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/SinibusUSG Jul 27 '26

Frankly if universities want to actually stop this they have to treat it like the academic dishonesty it is and start expelling people.

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u/redthrull Jul 27 '26

What makes you think they actually care whether the students learn anything or not? It's all about the money at this point. Students pay, they receive a diploma. The End.

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u/nathanzoet91 Jul 27 '26

But if it is pointed out that graduates from said college know barely anything, employers will be less likely to hire people who graduated from said school. This in turn leads to less enrollment in said school, which leads to less money for the school. It works, just needs the social /collective shame treatment.

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u/Hydrodynamic_Spatula Jul 27 '26

It's only a problem for a school if one school does it. If all or most schools do it, then it's the new normal. And the few schools that do have quality graduates can inflate their tuition. Same as what corporations do. It's a race to the bottom chasing profits

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u/nathanzoet91 Jul 27 '26

Correct. Like you said, it's a race to the bottom. So, do institutions want to get more money or less? If employers start finding that candidates they hire from everywhere are not ready for the job, on-the-job training will become the new norm again. Bottom line is people need to know how to do their job, and the people that do their job correctly will be compensated better. Better understanding = better pay = better profit. Nothing has changed, just the variables are now being affected. Want to make good money? Learn how to do your job well.

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u/minwood Jul 27 '26

It sucks how true this is. For profit schools could only be viable for so long under capitalism until the dam breaks and they all try to farm as much money as possible. Accept anyone who will pay and graduate anyone who doesn’t severely fuck up.

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u/FreddoMac5 Jul 27 '26

it's funny you think public and private non profit schools don't have budgets that have to be funded with tuition

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u/dmazzoni Jul 27 '26

They’re devaluing education and they should care about that.

When I’m looking at a resume, a college degree from certain schools used to mean something.

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u/25thNite Jul 27 '26

They already do that when they let underachieving rich people automatically in and pass or when they let top athletes take the easiest courses with little effort because they provide financial value to schools

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u/jaynort Jul 27 '26

They don’t, because money has become more important than anything else and that’s just… normal now.

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u/porktorque44 Jul 27 '26

“They” as in administrators, are comprised of the same BMAs destroying every institution. Their skills are seen as transferable to the ones running other industries so they will have new jobs waiting for them in a new industry after destroying this one.

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u/dmazzoni Jul 27 '26

That may be true about administrators, but college professors wield a lot of power. If they collectively decide to crack down on cheating there's nothing administration can do about it.

That's who I'm disappointed in.

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u/porktorque44 Jul 28 '26

I can’t speak to how this applies in this situation or how pervasive this is at the moment but there has also been an increasing shift towards non-tenured adjunct professors who can be easily removed. But you are right that professors, tenured or otherwise, should be throwing their weight around here.

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u/HateWinslet Jul 27 '26

Infuriating considering that when I was in college 20 years ago if you did not paraphrase something well enough (or if you just accidentally used a sentence that could be found online), you had a university court date to go before a tribunal and prove that you didn’t plagiarize - and people absolute were occasionally expelled for it.

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u/EveryRadio Jul 27 '26

For a large number of college professors, teaching is the side gig and academic research is where they actually spend their time

Some colleges are more "research" focused than others and it varies wildely with majors, but for the colleges where research is the focus I can easily see the whole AI cheating issue only being addressed briefly when articles like this come out

Otherwise? Probably not without heavy regulations that are ACTUALLY enforced. Paper tests and exams arent a bad idea but online exams and quizzes are so convinent that it will be an uphill battle in my opinion

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u/HomsarWasRight Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

It’s just super short-sided short-sighted. They have to know they’re making the thing they’re selling worthless over time if they don’t actually make it at least a little worthwhile.

Edit: Stupid typo.

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u/mazurcurto Jul 27 '26

* shortsighted

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u/HomsarWasRight Jul 27 '26

Both are correct:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/short-sighted

The non-hyphenate is just more common in the US.

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u/mazurcurto Jul 27 '26

You wrote "short-sided", not "short-sighted". I wasn't noting the hyphen.

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u/BiZzles14 Jul 27 '26

That just isn't the case at all, the schools care a lot because it devalues the degrees they put their name on. The professors care a lot as well. Schools just haven't fully adapted to the change yet, but within a few years we'll see many more changes come into play that are really going to hit the people that have already spent the past few years relying on AI.

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u/muusca Jul 27 '26

At a certain point, if this continues, an academic degree will become so devalued to the point of worthlessness, so they should care. It’ll take a while to catch up, but if we all accept that college students are using AI to earn their degree, why would employers care whether you have one or not?

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u/restricteddata Jul 27 '26

That is not really how universities see it. They do, of course, want tuition money. But they also want alumni donations, good job placement rates, and other things that are in the students' interest — not because they're nice, but because those things are worth a lot more than tuition in the long run.

The problem is that most university administrators are credulous and totally cooked on AI hype. Some professors are, some professors aren't. The official line is that they don't condone cheating but they think that students need to learn how to use the important "tools" for working in the modern world, and to learn how to use it "ethically." And other lies they tell themselves...

Eventually they will recognize the damage this is doing to higher education. What they will do about it, if anything, I don't know. But they're not there yet, despite all of the evidence that this stuff is a net negative for education and should just be banned across the board in a teaching context.