r/technology • • 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/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.