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/BTMarquis Jul 27 '26

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

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u/LaconicLacedaemonian Jul 27 '26

That means the professor can't use AI to grade it then. 

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u/m0rogfar Jul 27 '26

I mean, OCR is a thing. And if scanning the pages is too hard, there are solutions for that too.

I had to do a written math exam, wherein the university had moved to an all-digital system to make consistent digital document handling on locked-down computers possible, but we had to write by hand, because formulas generally take time to write digitally in proper academic syntax, and the exam was highly time-constrained.

They used a system provided by Nokia where you used a provided pen to write on a paper, but the provided pen actually had a camera inside it to see what you wrote, and the paper had a serial number + placement encoded into the paper by altered magnetic properties, that the pen could read as you wrote. It would then use these to recreate the page digitally.

The result was fairly seamless. I just wrote a bunch of papers, and then a PDF just appeared on the provided locked-down submission computer without me ever submitting a paper anywhere.

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u/coldblade2000 Jul 27 '26

I mean, OCR is a thing. And if scanning the pages is too hard, there are solutions for that too.

Reading handwriting for Gen Alpha kids seems like a pretty strong stress test for OCR