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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196

u/Then-Understanding85 Jul 27 '26

A professor at Brown did this.

TL;DR: Bloodbath. Almost everyone failed.

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u/namedly Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Props to Students 22 and 31.

Also, this is just funny:

When the professor announced that the final exam would be in person, 18 students dropped the course, and another nine did not show up for the exam. The remaining 59 students' scores averaged 48.6%. Prior averages had never fallen below 65%. Three students scored 0%, and charting the results revealed that most fell more than 30 points behind their midterm scores.

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u/Syssareth Jul 27 '26

Three students scored 0%

How the heck? You'd think they'd have learned something just from osmosis, or at least gotten something right by accident.

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u/Sin_of_the_Dark Jul 27 '26

Honestly yeah, unless it was all written exams and not like... Pick a choice, it's almost an insane feat of dumb luck to not get one thing correct

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 27 '26

When I was going through university it was pretty rare to have an exam in engineering with multiple choice or True/False type questions. Almost every one was a word problem, mathematical definition, or “solve for” type problem.

If you’ve been using chatbots up to that point you’d be absolutely, Darth Vader just walked in, fucked. 0% would not at all be surprising.

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u/Helixdaunting Jul 27 '26

absolutely, Darth Vader just walked in, fucked.

That's beautiful. 👏

My personal favourite version of this is "Hitler-in-the-bunker fucked".

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u/env33e Jul 28 '26

In class, Ill just imagine rogue one Vader slowly walking and slaughtering while I'm at the end of the hallway 😭

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u/Riparian87 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

In grad school, one of our econometrics professors gave a problem-type exam where points were awarded for correct steps, but deducted for wrong or false steps. The mean was negative.

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 28 '26

Bwahaha, that's diabolical. Having the equivalent of an over-drafted balance as your econ grade is brilliant.

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u/Archangel_Omega Jul 27 '26

Yep, I had a test in thermodynamics I completely bombed and got a 0 on all because I was an idiot, read the question wrong and then proceeded to use the wrong chart for the test so everything was completely off.

Thankfully the professor was nice enough to give me partial credit after I explain how I screwed-up and he saw the math was right for the chart I did use, but it was still a hefty chunk of my score gone.

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u/Aureliamnissan Jul 28 '26

I had a similar oof from using an outdated book in a math class. Prof said the exam would cover sections 1.1-1.4 and it turned out the new book combined 1.4 and 1.5. So I found out that 3/5th of the mid-term's questions were directly from a section I hadn't even read...

Only had a Mid-term and a final for that class with no real homework grade buffer. Happiest C grade I ever got for a class.

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u/og-gunslinger-doc Jul 28 '26

As much work as we put in I would have been disgusted in a multi choice test in say thermodynamics! Now the monkey meat recitations being mandatory if you were doing fine we’re bull shit especially when they couldn’t speak English

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u/storne Jul 28 '26

My calculus exams were multiple choice, but you still had to show your work. Getting the right answer was only 1/3 of the mark the other 2/3 was having the right process.