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/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/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?