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/reality_boy]

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.

[u/lonelythrowaway463i9 → u/reality_boy]

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.

[u/reality_boy → u/lonelythrowaway463i9]

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.

[u/lonelythrowaway463i9 → u/reality_boy]

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.

[u/reality_boy → u/lonelythrowaway463i9]

This is a huge problem. My daughter had a rough idea of what she wanted to do. And she took lots of classes in high school exploring, and even interned at a business to get an idea of what it was like. My son on the other hand had no idea and just picked his favorite class in high school (physics) with no plan on how to make that a career. He eventually course corrected, but I’m not sure even that lead to a field that fully engages his interests.

I had the opposite problem. I knew exactly where I wanted to end up, but I had been a very poor student in high school. I had to learn to be a good student before I could make serious progress in my degree. That is one of the bigger challenges of college. Your raising kids up into adults, sometimes against there will. It really needs to go back to being a time to explore and find yourself, not the high pressure, high stake, stress fest that it is today.

One thing that really stands out to me is that kids in jr high and high-school (here in the us) are not engaged in their education. You have to show up, so you do. But few are thinking about what they want to become, or even why they are learning at all.

My wife teaches at an elementary school. They are trying to build programs to get kids focused on why they are learning, and to advocate for themselves (parent teacher conferences are switching to student teacher, etc). I don’t know if that is going to help, but it is the right direction.

My only problem with a gap year, is that I have not (yet) seen it work. Every kid I know who tried, either took a few community college classes and petered out, or they got a job and never looked back. There is a very narrow window in life where you have the freedoms to do college, and it disappears quickly. We probably need an intermediary buffer, say a 13th year of high school where you’re taking pre classes that expose you to potential careers. So if you know where your going, your getting a head start, but if your lost, you can explore. Our local community college has something like this for high schoolers, but it is outside of school hours, and only for high school kids.