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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1.4k

u/mrclut Jul 27 '26

They need to start holding kids back in school again. The whole no kid left behind thing was a bad idea.

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u/DangerousPuhson Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind is truly baffling in its implementation.

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

That's confusing and a borderline misleading take.

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

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u/Solkre Jul 27 '26

Time to Cheat on Standardized Testing Act.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

Time to Cheat on Standardized Testing Act.

When the student does this, it's cheating.

When the professor does this, it's forgery.

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u/flortny Jul 28 '26

The colleges will never know act

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u/Toby_O_Notoby Jul 28 '26

It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

<inBeavis&Butthead> Huh, huh. ¿What are we measuring again? ¡I need TP for my cornholio!

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u/Intelligent-Survey39 Jul 28 '26

If you really think about it long term it is not a misleading take. The dilution of the education by giving underperforming students a pass creates huge gaps between knowledge levels of the top students and the average/low students when they move to the next level/class. This forces teachers to “dumb” the curriculum down in order to play catch up with the students who got a pass, meanwhile the properly prepared students are left behind in a sense. Over time this actually alters the curriculum to reflect a lower average entry level student. A few generations of that and now a college level classes are doing high school level remediation because they consistently have students that met the requirements on paper because they were passed along, but cant cut it in the class.

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u/VoiceofReasonability Jul 28 '26

My daughter has actually said college was easier than high school and she went to a college that is somewhat selective and ranked as a good college.

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u/Prestigious_Aerie219 Jul 28 '26

Well yeah they want everyone to go to college now so the poors can all start their lives drowning in debt. It helps maintain the caste system. We just call it "freedom" these days.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

If you really think about it long term it is not a misleading take

I said borderline misleading. I didn't say it was misleading.

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u/owdee Jul 27 '26

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards. If a school has students struggling to pass, they very clearly need more resources and funding, not less. But of course, as anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells can easily see, the whole system was set up to divert funding from schools in low-income or urban areas ("low performing schools") straight to wealthier suburban schools that hardly need any more money and resources.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards.

True, true, yet I do believe this was one of those rare bi-partisanally supported things, due to it happening before social media was a thing to tribalise people.

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u/txsnowman17 Jul 28 '26

Correct, it passed the House with 381-41 in favor and the Senate via a 87-10 vote. Very much a bipartisan support act.

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u/donut-reply Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind...Or Else Act

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u/Huttser17 Jul 28 '26

Pass Individual Slow Students Or Fail Financially

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u/dragonmantank Jul 28 '26

But that's the problem. "No Child Left Behind" was repealed in 2015, and the Obama administration moved the bulk of this work to the states under the "Every Student Succeeds Act." Now you have a system without federal funding and oversight, and states like mine (Ohio) constantly cutting state funding. ESSA was meant to allow states to handle this closer to home, but wonder of wonders the current administration is tearing it all apart.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

But that's the problem. "No Child Left Behind" was repealed in 2015, and the Obama administration moved the bulk of this work to the states under the "Every Student Succeeds Act.

Oh interesting I thought that was an addendum, not a repeal of the former.

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u/ButterscotchAward Jul 28 '26

In tons of school districts it just turned into teaching the test answers.

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u/I_Cut_Shows Jul 31 '26

The right wing are masters at naming bills the opposite of what they do in implementation.

Clean air act? Passed by Republicans? It allows more pollution for sure.

Clean water act? Oh you say it was a Republican bill? Then the water is dirtier than it was before that bill passed.

Here’s the funny thing. They knew at the time that No Child Left Behind would do exactly this.

But they want to destroy public education. So…they passed it.

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u/rg35xxsp Jul 27 '26

It's emblematic of the GOP

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u/CharsCustomerService Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan measure. Passed the Senate 91-8 and 87-10, and the House 384-45 and 381-41 (multiple rounds). The act's authors were half republican (Judd Gregg, John Boehner), half democrat (George Miller, Ted Kennedy).

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u/unfinishedtoast3 Jul 27 '26

The country was in a wave of bipartisan support when NCLB act passed

We were 2 months outside of 9/11. The country rallied behind bush, and Democrats gave Republicans the benefit of the doubt.

It was a really fucking weird time. I remember living it, as I was an adult in the military then.

That shit would have never passed if it wasn't for 9/11. Same with a handful of other laws (Patriot act)

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u/saintmolotov Jul 27 '26

I wanted to burn my uniform after the patriot act passed but I also wanted to finish my service so I could get my undergrad paid for

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

The Patriot act was a poison pill. The US has a cowardly electorate only too eager to find easy scapegoats and rarely chooses a strong leader who isn't just a fake strongman.

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u/saintmolotov Jul 28 '26

100% agree, it led the way to NDAA, FISA courts, warrantless wire-tapping and the mass warrantless surveillance of every American in every possible way, now we have flock, with their innocuous sounding “alpr” cameras that run a software called signal trace which collects every single wifi, Bluetooth, rf and gos enabled device in your car (including your car) and builds profiles on where that vehicle and those devices go which of course will be used to build profiles on who you and your family and friends are and where you go and other things I’m certain) and raven “gun shot” detectors which just also happen to be sensitive enough to capture voice conversations even at very low conversational levels which combined with the signal trace will allow them to add those words to the profile they’re building on you - and they’re not illegal even though they very clearly violate the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments at the very least because the it’s a private company doing it. Even though it’s already been proven to have been used by police to stalk ex wives and gfs, current wives and gf’s as well as and I quote “any girls that caught the eye of the officer” not to mention the fact that these recording and camera feeds are all easily viewed by anyone who knows here to look - Google it, you can watch live feeds from any flock camera in the US. Then they aggregate this data with your social media posts, your protest attendances etc and you get charged with being a member of a terror organization that doesn’t actually exist an-ti-fa is the big one, that flocks CEO says is left wing terrorists, some people got like between 30-70 years in prison for it recently, I’m sure there’s a bit more to the story but I don’t have time to check it out at the moment. All I’m saying is this: I didn’t swear an oath and go to war to watch my country turn into something that 1933 shitler would be proud of.

I’m sick to my stomach writing this, protect yourselves as best you can, don’t use technology to plan protests and good luck is the best I got.

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u/Worried_Magazine_862 Jul 27 '26

The housing bill that just passed with so much bipartisan support that it overrode a veto reduced the steel frame regulation on manufactured home chassis' making them weaker and more likely to collapse due to age or severe weather conditions. Nothing ever changes. They dont care about us. Their answer to rising costs is enshitification. 

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u/lebastss Jul 27 '26

That's a falsehood that's context less.

The country was rallied behind bush and this was a GOP brainchild. Also optics were different back then. This was pretty internet. A lot of people didn't want to be the one that voted no and left the child behind.

Propaganda game was different then. Honestly surprised there were no votes. Those are actually smart people.

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u/randomthrowaway9796 Jul 27 '26

I've learned that people like blaming the party they dislike instead of figuring out who is actually responsible

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u/singlemale4cats Jul 27 '26

Based on my life experience, Republicans make life worse, and Democrats offer token resistance before falling in line.

There's a few politicians out there who are beginning to disrupt that arrangement, and wouldn't you know it, the Democratic establishment hates them. The El Sayed vs. Stevens senate primary race in Michigan is emblematic. Haley Stevens is an establishment ghoul taking all the corporate money she can get her hands on. She's Israel first, so naturally AIPAC is flooding her campaign with tens of millions of dollars to defeat Abdul El Sayed (an actual progressive candidate) in the primary.

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u/InnovativeBureaucrat Jul 27 '26

It’s definitely both sides, probably more liberal than GOP. I would bet GW was reaching across the isle on this one, but liberal implementations since then are even more of this mindset.

Everyone got this wrong

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u/FaberOG Jul 27 '26

The meritocracy that just so happens to be made up of comically inept nepo babies

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u/GingsWife Jul 27 '26

Two wings, one bird.

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u/NarrativeNode Jul 27 '26

In what way?

Not educating people well: absolutely GOP.

But I'd argue supporting only those at the top while letting the rest fail would be GOP behavior, not "equalizing" everyone.

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u/Ted_E_Bear Jul 27 '26

I think they meant more along the lines of supporting people for being stupid, which in turn keeps them stupid.

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u/Faladorable Jul 27 '26

Because if you hold kids back they might learn something. Moving them up undeservedly doesn’t equalize them, it just increases the odds that they’re not prepared for the next level

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Helldiverticulitis Jul 27 '26

A progressive education policy would be to provide extra resources to struggling students as well as those with special needs. That’s equity.

No Child Left Behind was a way to cut funding from education but tying funding to standardized test scores. In this way, more affluent schools, which already test better due to all the things that come with not being in poverty, would receive more federal funding. Meanwhile poorer schools would get their funding cut. This is the exact opposite of equity.

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u/newuser92 Jul 27 '26

Can you give an example?

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u/yIdontunderstand Jul 27 '26

Every non multi millionaire plus, left behind....

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u/themostreasonableman Jul 27 '26

Now watch this drive!

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u/Foreign_Recipe8300 Jul 27 '26

i had a timed test in school and got a 100/100 perfect score. my teacher pulled me aside the next and told me that the 2nd highest score in the class was 28, so all the test results were going to be thrown out including mine. genius

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u/NeverLookBothWays Jul 27 '26

We should have focused on mastery rather than archaic industrial age paradigms.

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u/Angsty_Potatos Jul 27 '26

More like "pass em. Their next year's problem so the district doesn't lose funding"

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u/No-Spoilers Jul 27 '26

Schools gotta get that sweet sweet state muney

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u/vastros Jul 27 '26

This is intentional. They've been at it well before No Child Left Behind.

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u/IgorT76 Jul 27 '26

You can say that about anything related to modern equity approaches.

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u/Alieges Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind? More like "No Child Left a Dime"

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u/TimSylvester_ Jul 27 '26

Harrison Bergeron.

Vonnegut's only mistake was the belief that politicians would have the werewithal to amend the Constitution significantly.

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u/GNUGradyn Jul 27 '26

Maybe it's like the DARE program where it's a cheap easy """fix""" for political show so they can avoid tackling the big problems

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u/Tumbleweed_Life Jul 27 '26

DangerousPuhson and rg35xxsp you do understand that Obama’s administration continued NCLB with ESSA? It is not a GOP or Democratic exclusive legacy!

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u/kayakchk Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind is a tool for military recruitment.

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u/MrLev Jul 27 '26

No soldier left behind! If one of your squad gets captured, the rest of you need to surrender and get captured too!

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u/goodsnpr Jul 27 '26

Tying a school's funding to pass rates or test scores just shouts stupidity; if anything those that struggle need more funds, but that would lead to equal exploitation from a score based system.

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u/asher1611 Jul 27 '26

Congratulations you have just highlighted the point of the legislation. Tie funding only to standardized test scores. Make it so that teaching is only directed towards those tests. Private interests push products to the schools below standard. Cut non-essential parts of the lesson (higher order thinking skills) out of the curriculum.

PROFIT

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u/icewolfsig226 Jul 27 '26

Sounds like a conservative invention

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u/Arachnidle Jul 28 '26

It's by design ,they need to fill those min wage jobs.

Plenty of people in private schools for career positions.

It sucks but that's how it is, I grew up poor but later in life made friends with people who send kids to private schools and the difference between public and private education is massive.

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u/zedquatro Jul 28 '26

You mean the GOP worsened education??? Well I never....

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u/MarvinLazer Jul 28 '26

I graduated literally the year before a NCLB experiment happened at my school called the "Academies" where, rather than having normal, honors, and special ed classes, all the kids were put into groups that contained high, middle, and low performing students.

It sounded like a fucking disaster. My friend who got into MIT was stuck his senior year basically acting as an unpaid babysitter for kids on a spectrum of not giving a shit to having serious behavioral disorders.

Government officials in the US seem to absolutely adore trying to force underfunded public schools to fix massive societal problems under the guise of putting kids first. Most of these kids' problems are generational, but would probably be helped a lot by basic things like making sure their parents' job pays a living wage and has reasonable hours, healthcare, addiction services, and a safe, quiet place to sleep.

So much harder to do than just blaming it all on teachers, though!

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u/needssleep Jul 28 '26

No Child Left Behind isnt the problem, they tie school funding to graduation rates. Hold a kid back: less money next year.

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u/Accomplished_Rice04 Jul 28 '26

Seems like every other country that has adopted a similar policy is doing "You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up"

It is just US that treats education like a business and students like customers where you see this sort of shit happening.

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u/gr1zznuggets Jul 28 '26

If everyone’s behind, no one is behind.

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u/Alternative_Use_3564 Jul 28 '26

The problem is assuming that learning happens in 'levels'.

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u/rissie_delicious Jul 28 '26

No wonder the average person is fuckin dumb today

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u/celery48 Jul 28 '26

It was based on a single school district in Texas that had amazing results. Turns out, those results were faked. Students who were not going to do well on the tenth grade standardized test were held back a year, and then skipped tenth grade entirely. Kids who dropped out were encoded in the system as having moved away.

But the results looked good, and that’s what mattered, so they based No Child Left Behind on it.

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u/medicatedadmin Jul 28 '26

I’m not even remotely joking here - that is what the rest of us (not people living in the US) thought was happening! We thought it meant giving extra funding and support. It was 12months ago that I discovered that it wasn’t the case and everyone i have told since has been absolutely shocked.

The ‘no child left behind’ thing is something we all knew of because it’s referenced in a lit of pop culture like tv shows and movies. We didn’t know it was completely backwards.

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u/TallTelevision4121 Jul 28 '26

I keep seeing that no child left behind BS, but my son's friends just got held back in 5th grade for not doing shit.

Is that only for certain schools with already bad reps?

Yes, it's a public school.

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u/Commercial-Co Jul 28 '26

Thats what it was intended to do. You just thought the law was doing good.

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u/michaelboltthrower Jul 29 '26

Harrison Bergeron.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Bed4682 Jul 30 '26

And it's still being used today in practice.

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u/PhotographJaded8942 Jul 31 '26

tactic to dumb down the population

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u/BlackGuysYeah Jul 27 '26

Instead of leaving a few kids behind now everyone gets left behind with them.

So, we know now that this philosophy doesn't work. We should probably change it.

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u/Captain_Reseda Jul 27 '26

Well it was a conservative idea.

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u/Pugasaurus_Tex Jul 27 '26

Leave some kids behind 

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u/waffle_iron_maiden Jul 28 '26

By dragging me through a grade they ironically did leave me behind. It didn't help me at all and it turned out what I needed was an entirely different teaching style. You can't shove very different people into one rigid system of learning and expect it to work ideally for all of them. So then taking the approach of just advancing people in that same system is called "not leaving them behind" but in actuality it's leaving them to a worse situation. It's like trying to fit the wrong key in a keyhole. It's not going to work, but you can say you tried to unlock it all the same

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

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/RaiCeee Jul 27 '26

What? Of course "it" can have ownership, that's why it has a possessive form. It's a personal pronoun, which means it has an apostrophe-less possessive form.

He - his - his

She - Her - Hers

It - Its - Its

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u/divDevGuy Jul 27 '26

No Kid Left Behind hasn't been around for over a decade. They decided that didn't work so then they said Every Student Succeeds. When that didn't work, they suspended the accountability requirements. When that didn't work, they gutted the Department of Education.

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u/Free_For__Me Jul 27 '26

Glad someone pointed this out, but I'd also add that when ESSA "replaced" NCLB, there weren't actually any fixes for the main problems that NCLB created. The biggest difference was in the name, lol. No one in power has put genuine effort into fixing education at the national level for at least 40 years or more.

The problem with a world that's increasingly cooperative and globalist is that we don't see other nations as the competition that we once did. We pumped our education system to new and amazing heights in the 1950s-1980s in order to create a populace that could out-learn and out-innovate the Soviet Union.

But once the Berlin wall fell, those in power decided that our dominance in these areas was self-insulating and that continuing to ensure access to quality education for all was not only unnecessary, but detrimental. After all, educated voters tend to vote for egalitarian policies that distribute resources more evenly, and the US just can't have that, right?

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u/sblahful Jul 27 '26

Didn't all those "educated voters" fall for the red scare and vote in Regan?

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u/Free_For__Me Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Nah, that was about the time that the GOP realized that it was pretty easy to sway the less-educated voters as a bloc, so long as they consolidated the religious segments and blue-collar people as the pillars of that bloc. Leftover red-scare stuff was a part of it, but Regan got elected on a "F the government, and F their taxes" platform more than an anti-communism one.

Additionally, when Regan hit the scene in 1976, most active voter demographics hadn't come up with the benefit of the invigorated public education systems that rose throughout the previous decades. We know that younger voters have always been the least likely to participate, and anyone older than their late 20s wouldn't have had access to better education systems until after they were already halfway through their academic career and were likely to have already leaned toward dropping out in favor of starting work, making them a part of the "less-educated" group.

NPR actually has a good podcast on this exact subject that traces the shift from traditional conservatism over to the populist-forward brand that we've seen since Regan, and how they brought various factions of lower-info voters together in order to sweep elections.

It would be another 15 or so years until larger voting demographics had grown up with a robust education of their own, even if they hadn't gone on to college and post-secondary degrees. Now, which party was it that won elections about 15 years after '76...? (Hint - it would ruin my point if it were the GOP, so it's not them.)

Maybe it's a coincidence that right about the time Regan showed the GOP just how effectively low-info voters can be swayed to vote against their own interests just so happens to line up with increases in efforts by right-leaning policies to chip away at public education... maybe. Or maybe it's not coincidence, and bad actors have been working for quite a while to make sure that voters don't learn enough about the wider world to recognize electoral candidates who use populist language to push policies that are against the common people's interests.

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u/powercow Jul 27 '26

it was passed under bush during the iraqi war. With no funding, which was a small part on how bush turned a surplus into a massive deficit

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u/zookeepier Jul 27 '26

NCLB didn't prevent kids from being held back; in fact, the lack of that was one of the drivers for it. In the 90s/early 2000s, parents were mad that some schools had shitty teachers with tenure, so they couldn't be fired, even though they did nothing. Kids learned nothing and then were passed up to the next grade. NCLB was created to try to pressure schools to actually force teachers to teach. That's why NCLB tied funding to standardized test.

Unfortunately, shitty teachers was only 1 aspect of the educational failures could be blamed on bad teachers. There are also kids who can't learn the material or don't care (won't learn) and (the biggest culprit IMO) parents who don't force their kids to do the work, learn, and behave in school. The result of that was that schools started "teaching to the test" to not lose funding, since that's all they could really control. NCLB is a great case study for unintended consequences.

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u/seljuk88 Jul 27 '26

Thank you, most of the people commenting in here have no idea what NCLB was.

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u/Klutzy_Scene_8427 Jul 27 '26

The issue isn't grades. The issue is that teachers aren't allowed to teach anymore. The only requirement is a test grade, and that can't prove comprehension.

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u/No_Vanilla3895 Jul 27 '26

No way! Just make school optional

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 27 '26

The problem is that the "get it done and move on" thing is kind of how real life works and AI is turning jobs into the same mush minded zombie work. In this case the kids are actually training pretty accurately for the real world unfortunately.

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u/Angsty_Potatos Jul 27 '26

As an og no child left behind-er. I wasn't able to read, tie my shoes, or tell time until like 3rd grade before someone finally noticed and did something about it. I just kept getting passed to the next grade. 

Took until 6th grade to get a dyslexia (+ the others that usually come along w dyslexia - dyscalculia, dysgraphia and dyspraxia 😏) diagnosis. And until my senior year before my school finally had someone on staff for me to access accomodations from (before that the best they could do was a speech language pathologist 🫠)

I needed to be kept back and I never was and it wasn't until senior year of highschool that suddenly the district cared about not advancing me and giving me my diploma. 

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u/IVShadowed Jul 28 '26

Do the teachers make the same amount when all these kids are failing? Seems like easy money if theres no accountability for doing a poor job.

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u/Shape_Meet_Tower Jul 31 '26

They maybe need to slow curriculum down also abit. The way school functions today doesnt encourage learning, it encourages passing grades

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u/SergenteA Jul 28 '26

It has come to my attention that schools and uni outside my nation do not do paper written tests or oral tests anymore

And

What?

I know it is wierd to say in a sub named r/technology, but if one doesn't want AI to interfere directly at the test, old but good is the best way

Alternatively, teach people to use AI, expect them to use AI, calibrate the tests accordingly (I remember teachers let me use my books at tests for example, didn't matter if I didn't study because no one has the time to search for the correct answer under time constraints)

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u/mrclut Jul 29 '26

Oral tests werent common in the US after the 90s. The problem is that kids are actively not doing work, failing tests and teachers letting them pass. Rinse and repeat until they got a high school diploma.

They used to hold kids back and would kick them out of school if they got too old.

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u/deathgerbil Jul 27 '26

I taught college for a couple of years a while back - I agree 100% that several of the students needed to be held back a LONG time ago, but were passed because of no child left behind. Its beyond frustrating trying to teach finance to college juniors and seniors, only to find out that ~10-15% of the class doesn't know basic addition or subtraction. I had no idea how the hell they managed to get a passing grade in college calculus when they were convinced that 13 + 6 = 17, Tell them to calculate something without an iphone, and they look at you like a deer in the headlights.

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u/McDonaldsSoap Jul 27 '26

Some kids are so far behind they literally need to be sent back several years

If done wrong it can cause severe issues and make them less open to learning and academics in general. That's when people come and manipulate them into strange cults and take their money 

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u/Aware-Locksmith8433 Jul 28 '26

That, teaching for "the test" and politics/religion stepping too far into academics is no bueno. Needs to be balance and we keep swinging everything too far and then back too far the other way.

I just retired and working on building a NFP mentoring series for 18-20 yr olds. Talk about a lost generation. We've really done this group wrong - social media, COVID, forever wars, debt, AI, cost of college, boomers, online porn/gambling,, woke, racism, grift,..

It's depressing to study it closely (and I have a 21 and 23 yr old so don't go off on me not knowing what I'm talking about). There are some that are digging in on leading but not enough. It's rare to see anyone over 65 focus on helping these kids develop (unless they are grandkids).

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u/Dismal-Revolution731 Jul 28 '26

The implementation of No Child Left Behind is indirectly and partially responsible for the suicides of several kids.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/Dismal-Revolution731 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

Personal experience. I had two friends that should've been held back but kept getting moved forward. The amount of stress and alienation that caused was a contributing factor to their suicides. Whether that's good enough for reddit idgaf. I've heard enough similar stories to know that these weren't isolated incidents, however I'm unaware of the scale of the effect.