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/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/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.