Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

[gamerk2]

He banana prompted them. Applause.

 

[gamerk2]

We really are moving closer to Idiocracy/Wall-E every day.

The people in idiocracy were smarter then people today, because they were ultimately smart enough to put the smartest guy in the room in charge of everything.

 

[Rudyduu]

I guess the days are gone when pencil, paper and cursive where the way to write and turn in assignments. I'm not even that old, yet. Even back in the mid to late 90's a lot of my teachers required us to write out our papers and most of the time the work was done during a few days of class because we'd go to the library to find books via the card catalog, browsed the books organized by the Dewey Decimal System, browsing old newspapers on microfiche, making use of the encyclopedias and finally, checking out books!

Makes me wonder if any of these kids today even know what a library is or what exactly it is used for....

Good on the teacher making the kids look stupid, but bad on the teacher for allowing kids to simply do everything online.

Why does anyone need to know what a library is when you can find everything, including books, on the internet? What use is cursive today? What a waste of time learning something that isn't that important today. What's wrong with doing everything online when so much is already done online? Learning how to teach yourself something and how to use the resources available is more important. It's how people can get the skills they need to get a job when they get out of highschool or college since neither does a good job to prepare people for entering the job market.

Cursive is not taught anymore, because most people have the dexterity of a paraplegic running a marathon on broken stilts.

How can anyone say "most people" when no one can possibly know enough people to make such a claim. You can't possibly know 20% of the people in you country and certainly not a majority of people in the world. What makes you think people have less dexterity today then 50 years ago? Is there kind of benchmark test to determine something you're presenting as a fact? You think the average middle schooler in the 50s would be any good at typing with their thumbs on a tiny keyboard? Or typing at all?

Cursive was, and still is, extraordinarily useful. When you have to put text on paper by hand then cursive is dramatically faster than writing block letters. Writing block letters requires lifting the pen from the paper after every stroke. Writing cursive only requires lifting the pen occasionally, such as crossing "t"s and dotting "I"s.

Comparing two slow methods of writing against a much faster form of communication doesn't make any sense. How much time would a student have to spend practicing handwriting to write fast *and* legible? Isn’t that time better spent learning something a student could apply immediately, like how to set a budget, how to weld, fix a car, prepare for a job interview, preparing for and dealing with losing a job or being in a vehicle accident...etc?

In 18 years of English as a Second Language teaching, the students who progressed fastest were those who practiced with pen and paper, writing sentences using new words and sentence patterns. This is easily verifiable: take any challenging subject, break it into smaller chunks, and use writing as your final step to explain how it works.

I'm certain your best students were that ones that cared about doing well in school and those who practiced writing were the ones who cared. I'd argue being a practiced hand writer wasn't the cause of progressing faster it was a characteristic of taking learning seriously.

 

[BobHome]

As a teacher, the reality is the only assessments I place higher value on are the 1:1 face to face assessments I do with students. I wasn't surprised when some of the students scoring very high on the written online assignments didn't have a clue about the subject matter when I did the 1:1 conversational assessments with them.

Applicant waving his piece of paper: Hey, I got my degree, hire me.
Company: Okay. Here's you desk and your workload.
Applicant now new hire: Thanks! (what the **** am I supposed to do with this work-whatever he said???)

 

[Mark Fuller]

Cursive was totally, utterly, useless. There's a reason its not taught anymore.

I know in the 90s you had to walk uphill both ways, but today, everything is done online. When you work a job, anything you submit is going to be on a computer. The days of physically writing out tests is LONG gone.

Glad the teacher thought of this. Schools have got to get over their technophobia and adapt to modern tech, instead of trying to do things the way their great grandfathers did it.

Cursive was by no means totally useless. It sustained the world for 7000 years before AI proponents had even been born to crawl out of diapers. And I betcha AI won't change your children's diapers.

 

[bmmg39]

Cursive was totally, utterly, useless. There's a reason its not taught anymore.

I know in the 90s you had to walk uphill both ways, but today, everything is done online. When you work a job, anything you submit is going to be on a computer. The days of physically writing out tests is LONG gone.

Glad the teacher thought of this. Schools have got to get over their technophobia and adapt to modern tech, instead of trying to do things the way their great grandfathers did it.

You should research the matter a little more. Several states have mandated a return to teaching cursive. This will help students with their college assignments, which more and more are being assigned in the old Blue Books. No phones, no laptops. And not a moment too soon...

 

[Mark Fuller]

Why does anyone need to know what a library is when you can find everything, including books, on the internet? What use is cursive today? What a waste of time learning something that isn't that important today. What's wrong with doing everything online when so much is already done online? Learning how to teach yourself something and how to use the resources available is more important. It's how people can get the skills they need to get a job when they get out of highschool or college since neither does a good job to prepare people for entering the job market.


How can anyone say "most people" when no one can possibly know enough people to make such a claim. You can't possibly know 20% of the people in you country and certainly not a majority of people in the world. What makes you think people have less dexterity today then 50 years ago? Is there kind of benchmark test to determine something you're presenting as a fact? You think the average middle schooler in the 50s would be any good at typing with their thumbs on a tiny keyboard? Or typing at all?


Comparing two slow methods of writing against a much faster form of communication doesn't make any sense. How much time would a student have to spend practicing handwriting to write fast *and* legible? Isn’t that time better spent learning something a student could apply immediately, like how to set a budget, how to weld, fix a car, prepare for a job interview, preparing for and dealing with losing a job or being in a vehicle accident...etc?


I'm certain your best students were that ones that cared about doing well in school and those who practiced writing were the ones who cared. I'd argue being a practiced hand writer wasn't the cause of progressing faster it was a characteristic of taking learning seriously.

Ya'll don't realize that the world functioned for thousands of years before the advent of the computer with cursive because it had to be that way. And believe it or not, I remember when the accounting process at the bank was just that way and sometimes I could get my business done faster than I can today sifting through unecessary menus and what you call Artificial intelligence, which I don't think is always intelligence at all but just another gimmick to get money out of my back pocket.

 

[Arthurik_jan]

As someone who barely scraped by on every written test due to time limits or the assessor(s) being unable to read my writing I object to that. (Typically in the top 20% when typing things out)

That's always been a problem for me, but in college where I took programming related courses that was amplified due to some exams containing written (by hand) tests asking for programming examples.
Writing out code by hand is so unnatural and forces a top-down flow that you (or at least I) rarely use whilst actually writing code, I realize whilst say writing inside a loop it's more efficient not having to recalculate something for every entry so I move it outside the loop (and thus up). Can't do that on paper.

imo until local AI is a normal thing tests should be done either on a very restricted system or simply one without an internet connection. Anything you're supposed to work on during your own time or on your own device hidden prompts seem like a minimum to do. Ensure students at least read the question and the answer that's generated.

I agree it is a silly exercise in certain cases to force people to write things out, like the example you provided. I am just going to point out that in my Java 101 courses writing out difficult to grasp snippets of code using pen and paper while trying to explain it to someone was a fantastic method for me to grasp certain concepts like recursive self calling methods, sorting algorithms and such.

 

[Axeia]

recursive self calling methods

Funnily enough the way they were explained to me in the form of really dumb examples where a loop would've been simpler the logic didn't click for me in my head.
Then after banging my head on it for a while I realised I had already been using them since before being explained what they are by traversing a DOM for example. I had used them for some other situations as well, but traversing a DOM really is something you dont want to tackle in other way.

The way something is explained/shown can indeed make a big difference.

 

[trents]

I'd like to know how the prof hid the invisible instruction set. It will still take up space in a line of text.

 

[Spotifaj]

Surprise, Students!

https://I.imgflip.com/axntdq.jpg

 

[Axeia]

I'd like to know how the prof hid the invisible instruction set. It will still take up space in a line of text.

First paragraph of this article

The solution, used to great effect by one professor, was to hide a white-colored font in the assignment prompt telling the AI to talk nonsense about an unrelated subject.​

​

If you want to see it exactly click the video linked in the article, but basically he stuck it in at the end of a line somewhere. Which is smart because if you stick it at the very end it'll show wherever it gets pasted instead of being 'offscreen'.

I was a lazy student myself back in the day and I probably would've used AI as well if I had the option. But at least I'd read the frigging thing if for nothing else then to check for the typical AI'ish things like long dashes.

 

[bigreddyde]

As a Gen-Xer, stop with the generational superiority. If the kids today don't know what a library is, it's on their parents for never taking them.

It's on the government for closing them

The two kids who weren't caught cheating probably knew about "paste without formatting".

This isn't the first time I've heard of professors doing something to bury text so that the students wouldn't see it, but the AI bot would. Changing the font color is one way. Another is changing the font size to shrink the text into a point smaller than one pixel. AI bots are designed to expect copy/pasted text from the internet, so they will filter out any HTML formatting instructions as a matter of course. This makes it fairly easy for the professor to slip in text the student won't see, but the AI bot will. Any student who spends a few minutes a day reading news related to university study will already know this.

What the student wants is the ability to see the text, and only the text, being pasted into the prompt box. Most browsers on most operating systems can do this for you. On Windows and Linux you would press Ctrl-Shift-V to paste only plain text. On MacOS you'd press Cmd-Shift-V (or Cmd-Shift-Option-V). Alternatively, you might have a pop-up menu option like "paste without formatting" or "paste special". In the worst case, the old school way of accomplishing the same thing is to paste the text first into a simple text editor, manually edit out the HTML formatting code, and then copy the remaining text into the AI bot prompt box.

The students who weren't caught probably also used AI, but found the professor's AI trap and removed it before sending the prompt to the AI bot.

Or, you could type the prompt instead of copy-paste. (Gasp!)

 

[Mark Fuller]

I don't think people realize how the answers that people get using AI are put there in the first place. Oh well, where there's a will there's an A. When you do something for yourself, you don't have to rely on second-hand information for an answer and therefore don't have to take what comes, like maybe an inadvertent mouse click that will produce a self- replicating virus that will destroy all of your files.

 

[p51d007]

Sadly though, now they know how he did it, he'll have to come up with something different because you know EVERY student nationwide will now be doing a copy/paste to see if there is hidden text.

 

[Mark Fuller]

Why does anyone need to know what a library is when you can find everything, including books, on the internet? What use is cursive today? What a waste of time learning something that isn't that important today. What's wrong with doing everything online when so much is already done online? Learning how to teach yourself something and how to use the resources available is more important. It's how people can get the skills they need to get a job when they get out of highschool or college since neither does a good job to prepare people for entering the job market.


How can anyone say "most people" when no one can possibly know enough people to make such a claim. You can't possibly know 20% of the people in you country and certainly not a majority of people in the world. What makes you think people have less dexterity today then 50 years ago? Is there kind of benchmark test to determine something you're presenting as a fact? You think the average middle schooler in the 50s would be any good at typing with their thumbs on a tiny keyboard? Or typing at all?


Comparing two slow methods of writing against a much faster form of communication doesn't make any sense. How much time would a student have to spend practicing handwriting to write fast *and* legible? Isn’t that time better spent learning something a student could apply immediately, like how to set a budget, how to weld, fix a car, prepare for a job interview, preparing for and dealing with losing a job or being in a vehicle accident...etc?


I'm certain your best students were that ones that cared about doing well in school and those who practiced writing were the ones who cared. I'd argue being a practiced hand writer wasn't the cause of progressing faster it was a characteristic of taking learning seriously.

If 2 and 2 is still 4 everything you can do or find online is exacly the same things you can do or find in a paper book library. Which is where the information you will find online originated in the first place thanks to Guttenburg. You can buy an automobile online but you still have to know how to drive. And nothing online will cure your mama when she's laying in the emergency room (although I know it is true that online computers do aid in surgeries). Somebody has t be there to start with. Just like AI has to have someone set it up in the first place, and it might come to pass that machines will replicate machines someday. But the stage to set this all up happened thousands of years ago. Have people completely freaked out about the fact the we all live in a physical material energy universe.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

.

 

[ccccn]

I'm speaking of myself also, we all better watch over our health from here on out, the next doctors, surgeons and rehab technicians are going to be the next generation. And it is these people that will be diagnosing the next diseases and fixing them. Doctors from previous generations are going to be a lot more intelligent (in my opinion), compared to the next doctors that are coming up now. Current doctors and surgeons didn't have that luxury of having AI and the internet from back in the days. They had to sweat blood to get where they're at, but this generation has got it way to easy with AI, social media and the internet. Can you imagine all the misinformation that is out there? We will be next up in line when we run into issues with our health. Your next heart surgeon that relied heavily on ChatGPT to pass his exams could very well be the one that will open you up and work on you. If that isn't scary enough as it is, I don't know what is. I'm not saying using AI to get better on your skillset is a bad thing, not at all. But there are some people who rely on it HEAVILY to the point where they wouldn't know what to do if they didn't have it. That's what I am worried about. Also I'm not getting political or anything, but combine with what is happening now with kids relying heavily on AI and the whole DEI thing when it comes to prioritizing diversity over meritocracy, your going to end up having a real problem where doctors won't know what they're doing 10-20 years later from now. People are going to start dying if this doesn't get fixed.

It's already too late , have you seen todays examples of medical and mental health professionals ? You got people with medical degree's insisting that hundreds of different genders walk the planet .