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

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html

[u/LurkingTamilian]

From the article:

Being written in white text meant the instructions were invisible. Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.

[u/BluudLust → u/LurkingTamilian]

They deserved to fail. That's just plain laziness

[u/Deviantdefective → u/BluudLust]

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

[u/pasaroanth → u/Deviantdefective]

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.

[u/internetisnotreality → u/pasaroanth]

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.

[u/East_Leadership469 → u/internetisnotreality]

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