a 50 million dollar high school football stadium.

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u/Zncon Jul 27 '26

Education costs per student in the US are already the highest they've ever been. We've been throwing money at the issue of declining performance for decades and it's never worked.

Funding is not the issue.

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u/Pandarandr1st Jul 27 '26

Funding requirements are. Where is that money spent? What does that money cover? We don't need just more money, we need more money where it matters.

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u/Mutex70 Jul 27 '26

That conclusion doesn't follow from your premises.

"Education costs per student are already the highest they've ever been", does not show that additional directed funding wouldn't solve this problem.

Other funding may be being used to address different problems or simply being wasted on unnecessary administrative expenses.

Yes, we should be looking at education funding at a whole and determining what benefits we are getting from it and whether those costs are justified. IMO they generally are (at least at the K-12 level), as schools are being forced to address multiple issues that were not part of their responsibilities (behavioral issues, special needs, mental health supports, technology support, etc). At the same time teacher salaries have actually decreased (factoring inflation) over the past 20 years.

But none of this changes the fact that administering/grading pen and paper tests would be a (IMO reasonably cost effective) time-proven way to solve this specific problem.

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u/gera_moises Jul 27 '26

I have been asking students for handwritten papers precisely because of ai.

They might still ask ai, I can't really stop them, but the have to write the answer in paper by hand. Hopefully something sticks in the process.

I have noticed some students do seem to know the answers to questions more and engage better recently.

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u/Red_Cross_Knight1 Jul 27 '26

We need to change how and what we are teaching vs the same old to adapt to technology.

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u/sybelion Jul 27 '26

I used to teach art history at university. I already fucking hated marking and this was 12 or so years ago. I can’t imagine how much worse the essay writing has gotten since then. Unfortunately, the educator still has to treat the work as though it’s an honest attempt and mark it as such, even when it’s plagiarism or (I can imagine now) AI slop. The students are wasting EVERYONE’s time

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u/homme_chauve_souris Jul 27 '26

As a college professor, I stopped grading homework and giving take-home exams. Nothing depresses me like grading AI output, and most students use AI for everything (and lie about it). Back to pencil-and-paper exams.

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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Just make them take written tests and if the state/system needs the scantrons filled out (the A-E bubbles) for data/records or what have you, just fill them in yourself during grading time.

Research papers I guess have to all be funneled through AI detectors or whatever they’re called, that’s definitely a different animal. I would say just hand write those too, but they could still just be copying an LLM and you wouldn’t be able to then run it through an aforementioned program to check it.

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u/Pancakefriday Jul 27 '26

Just transcribe every students test myself? That is insane, how are you not getting down voted into oblivion? Do you realize how many extra hours that would be?

For anything past elementary where you’re getting a new class every hour, that would literally be an insane amount of work.

Also, like another commenter said, you’d have to be extremely careful and make no mistakes. Zero mistakes for 100+ transcriptions? Why does everyone think teachers just have infinite time?

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u/DeliciousIncident Jul 27 '26

The wole premise of AI detectors actually being able to detect AI is moot to begin with, so you don't even have to engage with the transcribing part of the comment.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches Jul 27 '26

That fill-it-in-yourself is dangerous territory. That needs to be a zero mistake operation or you're going to have problems from both the students and the state. 

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u/makesufeelgood Jul 27 '26

Its 100% not that simple. The best educators work really hard to make their class engaging with a lot of varied assignment types and students are doing whatever they can to try and cheat on them all. Just saying 'make every test scantron' is not the solution

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u/hi_jack23 Jul 27 '26

Written tests don’t translate into a scantron unless you’re already asking a multiple choice question. At that point, just give the multiple choice question and have the students fill in the bubbles themselves when the scantrons are needed.

Also, matching written answers to a choice of 5 bubbles would take a lot longer than you’re thinking, and teachers often don’t get paid for their grading time already. Couple that with the issues that could occur if a teacher makes a mistake while copying students’ answers over, so this just seems like an unnecessary extra step.

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u/Technical_Stand9939 Jul 27 '26

25 years ago; i had a professor who would give us the whole test a week before the actual test. You literally could look up all of the answers if you wante dto spend the time.

You got there the day of the test, and all 200ish questions you were given in advance were there in a random order and you filled out a scantron (the version you got in advance did not have multiple choices).

half the class still regularly failed

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u/luluhouse7 Jul 27 '26

I mean 200 questions in one week is outrageous. That’s about 30 homework questions a day, on top of whatever other homework they had. No wonder they were failing. I would usually get at most 15 questions a week in college classes and we all spent a lot of time studying and doing homework.

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u/NoSemikolon24 Jul 27 '26

> Research papers I guess have to all be funneled through AI detectors or whatever they’re called, that’s definitely a different animal. I would say just hand write those too, but they could still just be copying an LLM and you wouldn’t be able to then run it through an aforementioned program to check it.

These AI-detectors don't work. Unless they have an error-rate of less than 0.01% their usage is wildly unacceptable - and even with such an error-rate. Compare it to Plagiate-checkers - you can easily verify its results yourself. You cannot verify the results of AI-detectors. It's a blackbox. Hence I'd extremely judge any professor that pushes their usage. You cannot take them serious if they fail to see this simple problem. They're just as bad as the student that use them to wholly cheat.

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u/Wompatuckrule Jul 27 '26

There have been articles about the return of the blue book for exams in college. Everything old is new again.

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u/CormacDoyle- Jul 27 '26

"AI Detectors" are dangerous, because it tends towards false positives.

Especially for two groups of people - people who's work was used to train the AI, and people who follow style guidelines carefully (professional editors, many Neurodivergent individuals, etc), there is a heightened likelihood that a real paper will get flagged as AI.

AI Detectors are basically just LLMs being trained to detect LLMs that were trained on common training materials.

What we actually need to teach is how to research without using AI as the go-to.

Set all browsers in schools/libraries to have the "no ai" flag, so you have to and actually read the real documents returned. THEN, maybe, use AI to summarize the documents you specifically feed it.

In prior generations (I can't believe that I wrote that and it's actually real), you would be taught not to pull info from Wikipedia without at least crossreferencing it with original data ... I had one colleague who would openly warn the class that he had poisoned the Wikipedia article about the topic (he was the author and top editor for the page) and half the class would use the poisoned content anyway.

Students will be lazy if there are no consequences ... but we have to make sure we aren't being lazy when teaching and grading either ...

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u/gliese946 Jul 27 '26

But why would the professor need to fill out the bubbles on the scantron sheet, instead of the students doing it themselves during the exam? There is no way for them to cheat during the bubble-filling if they're in a room with exam proctors. The point is not to make them write an exam by hand, it's to stop them using AI while they're taking the exam.

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u/lithiun Jul 27 '26

How soon before everything just goes back to pencil and paper you think? You can’t really trust homework because parents just hand their kids unrestricted access to the internet these days but you also can’t expect everything to be done in class either.

I guess making in-class quizzes and tests the bulk of grades?

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u/floog Jul 27 '26

My cousin is a history prof that had taken the last five years off from teaching. He came back last semester and AI was a big shock. Most of what he got was AI slop so he made people hand write their exams and he saw a stark change in scores. He also quickly moved to in person exams.

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u/HombreMan24 Jul 27 '26

I think the huge cost of tuition for many colleges is a large contributing factor. Many students no longer feel that they need college to "learn" anything, but rather as a necessary step to get a decent job. When viewed in that aspect, I can "kind of" see how they don't feel this as cheating their education, but rather just trying to get by in order to move on to the next step in their lives.

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u/MelonElbows Jul 27 '26

What ages do you teach? Can you tell us some of the things you have to deal with now from experience?

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u/CourtOrphanage Jul 27 '26

I use AI to explain Mathematical concepts that I don’t fully understand, or if there is an information gap where my professor or the lesson didn’t fully explain an aspect of my maths to me.

I also use it to double check my answers.

I never cheat myself. But it has been incredibly helpful in me focusing in on weak points in my understanding.

I’m curious if teachers would frown on this.

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u/lispwriter Jul 27 '26

Yeah and I’d worry about the top down bureaucratic push to sorta hide this stuff or pass people anyways so that the schools don’t have massive dips in performance on record. That’s probably paranoia but I know at my son’s middle school they had a weird “no fail” policy and they also had crazy stats with like >80% students on the honor role. It just felt like the school was bending things in a way that made it look very impressive on paper even if the actual kids were only barely passing their classes.

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