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/TheMusicArchivist Jul 27 '26

I mark essays at university, and one person clearly wrote it using AI. People don't write analytical essays and start complimenting the question, or adding adjectives to every other noun. Turnitin said it was 99% AI.

Unfortunately, we aren't permitted to assume the student actually used AI and fail them because there is always a small chance they're just weird at writing. If we have no definitive proof, we could get in trouble throwing accusations around.

So I was told by my superiors to just mark it as if it had been written by a human. I failed it, because it was objectively bad. But had it been good, I would have had to have passed it.

Thankfully, next assignment was much more normal, and I hope that the student learnt that AI doesn't really help them.