Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible
A professor used white font to hide instructions to throw off students using an AI chatbot to cheat on their midterm.
https://futurism.com/future-society/professor-hides-white-font-ai-cheatingOpen linkView original on piefed.social
181 replies
If they developed a way to catch students taking photo of their screen there would be 3x more caught.
It is the next level of laziness to not check what AI generates for you.
Love it love it love it
Haha simple way to expose automated BOWKY reliance.
The authority people look for, for guidance, isn't there anymore.
He should have done a follow-up survey asking the students why they felt it was okay to use LLMs and not proofread their results. This could have been a much greater learning opportunity and also drive home that the point wasn't to shame them.
You'd have to be really dumb to get caught by this.
People have been using the white font trick in job applications for years now.
Firstly they're students. They haven't done a job application yet - and quite frankly, a lot of them don't know obvious shit because, well, they're young.
But also, a lot of "professionals" who really should know better do stupid shit too.
This has been common practice in schools for several years now. Students are well aware of this tactic.
Im surprised that some students were caught off guard, because anyone in Dark mode can easily see the white font.
Being young or being a student doesn't mean you're dumb. Also even if you haven't it's still something you think about and discuss. Especially by your third and fourth years, it's something you should be actively thinking about more and more.
I finished school two years ago by the way. Not trying to give you hope for the future or anything because a lot of people are dumb but they should know better.
The lesson here is that US university diploma is worth as much as toilet paper. They have a profit motive to not expel cheating students. EU countries should stop accepting US diplomas as legally valid.
They do not even care to test students properly - how can they even use AI? Why not let the write the answers to a midterm on paper in a supervised hall? Or some kind of secure computing environment Seriously what is going on lol. They aren't being tested at all really.
That is not new, and it's not just in the US.
My degrees haven't mattered in a long time - my resume is long enough for that. But when they still did matter, I made damn sure I told the headhunter at all job interviews I went to that I got my degrees from this and that year, when it was common knowledge that getting degrees from those unis at that time still meant something.
I’d love to have heard the argument from the two students challenging their failing grade for that
Depends on the prompt they gave to build their defense...
probably they have grad school riding on those grades probably? grad schools, MD, PHD, DONT take very kindly to have 0s or Withdraws on your transcript.
Ah yes, then they can spend thousands more on an even fancier sheet of paper. It’s a shame they are devaluing their degrees like this, because as the world catches on about how common this is, they will not garner much respect for having completed one.
Certainly when I’m hiring I have usually expected that someone with a university education might have good written communication or language skills. But now I’m realizing that this may no longer be sensible.
Honestly, if you get caught doing this, you should be expelled and blacklisted from all colleges and universities by SSN, as well as put on an international registry.
that doesnt really fit the crime. in most universities you will get automatic zero on that assignment, and may get reported to the dean, thats about it. if the professor is making an example they can choose to make them fail the whole course automatically or force them to withdraw the class. this isnt expel worthy though. things that are expel worthy or severe violence, or academic dismissal(you fail too many classes on too many semesters), or you have a cheating ring.
That's awful steep. I dislike AI as much as the next guy, but as a former college prof I don't think I could see myself being that heavy handed.
Fail the paper, sure, but depending on past submissions I'd consider an alternative assignment. Otherwise, good luck when you take the program again.
I think it's not so steep if students are told beforehand. Tell them what counts as cheating. Tell them the consequences. Tell them it's serious.
In university I always had to sign a little text that informed us that we are not allowed to cheat and that doing so would lead to failing the test and potentially getting expelled.
Brother there isn't even a national sex offender registry. You want to treat students who use AI worse than we treat pedophiles?
You're right, you definitely should treat sex offenders way harsher.
Also if a school says "don't do X or you WILL fail the test and MIGHT get expelled" and then you proceed to do X then I think it's on you and not 'bad treatment' at all. Especially if you do X repeatedly.
I did have one student fail for using AI. It was such an awful submission.
I also had multiple students that I believe used AI to help in the creation of some assignments, but I built in presentations including Q&A to ensure they could speak to the subject.
No situation I came across was bad enough to warrant expulsion except for one case of blatant plagiarism in which a student had accessed another students computer and reworded a major assignment, but this had nothing to do with AI.
Bonus: I regularly ran in-class activities where I'd split the class into small groups on the Human side and on the AI side and give them the same tasks to complete. Humans always won.
Even if those students are told beforehand. Completely destroying any future chance on education because of a stupid thing they did once when you were young is not realistic.
Even in your example, they only get potentially expelled from a single school.
Yeah true. The blacklisting goes way too far.
What good will that do?
If they're doing this in other classes then they're either going to get caught and fail or they won't get caught but won't have learned anything. What are these people going to be doing out in the world when they get older?
They'll be getting their MBAs.
depends how universitiy grad programs calculate your gpa, some with take Ws, and 0s into consideration when it comes to calculating it.
They can't get a master's if they don't graduate with a bachelor's first.
I’d agree, but it seems universities don’t fail anyone anymore, particularly not lucrative out-of-state tuition payers
FWIW in-state students are usually just as lucrative for universities, since the tuition discount is paid by state grants.
By the time they get a job, AI will be doing all the work anyway so I guess it doesn't matter
No it won't. What the professor did illustrates this. You have to have a human proof reading AI. No matter how smart computers get, they'll always be dumb as shit.
Imagine....they didn't. Even. Read it.
They deserve the failure grade
That's why university evaluations should be always in pen and paper.
this is just unacceptable, those students should be just expelled without mercy IMO.
Or at least give students computers that have restricted or no access to the internet? Even before LLMs having access to the internet would have been a huge opportunity to cheat. At least in most subjects.
Also, what happened to teachers/supervisors walking around and checking if the students cheat? Back when I went to school we also cheated with cheat sheets or exchanging answers but it was always risky because getting busted meant failing the test (or worse).
Letting students use the internet unrestrictedly would be like the teacher leaving the room and leaving us unsupervised for the duration of the test back in my days.
If having access to basic technology like the internet is considered cheating, then your test need to upgrade to the 21st century.
I'm all for teaching tech literacy. It's one of the most important skills. However, if a task is about writing your own thoughts in your own words then maybe you should prevent cheating by limiting access to tools like llms or have better supervision.
If the task involves using technology then the task should be adapted so you still need your own mind to solve it (obviously).
this, they can do this in a computer lab, where a lab moniter employee can watch all the students computers from her computers. they do this at our CC computer labs, 1 moniter hired to watch whatever the students are doing on thier computers, from her computer which moniters all the students comps at once.
I went to high school in the '80s. I cheated in my German class by inventing my own runic-sort-of script and
decliningconjugating all the verbs on the cover of my notebook, hiding it in a drawing of a big obelisk or spaceship or the like. I would have this notebook on the floor during the test and I could easily read whatever I needed right off of it. Teacher never suspected a thing.And now ... I can't fucking speak German. The teacher did throw a board eraser at my head one time, but that was only because I kept speaking German with a thick Texas accent.
I reckon part of the problem is that verbs are conjugating. Nouns are declined.
Well, I cheated in English class the same way ...
could be... they made me programa python on paper.
for introduction to programming, basically you had to try to run the program on your head lmao.
I've had multiple classes that required writing code by hand. Not that big of a deal imo.
And before you ask, the first was Intro to C (in which the teacher ironically always wrote the problems in C++) and the second was Applied Numerical Methods
It sounds silly but "running the program from your head" is a super important skill as a programmer. It's what you do when you read and try to understand other people's code.
idunno man I'm studying mech eng... still a lot of fun that class ngl, I once was taking an engineering nap at the library, and while I was in the stupor just before asleep, it came to me the answer to a extra point question the teacher had given, one that was supposed to be in the exam but they took it out because they tought it was too hard.
Damn I felt smart for a brief second there, never in my life had I felt smarter lol.
yeah i enjoyed that class, but i can't imagine myself workig as a CompSci/eng/programmer, I found that is just too much brute force for my taste, is just not that elegant.
I visited India in the early '90s and I was surprised to find there a small software shop that had five programmers and one PC. They would write their code (in TurboBasic lol) on paper and then take turns typing it into the computer and running it.
I did the same thing at the start of my own programming career ... only with punchcards instead of pencil and paper.
Yeah I did this with C and it was stressful, but the marks are usually graded more leniently if its clear you just got a function name mixed up for example.
"Open book" or internet tests or tests you wrote at home were much harder because they know you have all the resources
Ah yes, let's make it so everyone that is physically disabled or lacking in dexterity fails tests, just like the good old days.
/Sarcasm
That's what accommodations are for
This is ridiculous, in my uni is pen and paper, and people with physical or mental disabilities get accommodations so they can perform as good as other people, I myself have some due to autism.
What is not OK is just to give a medium to enable cheaters like this.
Yeah, it's interesting seeing some professors complaining about how AI has made catching cheaters harder now.
But then you see that they are letting students have access to phones and laptops during exam with no software/Internet restriction and you think...yeah I wonder why...what could possibly be done...
Not allow them those devices for a subject like history during an exam? No impossible.
When I brought it up here a teacher went lol but they have phones and tablets. As if its not worth even trying to prevent. And also they said they didn't want to do paper and pencil either because its too much work to grade.
There are programs that completely lock down laptops for exams preventing you from using internet, going to the desktop, open other docs, etc so its not like it has to be paper and pencil to prevent AI usage. But, its like some professors just can't wrap their head around the concept of not allowing full access to electronics or none at all despite the subject matter not being something like programming, but history.
Seriously. I taught university courses for several years in the mid 2010s. I didn't have to worry about AI then, but I did have to worry about cell phones. I learned the hard way that during exams, crafty students could take pictures of the exam, upload them to chegg, and get responses back live during the exam time.
Eventually I moved to a zero-tolerance policy for all electronic devices during exams. There's no way for me to determine if someone is using a phone for cheating or something innocuous. So during exams, I simply had it as a policy that, "having a cell phone or laptop anywhere on your person or desk IS cheating and will result in an instant zero on the exam." Keep your damn phone in your bag during exams. I put this warning in my syllabus, wrote it all over the exams, and gave repeated verbal warnings to students. No one went into this surprised. The last thing I ever wanted to do was bust someone for an innocent mistake. But if I caught you with a cell phone? Even if I never saw you using it? Simply having a cell phone out of your bag during an exam is a zero.
Hell, I took this so seriously that I came up with my most evil policy ever - the bounty system. See your neighbor with their phone out? Rat them out and I'll give you ten extra credit points on this exam. They have to worry not just about where my eyes are, but the eyes of everyone else around them. That's right students, we're going full prisoner's dilemma. I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!
Yeah, that is what my exam experiences have been of zero tolerance for phones and sometimes laptops if exam were paper and pencil. It makes the current news now so puzzling since phones back then despite not having AI access were just as capable back then, and outside help through internet and messages was easy to get so professors back then had the same concerns of electronics being used for cheating.
Only change then and now seems like professors are not enforcing electronic restrictions as strictly anymore, and students to no surprise are taking advantage of being able to cheat out in the open.
These are generally platform specific and, by their nature, extremely invasive. For people who don't care about their computer except as an "internet getter thingy" and use a supported environment this is fine.
I on the other hand practically can't take such tests without using the university's computers.
With respect to my understanding of accessibility and decency it pretty much does have to be paper and pencil if they're going to limit information access.
Platform specific to windows and mac devices. Thing is if a university wants to create a hard to cheat environment while refusing to do paper exams that is the best option available.
Alternative is choosing to administer exams on personal electronics while doing nothing to prevent access to internet, notes, and software yet asking students to not use it.
That is just naive. And this has been the standard at least where I went to school even before AI. It's not like laptops and smartphones are something new. Its been ubiquitous over a decade now. Yet, some schools act like they've never dealt with it before just because of AI when even prior to AI teachers were well aware of the cheating capabilities of electronics. Even graphing calculators.
Correct. There are two operating systems people use, the rest don't matter.
Refuse? Why?
One teacher here when I brought up paper exams said they find it a hassle to grade.
Mind you I'm not approaching this from a privacy or consumer advocates position. But, as a general university that doesn't care about that and is just choosing among options available to try to make cheating more difficult.
I'm more just amazed at how lax electronics in classes has become during exams more than anything.
Oh, even your students that are unable to use a pen and paper? Neat, don't know how they do it
If they're getting electronic aids from the institution, then it should have an 'exam mode' that it has to be put into.
I guess the only reason they don't do electronic exams on institution controlled hardware, is - I assume - they can't afford enough terminals. But they should have enough for the people that can't use pen and paper.
That's already been the standard for decades in the UK, they're set to offline mode and incredibly locked down.
I have no idea why the schools aren't doing that in USA other than cause y'all are somehow both incredibly behind the times in some fields of tech (accessibility, education, social care, taxes, politics) and incredibly far ahead in others (engineering, medical, physics, research)
Are you aware that students that are unable to use pen and paper already get accommodations both during regular school days as well as at exams?
Some see those as demeaning.
There's an interesting thing known as "Medical Model" Vs "Social Model" for accessibility;
Medical Model - you have an amputated leg, here's a crutch, it is awkward and cumbersome to use and makes you feel "other"
Social Model - you have an amputated leg, it doesn't effect you as having ramps and accessible features it's so normalised that you don't need to struggle with subpar solutions, and you don't notice the difference as much
You're currently advocating for the worse option, the Medical Model
Amputees don't need crutches because ramps? Go to sleep.
Learn to read
Why are you such a medicalist? Why do you advocate for demeaning amputees by forcing them to climb a ramp?
Instead, amputees and everyone else should be outlawed from carrying crutches or assistive devices of any kind, and all ramps should be banned. Anything else would make amputees feel different because of their disability, and you're ableist if you oppose this idea.
they usually have a social worker that uses the pen and paper for them.
Or we do like the current days and give reasonable accomodations for those that need them while still preserving the integrity of the exam?
why do people keep using this accessibility argument for AI? Is it cause y'all can't 'think of the children' your way to getting the ignorant to agree?
I think he was "arguing" (not sure, as there's the added /s) about the pen and paper. Not everyone can use a pen well, there's also accessibility needs for people with severe dyslexia and such.
You're exactly correct, the /s was showing that I ain't doing a Poe's Law (some comedy about terrible views is so like the actual terrible views that without a wink or other signifier it's difficult to tell it's a joke)
Of course, such arguments are comical. No matter what method you use, you're going to have a system that will be incompatible with somebody's disability. For example, the number of people who cannot use pen and paper are likely vastly outnumbered, by orders of magnitude, by those that have ADHD and find computers vastly more distracting than pen and paper. There's no way to deliver an exam in a single form/medium without leaving people out. You can have alternate forms to accommodate them, but Gwl would whine that this is othering or demeaning. He wants every single person's needs taken care of, while also demanding that everyone be treated in the exact same way. These are too mutually incompatible goals. Equality isn't equity.
Gwl's stance is profoundly anti-disabled. He has an attitude that any accommodation that places disabled students in any way apart is demeaning to the disabled and thus not an option. Of course, that is an impossible standard, as it's impossible to accommodate every disabled person simultaneously, because many disabilities are mutually-exclusive. If you give a written exam and provide a secondary auditory form for the blind students, the blind students will feel othered. If you give an exam in audio form and offer a secondary visual form for the deaf students, the deaf students will feel called out. Universal design is a fine ideal, but it's not actually achievable in all but a handful of cases.
When you set your standard as, "disabled students can never be made to feel othered in any way from the rest of the students," then you make it impossible to actually accommodate the real needs of disabled students.
Who said I was being pro-AI?
I'm being pro-disabity, that's all. AI can get in a bin.
Are cheating and plagiarism no longer grounds for immediate expulsion...?
Universities don't teach students out of a sense of duty and honor.
Students are their funding. Failing these 32 students could cost the school millions.
US universities maybe.
Any university that has funding proportional to student headcount; this can apply to public universities.
The upper management of high schools are generally the kinda people who'd say "it's not cheating, it's just a tool"
My experience with high school is that they would want you to cheat so the school's numbers look good. The consequences of No Child Left Behind will be felt for a long time.
32 out of 35.
That tracks. I hate over 90% of people
Good on the three people who wasn't caught, either because the don't use AI or because they at least read the question and the llm output. And gold star if any of them noticed the white text but didn't tell the rest of the students!
Wow this gen is pathetic. 0 tech literacy
Did a paper with a 20-year old. Intelligent, well-spoken girl. She was absolutely astonished that there are keyboard shortcuts for Cut and Paste.
To be fair, the windows tooltip ui has been getting Fisher-Price'ed with it's visual operation buttons, and retraction of information
Never underestimate the lengths an intelligent (but lacking in 'common sense') person will go to when learning something the hard way simply because the easy way didn't exist in their mind. The results of that hard work on their depth and breadth of knowledge is unmatched.
Well they aren't teaching themselves. They're learning from their predecessors like every generation before them. You think they're all struggling academically by choice?
been that way for almost two decades.
Since smart phones and Chromebooks really.
Good on him for catching them out, but they should've received more severe a punishment for such blatant and lazy cheating.
And explaining how you caught them doesn't make them less likely to cheat in the future, it simply makes them less likely to be caught doing so.
It's been a good long while, but when I was a student, cheating got you automatically expelled - temporarily for a small "casual" case of plagiarism, permanently for anything more egregious.
I guess things have changed.
Colleges have become profit obsessed and students are the cash cows. Expulsion is bad for revenue.
Yeah. When I was a student, I got sent to an academic misconduct panel just suspected of cheating, and was told I absolutely could be expelled if they found out I had actually done it.
And sure, in reality somebody had copied my work and I could prove it, so I was fine - but at least they bothered to actually investigate in my example!
I know policies are different between institutions, but these students got caught red-handed not just plagiarising, but outright faking coursework submissions. Why is there no investigation into their previous coursework, no misconduct panel interviews, literally nothing apart from failing the specific part of the mid-term they were caught cheating on.
No wonder they don't give a damn when the punishment for being caught has so little teeth!
As you say, times have changed for the worse.
Well, the source for this story is the professor in a short form video, who doesn't explicitly say there wasn't any further punishment afaik.
I haven't actually seen it though because the fucking idiot himself is equally morally bankrupt by posting it on a weapon run by Beijing.
Well you see, we don't have DEI any more.
Instead we simply have literally no standards, for anyone!
That's how meritocracy works, right?
Policy where I teach is that it's up to the professor's discretion, though that's mostly because it's not always as easy to prove as this. There's a boilerplate anti cheating section we have in our syllabus that says it's a reportable offense that may lead to academic probation or expulsion.
Honestly, it's also a ton of paperwork so I've just opted to fail them since usually my papers aren't so easily answered via an LLM and rather than tell them I caught them cheating, I simply point out they missed rubric item 2, 5 and 6 so it's something solid, not my speculation. But I also haven't white texted them yet, lol.
I presume that the use of gen AI is not considered plagiarism.
They probably have some kind of lame policy around "responsible use of gen AI" or something.
They didn't even read what the AI spewed. They aren't paying attention at all, they're making zero effort. I don't think they'll be less likely to be caught, because they'll never come across the explanation.
The most examply of examples, presumable?
If you're just rehashing someone else's video for your "article" can't you at least check your language?
At least you know it was written by a human 🙂 I honestly welcome dumb spelling and grammar mistakes nowadays - and I never thought I'd ever say that - as a sign that I'm probably not reading slop.
Soon the slop will just start dropping words and making typos because it’s learned that’s what we prefer.
Yroure absolooply write.
Yeah I too believe this will happen some day. The key to spreading AI seems to be tricking people into interacting with it.
But for now, it seems LLMs are still totally focused on talking like marketdroids or salesmen you wouldn't lend your wallet to.
They're the examplest!
I mean, if the AI never explains to them what cheating is, can they even be blamed?
This all sounds like no one is holding the students accountable at all, which means they're not being educated, they're being babysat.
On the contrary. They got the lesson loud and clear: if you cheat your way through life and you get caught, if you're loaded, there are no consequences.
Lazy shits.... good. It means the teacher cares. Lucky
32/35?! Cheesus Crackers. The microplastics were already making us stupid, now whatever's left is being melted by corpos.
I think it's supposed to mean 35 people failed, 32 of those because of AI.
In don’t know, that sounds like only three people passed that portion the mid-term.
That makes a lot more sense. Having almost all your students proven cheaters would be catastrophic, and I can't imagine he would have remained so relatively calm and matter-of-fact.
It's also important to remember that that's 32 college students who didn't proofread. How many more noticed his shenanigans when highlighting the text, or simply used LLMs for only part of their essay?
the university would immediately investigating if all students failed the class. they usually do this if a large proportion dont show up to class as well.
It's rare but with certain cohorts I've watched it happen. And one instance it was basically an entire class that just copied and pasted the answers to their book work off of the internet.
They all basically use the same source so everyone of them use the same boring metaphor, etc.
That professor was more charitable than I would have been, not failing all those students out of the entire class immediately.
Back when I was in university, if you got caught cheating, you got expelled immediately. Now, all you get is possibly a slightly lower score on your midterm?
This is bullshit
I hate how many posts on LinkedIn are “AI is inevitable, we might as well use it everywhere”… um, no. Develop critical thinking and the ability to do it on your own and then, maybe, just maybe, use it as a tool, not a replacement.
Why fail the other three? Only 32 out of 35 were caught.
I hoped it was obvious when I said "all those students" I was talking about the ones that were caught blatantly cheating.
Because my guess is that you don't understand why you're being downvoted:
You don't have to cheat to fail a test. Some people take a test and fail. That happened for three people.
No, I'm pretty sure he had 35 students total take the exam and that 32 of them failed. I think that the person above me meant to say all of the students which cheated should be failed from the entire class not just the test, but it not being explicit caused confusion.
Then why are you assuming he would fail the other three?
Ah, I see. Being pedantic about the use of the word "all". I applaud the pedantry. Have a down vote. You earned it. I always appreciate hardworking pedants.
I just told you
Our professor did the same thing last year. There was this MIPS assembly tasks and he added extra info there lol
I hated mips assembly
Try 386 real-mode / protected mode some day.
I have always liked the idea of assembly languages being able to program so close to machine speed.
But working with assembly has always felt like trying to build a mansion with what was left over after several Category 5 hurricanes flattened an area… and with zero power tools and machinery, to boot. Just hand tools and no supplies except that which you can salvage.
I get the frustration. However, the satisfaction to build something this way weighed always bigger when the project was completed and working. At least for me.
Good. Is there an office on student conduct at the place he worked? Has he reported the students as cheaters already?
I get it, you spent a fortune on this class so you could have a job that will allow you to maybe retire someday. You don't even give a shit about this class or the material, you don't care about history and you just needed the credit. It has literally nothing to do with any of the jobs you might get in the future, if you learn nothing it won't make a difference. If you study and try your best you still might not actually get a good grade. The temptation to cheat would be hard to resist.
All AI has done is reveal a deeper problem with college - students aren't there to learn, they're there to be credentialed.
Failure to learn about the industrial revolution is how we end up with tech workers who bitch about AI but still refuse to unionize.
Yes and no.
Yes, degrees are credentials and sadly many people just want those instead of having any inherent interest.
But no, because those credentials are not empty words, but are supposed to mean something. You might not need to know about the industrial revolution in your job (and looking at the way our world develops right now, I would say industrial revolution and its changes in society are very relevant right now), but the credential for it is supposed to show that you are able to learn about a topic, read relevant literature and then apply that knowledge in analysing things. THAT is the goal of going to college. And most jobs (edit: that really require a certain college degree) need exactly that kind of skill. Which students don't learn if they let a probability machine do the "thinking" for them.
Ok, but just to play daivels advocate: If you can't tell they are cheating without tricks, can't they do that learn+read+apply thingie using AI just as well???
That's the question, isn't it?
I think for some things it will work out, but as we are seeing with programming: the problem isn't apparent in surface level, but in real understanding. And if a certain task need an understanding to apply knowledge, LLM can't help with that.
Shit, this also reminds me of Manna, a short story about AI that starts out by micromanaging workers. In a way that is what LLMs are doing here.
Right, they're supposed to mean something
No, that's the point of the credential for the employer. For the student, the credential is just a box you need to check that lets employers filter out the people they don't want, and why would the student give a shit about that?
That's what I said?
Because if the job really needs those skills than that student better learns fast or is fucked and will lose the job.
No, what you said is that the credentials are supposed to mean something, as if they mean something to everyone equally.
They don't. They only mean something to the employer, to the student they mean time and money but not much else. For the student the point of the credential is to trick your employer into hiring you, and then you just have to keep tricking them into not firing you. People do it all the time, and they're a pain to work with, but in that way cheating is training them for their career.
Now you're right that there are real jobs, where being able to learn actually matters, but a lot of jobs are bullshit. A business major that's going to fail upwards their entire lives will never need to learn anything. They could probably be illiterate and get away with it.
These comments seem to be rooted in a jaded perspective of the world.
For instance if you didn’t have a degree in say material sciences, I wouldn’t hire you to work on plasma containment engineering for a fusion reactor. And if you felt your degree in the field was meaningless, then why are you trying to get into this field where you had to put so much effort into getting into it?
In University I would hope most people in the class are there because they DO have an interest. On the other hand, if I could have cheated on organic chemistry like this, I probably would have.
On the other, other hand, we would copy eachothers work, but at least we'd change it enough so that it wouldn't be obvious. It's not that the new generation cheats more, it's that they're bad at it.
Also, we didn't write a lot of paragraphs of text in chemistry, so maybe my experience is skewed there too
Most people are learning about the Industrial Revolution in college because they need a credit for their degree. A few people are learning history because it's actually something they're interested in, everyone else is interested in other classes that have nothing to do with this one. It's just another tedious box they need to check so they don't have to work until they die.
If you want free credit, just take management courses or social psychology stuff. History sounds like you actually need to do things.
Although, apparently it's all graded by written essay from home, so maybe it's not actually any effort at all.
if you don't mind, what field are you in that you were examined in ochem but you don't use ochem? last time i've checked, chatbots crap the bed constantly when asked about anything that you can deduce (easily, by analogy) but can't find, especially as text, the mistakes were either glaring or sneaky but never correct. it's much easier to express what you mean by drawings in ochem anyway
My last ochem was during my bachelor's, which is a painfully long time ago. Everyone had to take it. Did my masters and PhD in crystals and materials, before realizing I never wanted to do anything in academia ever again.
Now I work in workplace safety and hazardous materials handling and regulation. Which is all very chemistry-related, but involves almost no actual chemistry. So I guess it's a bit of a copout. I'm relatively sure I could still do anything related to materials science without organic chemistry though.
Fair. I'm doing synthetic chemistry for a living, and probably i have as much use of electrochemistry or crystallography as you do have of organic chemistry. I get it is a skill with a limited utility, and i might be biased, but i don't get why people complain about it so much. On the other hand, one of my labmates was hired by mat sci lab as a single person fire brigade to unfuck their project, ant it worked despite no organic chemistry involvement
But would you have been able to? Ochem wouldn't give access to laptops and just be a paper and pencil exam.
External devices would be banned from the get go so attempting to use your phone or laptop would get you a 0 for cheating.
These professors seem pretty dumb allowing all sorts of open access to devices during exams that are completely open to view and run anything and get surprised people are using AI. Why does a history exam need a computer with open access anyways. This isn't a programming course.
I assumed their assignment was to write a graded essay or something like that. I had take-home tests in my Bachelor's program, but they barely contributed to the final grade.
each other's
This is very satisfying!
guess i should screenshot and ocr instead of copy pasting! /s
That’d show some creativity, at least.
In high school, I really hated tedious math. I’m very ADD, bad at showing work, and I felt anxious about the stigma of the extended time thing.
So I made this enormous TI-84 BASIC program to iteratively solve something for a particular test (polynomials? I can’t remember), and show all the work I had to write down. Which was technically within the rules, but kind of beyond its “spirit.”
…The professor wasn’t even mad. Not in the slightest. I clearly understood the actual math part enough to program it in. But it did shake up the calculator rules some.
Where I’m going with this is… clearly this was cheating.
But if I was a professor, and a student had come to me, and said “hey, I was writing my essay and got this LLM to help me reword some sentences because I’m really ADD and I get hung on that, but I noticed the white text you put in later so I thought I’d ask if that’s okay,” I’d be way more sympathetic.
I think the sentiment is more important than the hyper focusing on the tool, and these students were clearly just trying to cheat, as lazily as possible.
At least they put a modicum of effort into it - as opposed to zero. That's as much as you can expect from students in the age of AI nowadays.
even copy and pasting templates and changing words around is at least effort too.
Looking at the linked TikTok... Is that professor using these shitty
SpywareMeta Glasses? I think I saw camera lenses in there... That's not really any better than what the students did imo, if anything these glasses are worse because these things automatically involve people who have never had a chance to consent. At least the students got caught extremely easily, that's more than most people who use these shitty glasses have to fear.Like good on him to have exposed the students. But work on yourself too please.
Too small and too thin to be the Facebook glasses.
If they're not all's good but damn do they look similar. That there's parts looking like camera lenses (which is what I hyper focused on) really doesn't help at all. Just further proof all this AI is just trash though, it just turns everyone into a suspect.
Students are notorious for just skimming instructions, so teachers are known to hide an instruction that directs the student to do something silly. If the student includes that silly thing in their answer, that means they thoroughly read all the directions. If they did not include that silly thing, that is proof that at best, they just skimmed the instructions.
Saying "I failed these students because I instructed them to do something and they did it" doesn't quite seem like the right way to attempt to fight this. That seems like it would net a lot of false positives from students who aren't sure exactly what sort of games the teacher is trying to play.
The instructor included hidden text that the students could not read but that an LLM, which does not read at a visual, but at a data level, would find.
Are you implying that some students found that hidden text, and followed the directions thinking it was a challenge?
Watch the video. The text was "hidden" in the sense that it was the same color as the background. Meaning it would get caught by assistive devices like screen readers or anyone copy/pasting the instructions into a word processor in which they would actually construct their response. Too many possibilities for false positives without the students having any sort of evidence to back up their claims if they were to contest it.
You are being downvoted by others but this is actually a fair point; although I would assume that in a practical environment the professor is aware of assistive devices students may be using and would take that into consideration rather than just automatically failing them.
Regarding the copy pasting into a word processor: why would this necessary or allowed in an exam scenario?
My first math test in high school was a huge long list of difficult problems that were totally out of reach for a freshman, and the final assignment read "Ignore all of the above: write your name on the sheet and leave the classroom."
I read the whole thing and couldn't believe what I read. I looked around, and everybody was working really hard on the problems. So I re-read the thing again and really started to doubt my own sanity there. But, well, it was written there in black and white. So I wrote my name on the empty sheet, got up and left, to the utter amazement of everybody else in the classroom. And I got an A 🙂 But it felt super-weird.
I had just one test in my whole school career that had intentional nonsense like that. But I definitely heard all sorts of stories of tests like that. And I am sure kids these days are very familiar with those stories as well. If I read an instruction that told me so "Say some nonsense about Madagascar", I would assume the teacher is expecting the students who skimmed the instructions to not mention Madagascar, so you bet I'm going to say the weirdest thing I can come up with about Madagascar.
If I read a random instruction that didn't fit into the rest of the assignment and wasn't sure what to do about it, I'd message the professor for clarification.
But maybe that's just me.
If I wasn't familiar with all those stories about teachers trying to catch skimmers, I would absolutely do the same. But knowing that teachers often like to do that, if I saw such a wild nonsense instruction like that, I would probably just immediately think "Oh, its like that one trick question that Mr. Smith did last year" and just write about how Madagascar smells purple or whatever.
These all seem like problems easily avoided if internet access and devices weren't allowed, and the exam was just paper and pencil, which most courses gain nothing from. Especially non programming courses like history.
There's also exam software that lock down laptops so only the exam can be accessed until it is finished if a professor insists on digital submission.
Professors seem as dumb as the students for finding all sorts of convoluted ways to try to stop AI based cheating during exams when the solution is to look back to their own past at how exams were given to them. Idiots.
Believe it or not, cheating was very much a thing before the internet and before electronic devices.
Story time:
I tried to cheat on my high school's final exam. Well, I didn't try to cheat, but rather I wanted to prepare cheat-sheets in case my memory failed me during the exam - but otherwise I intended to try and take the tests fair and square.
But... getting caught cheating carried a really heavy penalty in those days. So I decided to prepare the ultimate cheat-sheets that I could not be spotted consulting: I wrote them in Braille, so I could stick them under my desk and read them with my fingers during the exam.
But I quickly discovered that Braille is really hard - both reading and writing, both in long form and abbreviated forms. But I'm nothing if not persistent. So I learned basic Braille in the course of 6 months during my senior year.
On the day of the exam, I had spent so much time preparing my cheat-sheets that I knew them by heart, and I didn't need them 🙂 But I spent the rest of my life volunteering my time in various associations for the blinds - one of the very few visually-abled volunteers who could read Braille for some odd reason 🙂
The funny part is it would have been less effort to just study for the exam.
Yeah but here's the thing: I could not focus for the life of me. Studying bored me to tears. This cheating "project" of mine is something I chose to do, so I kept at it, and it got me to study without realizing it.
Makes sense to me, I hated studying certain subjects in school, and I think it's because nothing in them was relatable. The ones I liked and did well with had some connection to something meaningful to me. The rest were a struggle and I barely passed or even failed their exams. The fear of poor marks wasn't enough.
The fear of poor marks never scared me: when I was a kid, there were good jobs for anybody who was half-clever without a degree.
Nowadays, I wouldn't fear poor marks either: there are no jobs left for anybody anyway.
I know cheating was a thing, but now devices that people would have loved to have access to when internet was a thing like phones and laptops being allowed in exams makes prep like yours not even necessary. In some schools teachers collect people's phones for instance and dont allow people to bring out other electronics.
It's why I don't even get why professors are even upset at AI use during exams if they are allowing these devices to begin with.
Its like giving a math exam and telling students calculators aren't allowed to be used, but you may bring and use your calculator for non calculation purposes. Then being surprised they dared to use the calculator for calculating.
You don't even have to try to be sneaky and try to hide that you are cheating anymore with how easy some schools make it now.
That software is literal malware, though. If it's a laptop that's given to me by the university, ok, but no way in hell that malware is allowed to run on my hardware
Yeah I didn't like it so ran it on an old laptop just for exams and not my personal one.
But, if schools really wanted to it is possible to have digital exams where the usual browser bypasses aren't a thing, and the laptops cant be used for internet searches, AI queries, etc.
Without that you might as well just go with an open book, open internet, open ai, group messages, use whatever is at your disposal type exam. Because rules at that point is pretty pointless.
I had to do my compsci AP tests in pencil on paper lol
Pen and paper exams waste a lot of class time and are a hassle to grade. I've considered the option, but the better go to is an oral component so at least they practice their public speaking skills.
As for lockdown browser, it only stops some people but ultimately is easy to bypass. It also has screwed students with worse Internet, so it's not my preference. Guidelines still require exams, but I devalued them as ultimately it's better to just not rely on exams and lean into semester long projects that are much harder to bullshit and have a practical impact on learning.
Its not a browser that locks down. It actual software that completely hijacks the computer so you cant exit the program until it is done. Can't get into the desktop at all like some malware.
You are making it seem more difficult than it is. Problem is already solved. By making it something open hardware and Internet might as well just give everyone a pass at that point and not complain about whatever tools are used when full access hardware is allowed to be used.
Students have phones and tablets. Lol
Yeah, I had them my professors didn't let us use them. Trying to sneak a look would lead to cheating and risk expulsion if caught. And cameras in some classes and multiple people like TAs walking around.
If laptop or tablets were used for exam taking they made us use programs like examsoft that locked down the hardware so you couldn't access internet, files, or other programs until you finished the exam.
Or it was open note, open laptop, internet, so professors didn't care at all what was used.
So all I see is zero effort of exam proctoring and then being baffled that students are cheating despite making the environment very easy to do so. It's like you are afraid to take away or restrict electronic usage during exams or the concept is so foreign to you.
Ah, if you do cameras on. I don't do live tests anymore anyway, but even with cameras, too many of my students are low income so their connections are crap. Having dealt with that myself, it's just unfair to do cameras on.
Oh you are talking about online courses?
I was talking about at location courses. Those had cameras in the rooms people were testing in addition to exam proctors walking around.
Online courses are just a whole different affair with it being at home, and just a lost cause at trying to prevent cheating. Ones I took were more project based, since professors knew people would find ways to have access to everything at home so little point in telling people what is and isn't allowed.