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/Cubacane Jul 27 '26

High school teacher here— they will hand you a piece of paper and not be able to tell you one thing that they wrote. Access to AI means access to bypassing thinking. Maybe 1 out of 5 kids uses it to "help," (which is what admin THINKS AI is for) but the vast majority are using it so they can get the assignment done and move on to something else.

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u/mrclut Jul 27 '26

They need to start holding kids back in school again. The whole no kid left behind thing was a bad idea.

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u/DangerousPuhson Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind is truly baffling in its implementation.

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

You'd think it meant taking the kids that are falling behind and giving them extra help to catch up, but instead it means dragging all the other kids down to their level, which is hilariously backwards.

That's confusing and a borderline misleading take.

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

Time to Cheat on Standardized Testing Act.

When the student does this, it's cheating.

When the professor does this, it's forgery.

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u/flortny Jul 28 '26

The colleges will never know act

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u/Toby_O_Notoby Jul 28 '26

It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

It's a prime example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

<inBeavis&Butthead> Huh, huh. ¿What are we measuring again? ¡I need TP for my cornholio!

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u/Intelligent-Survey39 Jul 28 '26

If you really think about it long term it is not a misleading take. The dilution of the education by giving underperforming students a pass creates huge gaps between knowledge levels of the top students and the average/low students when they move to the next level/class. This forces teachers to “dumb” the curriculum down in order to play catch up with the students who got a pass, meanwhile the properly prepared students are left behind in a sense. Over time this actually alters the curriculum to reflect a lower average entry level student. A few generations of that and now a college level classes are doing high school level remediation because they consistently have students that met the requirements on paper because they were passed along, but cant cut it in the class.

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u/VoiceofReasonability Jul 28 '26

My daughter has actually said college was easier than high school and she went to a college that is somewhat selective and ranked as a good college.

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u/Prestigious_Aerie219 Jul 28 '26

Well yeah they want everyone to go to college now so the poors can all start their lives drowning in debt. It helps maintain the caste system. We just call it "freedom" these days.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

If you really think about it long term it is not a misleading take

I said borderline misleading. I didn't say it was misleading.

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u/owdee Jul 27 '26

It should have been named the Pass Every Student or Your School's Funding Gets Cut ACT.

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards. If a school has students struggling to pass, they very clearly need more resources and funding, not less. But of course, as anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells can easily see, the whole system was set up to divert funding from schools in low-income or urban areas ("low performing schools") straight to wealthier suburban schools that hardly need any more money and resources.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 27 '26

Which, in true GOP fashion faschion, is completely back-asswards.

True, true, yet I do believe this was one of those rare bi-partisanally supported things, due to it happening before social media was a thing to tribalise people.

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u/txsnowman17 Jul 28 '26

Correct, it passed the House with 381-41 in favor and the Senate via a 87-10 vote. Very much a bipartisan support act.

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u/donut-reply Jul 27 '26

No Child Left Behind...Or Else Act

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u/Huttser17 Jul 28 '26

Pass Individual Slow Students Or Fail Financially

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u/dragonmantank Jul 28 '26

But that's the problem. "No Child Left Behind" was repealed in 2015, and the Obama administration moved the bulk of this work to the states under the "Every Student Succeeds Act." Now you have a system without federal funding and oversight, and states like mine (Ohio) constantly cutting state funding. ESSA was meant to allow states to handle this closer to home, but wonder of wonders the current administration is tearing it all apart.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 29 '26

But that's the problem. "No Child Left Behind" was repealed in 2015, and the Obama administration moved the bulk of this work to the states under the "Every Student Succeeds Act.

Oh interesting I thought that was an addendum, not a repeal of the former.

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u/ButterscotchAward Jul 28 '26

In tons of school districts it just turned into teaching the test answers.

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u/I_Cut_Shows Jul 31 '26

The right wing are masters at naming bills the opposite of what they do in implementation.

Clean air act? Passed by Republicans? It allows more pollution for sure.

Clean water act? Oh you say it was a Republican bill? Then the water is dirtier than it was before that bill passed.

Here’s the funny thing. They knew at the time that No Child Left Behind would do exactly this.

But they want to destroy public education. So…they passed it.