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
32.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.2k

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.

1.5k

u/BTMarquis Jul 27 '26

This might sound crazy, but they could also have them use a pen and paper to take tests.

1

u/Mediocre_Internet939 Jul 27 '26

Or have verbal tests?

You draw a question. Go into a room and have 30 minutes to prepare your defense. You present for 10 minutes, then get asked follow up questions for 10 minutes, get kicked out for 5 minutes, get back in and get your grade. Repeat for every other student in your class.

Takes roughly a week for a university class.

This was the exam format for the university I went to, for 3 of 4 exams each semester for 5 years.

The fourth exam would was a paper defense. You spend the semester writing a paper as a group of 2-6 students. You hand it in. The examinator and censor reads it, rips it apart, find the flaws and prepares their questions for your examination.

You then defend your paper for an hour or more, take a break and go back in for the offence. The examinator and censor grill you, questioning you on everything you wrote. If you do well you get questioned on why you didn't use a different method, theory etc. or how you would have used them, if you were to do so.

After an hour or so if this you have another break and then get your grade. The grade is usually half of your semester score.

You do this 10 times over your studies. With your masters thesis being the entire grade for that semester.

There is next to no way to use LLMs for this. Sure you can use it to write / proof read your paper/thesis, but that won't help much when you are being grilled by your professor and an external professor from a competing university.

The longest exam I had was a 5 hour defense.