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/Doodenmier Jul 27 '26

I've worked as higher ed instructor support for the past decade. One major problem is the inability to definitively prove AI use, barring a trap like mentioned in the story that OP linked.

We've had a plagiarism detection tool for a long time, and that tool added an AI detector a couple years back. But we disabled the AI detector fairly quickly when it became clear that it was also spitting out false positives. Even if only 1/10 winds up being a false positive, that's still a huge number of students who will be facing major punishent for something they didn't do.

At this point, the only way to immediately address the issue is for the instructors to modify the way they approach their courses. Whether that means embracing AI usage, requiring iterations, moving to handwritten assignments, screen recording exams– whatever they decide is up to them, but the old copy-and-paste approach is a million times worse now that whole papers can be GPT'd into existence.

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u/SirEnderLord Jul 29 '26

Oral examinations?

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u/Doodenmier Jul 29 '26

That's another way that some instructors have approached it. One person I've closely worked with has gone from staunchly anti-AI to begrudgingly being okay with it, if the student can verbally defend whatever they've submitted and demonstrate a clear understanding of the materials. That's easier said than done, of course.

What's funny to me is how numerous instructors I've worked with have all said how they would suspect a student of using AI for their work, and how the students almost always confess to using AI even if they weren't actually accused of it (yet) lol.

You'll find the full range of opinions on AI usage from teachers and professors. Some love the potential or enjoy being on the cutting edge, and others want to auto-fail anybody caught using it