I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was Deflating
6mon 24d ago by discuss.tchncs.de/u/thfi in fuck_ai from discuss.tchncs.de
‘But there is a difference between recognising AI use and proving its use. So I tried an experiment. … I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.‘
Article archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20251125225915/https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/set-trap-to-catch-students-cheating-ai_uk_691f20d1e4b00ed8a94f4c01
Distillation:
Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.
I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”
I decided to not punish them. All I know how to do is teach, so that’s what I did. I assigned a wonderful essay by Cal Poly professor Patrick Lin that he addressed to his class on the benefits and detriments of AI use. I attached instructions that asked them to read it and reflect. These instructions also had a Trojan horse.
Thirty-six of my AI students completed it. One of them used AI, and the other 12 have been slowly dropping the class. Ultimately, 35 out of 47 isn’t too bad. The responses to the assignment were generally good, and some were deeply reflective.
But a handful said something I found quite sad: “I just wanted to write the best essay I could.” Those students in question, who at least tried to provide some of their own thoughts before mixing them with the generated result, had already written the best essay they could. And I guess that’s why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do.
Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a saviour. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.
The only problem I have with the whole "Don't be afraid to fail" thing, is that so much rides on the grades a student receives it makes it very difficult to not treat every assignment as a highly critical task which must be as close to perfect as possible. I totally agree with this professor and I believe he did the right thing by the students. The problem is the system itself.
Those who are going to outsource their work are likely to always outsource their work or take the path of least resistance. You can't moral lesson or embarrass that away, usually. But the rest of the class seems to have learned a valuable lesson, or at least learned how to cheat better.
Regardless, we need to stop having everything boil down to the grades. There's good reasons grades are important, but there are even more that are detrimental. I don't know the answer, I just know the system is broken. Maybe it's just capitalism that's broken.
Society: "don't be afraid to fail!"
Also society: actively punishes failure with intricate systems such as admissions, CV screening, and increasing fewer safety nets
holding a gun to your head "why are you so nervous?"
The most ironic part of this is, if those kids did understand the basics of Marxism, they'd be able to see this much more clearly.
I agree, the biggest thing that stood out to me here is that they were afraid to fail. If students were focused on creating the work that appeals to them, rather than just the work that will get the highest grade, think of the creativity that could be explored. Instead students are just focused on saying the "right answers" and dont get to think critically about the material. Sad
And it's ironic because once I let that go my grades improved. Professors wanted me to think for myself and do something weird, but only when I thought for myself.
My undergraduate school didn't assign grades below a C. If you did piss-poorly, the class just didn't show up on your transcript. This encouraged me to take classes I might otherwise have avoided, if I was worried about my GPA.
I fully agree. This was decades in the making. Good grades became the only important thing, we told students every day they won't amount to anything if they don't have straight As and then act surprised when they panic and use any tool to make it.
But we also leave them alone with a bunch of technology way too young which fosters a mentality of "Why do it myself when I've so many ways to have it done by a computer".
Yeah. Afraid to fail is bullshit, just like a college degree has become bullshit. Right down to actually needing to take prerequisite base classes to get your degree in something. Almost no one goes to college because they have a general thirst for knowledge. They go so they can get a job, or because mommy and daddy told them to go.
Listening to a guy talk in a 200 person class you're paying six figures to attend while in the age of the internet is stupid.
nothing embarrassing about outsourcing work
I’m not going to stop using a calculator or spreadsheets, we already use spell checkers and text editors, matlab and wolfram alpha will do some rather complicated math almost entirely for you (you still have to set it up)
the arts are just facing the reality now (i acknowledge it is worse with how much ai will do for you)
i appreciate that this prof was coming from a place of teaching and not punishment
the only issue is the students turned off their brain and got lazy, removing grades sadly won’t stop this behavior
Nobody was talking about using tools to arrive at objective answers. Math, at least at the lower levels, doesn't require creativity. Writing is something wholly different. When you are outsourcing your writing it no longer says anything about you. It's creatively bankrupt.
I'm not wholly opposed to AI. I realize its an inevitability. But at least in this case, especially for writing, you're only cheating yourself. So yeah, I think it is embarrassing to outsource that type of work.
that’s kinda my point, there was a time in math where approach did say something about you at the further edges which are much more standardized and route now
math in real application is much less objective than common thought would place it
outsourcing with clear intent and final control of the work saying what you intended (directly anyway) seems perfectly fine
your argument on ai is pretty much exactly the same thing my now 80+ math prof had for not using calculators or computers
The difference here is that your final sentence in your previous comment is what AI is specifically used for, not just in school but everywhere. Though I do agree that removing grades won't fix it:
the only issue is the students turned off their brain and got lazy, removing grades sadly won’t stop this behavior
The way AI is used is exactly for that reason. To turn off your brain and get the right answer without understanding the how or why - or even if there is a right answer or not. Writing and the entire breath of the arts are different from STEM in that oftentimes there is only your voice and what you want to say, and using AI largely removes your voice from the process.
It's not an issue inherent to AI in this regard, but AI definitely exacerbates it by making it much easier. Let the robot tell you what to think and what the correct answer is.
When I was still doing math in school, they wanted us to write out the equations that we used to get our answer and most teachers would give you partial credit even if you got the wrong answer as long as they could understand the logic of how you got there, because the point wasn't to get the answer right so much as to prove that you understood the concepts. And even then, it was constantly drilled into us that getting a good grade was the only thing that mattered. The rote memorization and regurgitating the desired answer for every test in every subject practically killed my love of learning. It took me years after getting out of school to realize again that I actually did enjoy learning new things. AI simply allows kids to regurgitate the correct answer faster and more efficiently, with less effort on their part. It's Cliff Notes without even having to look at the Notes part - just ask Cliff to write your answer for you. The way school is set up unfortunately outright encourages this thought process.
The modern school system was created partially during the industrial revolution in order to churn out factory workers who could repeat a rote task day in and day out. It wasn't created to make free thinkers and inspire creativity, and how we use AI reflects that. There's no desire there to put in the effort to say what you want to say or an enjoyment of the process (which is a major thing that a lot of artists enjoy about creating - the process can be even more important than the final product), only the desire to obtain a "good" product, whether that's a good grade or something else like Gen AI images to post for Twitter likes.
agree with everything you’ve written here
grew up in a poor area, mom was a teacher where we lived through ‘no child left behind’, having gone to a rich kid college and seen what the other side learns like it’s pretty eye opening
not everyone is taught like they are a cog
When failure means having to pay another thousand or more to retake the subject and spending another year at uni, I can understand why some people would take the easy route
The only problem I have with the whole “Don’t be afraid to fail” thing, is that so much rides on the grades a student receives it makes it very difficult to not treat every assignment as a highly critical task which must be as close to perfect as possible.
I get what you're saying in general, but I don't think most profs actually want their students to fail when they're actively trying. I assume that the assignment where he asked them to "read and reflect" on an essay that it was probably something ungraded. I know there are some courses (especially large lecture ones where there could be hundreds of students in one class) where you don't have a lot of signposts other than tests telling you how you're doing in a class, but there really should be something outside graded assignments for you to get feedback on.
I dunno... What if a bunch of students got together, seized a data center, then used the AI hardware inside to generate their papers on Marxism?
The Proletarians have nothing to lose except their chains subscriptions!
Seize the means of computation!
Here's the link to the actual article. I get that you're trying to do users a favour to bypass tracking at the original URL, but the Internet Archive is a Free service that shouldn't be abused for link cleaning as it costs a lot of money to store and serve all this stuff and it's meant as an "archive", not an ad-blocking proxy.
I'm posting this in part because currently clicking that link errors it with a "too many requests" error. Let's try to be a little kinder to the good guys, shall we?
If users wasnt a cleaner/safer/faster browsing experience, I recommend ditching Chrome for Firefox and getting the standard set of extensions: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc.
Yeah, especially if it’s not paywalled.
It deprives the original source of traffic too, even if it’s Adblock traffic.
Any free service is bound to be exploited to the fullest possible extent. It's the depressing fate of so many internet projects.
Fuck it. Let's make the Internet Archive only accessible from public libraries. And you will have to physically go to a library to access it. No accessing the archive through your library's website.
I could also be convinced to make the Internet Archive only accessible from a series of elaborate temples we build just for this purpose.
Regardless of the method, the point is that the Internet Archive still exists and serves its core purpose. It loses some convenience of scholarly access, but in turn it now becomes useless as a paywall bypass mechanism.
In one of my classes, when ChatGPT was still new, I once handed out homework assignments related to programming. Multiple students handed in code that obviously came from ChatGPT (too clean a style, too general for the simple tasks that they were required to do).
Decided to bring one of the most egregious cases to class to discuss, because several people handed in something similar, so at least someone should be able to explain how the code works, right? Nobody could, so we went through it and made sense of it together. The code was also nonfunctional, so we looked at why it failed, too. I then gave them the talk about how their time in university is likely the only time in their lives when they can fully commit themselves to learning, and where each class is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn something in a way that they will never be able to experience again after they graduate (plus some stuff about fairness) and how they are depriving themselves of these opportunities by using AI in this way.
This seemed to get through, and we then established some ground rules that all students seemed to stick with throughout the rest of the class. I now have an AI policy that explains what kind of AI use I consider acceptable and unacceptable. Doesn't solve the problem completely, but I haven't had any really egregious cases since then. Most students listen once they understand it's really about them and their own "becoming" professional and a more fully developed person.
This seems pretty fair and reasonable, although, we should ask why people do this in the first place? Why is there so much pressure to get good or decent grades? If you are just going to college to get a degree and all you want to do is pass, then why go at all?
College is a broken system right now. If things continue the way they are going, people will just learn how to use AI tools and go find a job. They don't even need to think for themselves, they can just have a computer do it for them.
If you are just going to college to get a degree and all you want to do is pass, then why go at all?
While I'm about a decade older than the current attendees, "go to college or your life will be terrible" was a persistent and unified message we were forcefed from a very young age. A college degree was billed as a checkpoint to entetr real adult life.
With that in mind, and another 13 years of compulsory education behind us, why would anybody see college as an opportunity instead of a barrier?
People aren't going to college to learn anymore, they're going to get a degree, so they can get a job, so they can afford rent and food. An over generalisation sure, but probably not far off the truth
Great working being a mentor, your impact there was larger than the subject matter at hand.
Thanks, man, that's kind of you to say.
CS
Comma splice. –1 mark
/s — For contrast. Feedback I got in the 00s on my writing.
which is funny because reality makes that idea complete bullshit
leadership doesn't want professionals, it wants low paid worker drones and ‘good enough’ ai
10% of your students might go on to be skilled enough to demand a job that respects their abilities, the rest are gonna be employed by tech illiterate boomers (lord these guys don’t want to retire) and will likely be dealing with being forced to use ai
thankfully i can’t use ai in my work so it'll be decades before it is even a concern for me directly but i have multiple friends dealing with this issue now
they are intelligent, well educated, had top grades, their boss is some nepo baby with grand ideas of being the next elon
*edit
just read this
That's a very capitalist view of education. Some people just want to learn, and that's the point of an education, to enable learning. You might need that piece of paper to get a job in the field you want, and the field you want might prefer a mindless worker drone, but that doesn't mean that education should cut corners and teach to the job.
sadly yea, i’m not happy about it but pretending education is above it all is doing no one any favors
i’d love if we had free education and a culture valuing learning for the joy of it in the us but we can’t even manage to agree feeding starving kids is important
and we just shat all over skilled nurses and the like as non-professional
hard to not hold a bleak outlook on all of it
we can’t even manage to agree feeding starving kids is important
We don't have to agree. We essentially live in post democratic times. Some people just have to do it.
Education can be above it all and make it possible.
i too want star treck but we’re getting children of men
Because people don't enact the values of Star Trek. People could create a Starfleet Academy and an organisation with Star Trek values but it seems that all fans are eager for WW3 because that is scripture.
us: sorry best we can do is elysium
What about you? What do you need to make a change?
what an odd thing to hear about new mexico but good, i’m happy for you and i hope improves life for more in your state
Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.
I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”
Christ.......
Then they whine on Reddit when they can't get a job.
Yeah, those students deserve to fail.
I assume he taught what Marxism is in the class, yeah?
No, it was irrelevant to the class
This is university, not high school or college.
They should've checked it themselves, realised that it was ridiculous and either removed it, or at least asked the prof if that's supposed to be there.
Well that's kinda fucked then.
Maybe you need his class lmao. Re read the article and have a think about what it means.
A lot of this comment section does apparently lol
So he fails people who are Marxist because they follow directions and have actually educated themselves on something?
It's a history class ffs. We should be teaching Marxism anyway
I legitimately think that you need to work on reading comprehension or let yourself read things without just getting too pissed based on trigger phrases you decided on to think about what you read. He asked all the students who submitted Marxist papers about their perspectives and none of them could even explain what Marxism was. I implore you to step back and think through this rationally - how many US college freshmen have strong Marxist views and are knowledgeable and passionate enough about them to write a strong essay about how an event in American history fits within a Marxist perspective? I also invite you to consider how a professor who wants to "fail people who are marxist" would recognize Marxist language and rhetoric subtly inserted into an essay? Furthermore, THE INSTRUCTIONS TO WRITE FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE WERE IN WHITE TEXT THE STUDENTS COULDN'T READ UNLESS THEY COPY AND PASTED THEM INTO A DIFFERENT TEXT FIELD! I don't understand how you could supposedly read this article multiple times and not understand this crucial detail.
All I read there was. That they could not define Marxist perspectives correctly, which when not part of your specific field is rather challenging
If you didn't make it to your freshmen year without learning what Marxism is, you probably shouldn't be in Uni
Yes, most educated US Americans learn about Marxism at some point in high school (or earlier)
THE INSTRUCTIONS TO WRITE FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE WERE IN WHITE TEXT THE STUDENTS COULDN'T READ
The fuck are you yelling about. That doesn't make sense. Obviously it could be read from the assignment paper. Otherwise, it wouldn't be read by the students. Which, the article made very clear, it was read by the students.
To be brief, I inserted hidden text into an assignment’s directions that the students couldn’t see but that ChatGPT can.
Yeah, I read that. And I read nothing that described how that's possible. So, no, obviously the students could see it.
That claim makes no sense.
Dude, the way you dig that hole for yourself is impressive. Not good, but impressive.
Maybe you need to learn to think critically?
I think you may legit need adult education classes or something. I literally explained how it works in my last comment.
that was the trap.
I don't get it. I try to see everything in life through Marxist and feminist lens.
Yes, this Trojan horse could only be done when Marxism is a foreign concept
I get it about the hidden text and the only students who used it were tricked.
But, it’s sad
". My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”
Freshmen.
That's a dangerous proof.
He could have said to write from a zagnoore brandle-frujt perspective. Some would have scanned the assignment, ignored the part they didn't understand, and kept chooching right along. Many students would rather try to figure it out than sound stupid in class or risk the spotlight of social interaction.
Interrogating each of them on the material is the only safe way.
The Trojan worked because the students who read the assignment would not have seen the reference to Marxism. Only by copy pasting the text in to another field would that show up.
The article mentions that he gave them a chance to explain why they chose to write it from a Marxist perspective and none of the students even knew what Marxism was.
He gave students an out in the event they actually did write from a Marxist pov
You're assuming the freshmen would recognize a reference to marxism and not ignore that part because they didn't understand. It's what inexperienced students do
He made it hidden text in the assignment, i.e im guessing he made the text the same color as the background. Only when one copied the text and pasted it as instructions for a prompt would it be seen. Hence it was a Trojan horse on the assignment where those not using ai blatantly would not find it.
I'm not assuming a damn thing. He literally made it impossible to see the reference to Marxism unless you copy pasted the text in to another field. Like you would do if you were feeding it to an AI. Think very small white font.
Honestly interrogating each one on the material would be best but costly. Some classes have 80 students and professors have more than one class.
Also rest of the article says he asked students objecting accusations to tell what Marxism is and they admitted afterwards.
Apparently chatgpt asked "are you sure you want marxist perspective" as topic is older and not that directly related to marxism. One said they picked yes because quote, unquote "it sounded smart."
The idiom you're looking for in your last sentence is quote, unquote
Don't do this to me.
(Jokes aside thank you)
No shame at all, just wanted to let you know!
Also rest of the article says he asked students objecting accusations to tell what Marxism is and they admitted afterwards.
Yes, I read it. All of it.
He definitely caught a number of them, but he called it proof, it should NOT be treated as proof, an indicator at best. If it were proof he could just fail them all and not catch false positives.
Totally agree about the number of people to interview being expensive. But it is more adequate as proof.
What he didn't do wasn't wrong, but he can't count on that to be a point to fail.
He definitely caught a number of them, but he called it proof, it should NOT be treated as proof, an indicator at best. If it were proof he could just fail them all and not catch false positives.
So you frequently wrote your papers from a Marxists perspective randomly when it had no relevance to the topic at hand? He hid the text by making it the same color as the background in the assignment so only when one copy and pasted the assignment or attached the file to their prompt would it be picked up. The only real false positives would be those staunchly Marxists students or someone using a screen reader. Which I think if you are inserting Marxism into random essays that are not relevant you probably are going to be bringing it up constantly in every setting you can and would also be able to explain it. It definitely is a reason to be failed on an assignment if he caught you with this.
Many students would rather try to figure it out than sound stupid in class or risk the spotlight of social interaction.
This ignores the entire premise of the experiment. The 39% were not interested in learning regardless of the consequences.
You pay to go to college. Then essentially do the equivalent of lighting that money on fire by not engaging with the product/services you just purchased.
Yes and no. You pay for a college to recognize your competency and say it to the world. That’s why so many students use AI
You pay a bad college to recognize your competency.
A good college teaches you how to reach beyond what they teach you.
This. While I do agree that college is largely you proving to others you can learn a lot of something(s) and commit to something(s) in the long run, college can just be a purchased vessel to some.
That's akin to getting a driver's license to prove you can drive - but not sitting behind the wheel a single time, and paying someone else to do your test.
No skills learned, nothing gained beyond a piece of paper.
Students might think they're being slick by pushing all the work to AI during their degree, but their new boss in the real world will quickly recognize that they do not have the skills they should have according to their certification and say bye-bye during their probation period.
driver license actually has a use, its a requirement to drive. its more akin to have certification for different professions, rather than the degree.
There’s no competency to recognize if you’re using AI instead of processing the material yourself. Only a scam that swings both ways.
In America you go to college at 18. It's hard to have perspective. I'm almost 40 and reflecting on how powerful my degree was, because of how it taught me to think.
Even when I had teachers tell me this to my face at 18 I didn't understand it.
Well yeah, I was the same because at 18 I didn't understand how to think yet. Also because I hadn't experienced those who never learned. At 31 I cherish the education I tried to avoid in my teens.
I went to college at 18. I wasn't ready for it. I floundered for a few years, gaining no valueble life skills nor experiences, then dropped out and moved across the state and starting working and being an adult. Through that process I got to where I could appreciate college, understand what these amounts of money that are being talked about, that I'm spending in my daily life actually are worth so when I went back to college a few years later I could truly appreciate both the opportunities it presented to me, and how my life was being impacted. I've literally trippled my income from just a $20k (before financial aid) two year degree just a few years after graduation.
When your high school is just a conveyer belt into college, you don't appreciate college, it's just another school, and you just have to work through the classes finding the paths of least resistance between where you are now and the final goal of graduation. You don't get to understand what college is about, you don't get to understand how incredibly unique the time you spend in college is compared to the rest of your life, how this is the only time in your life when your focus is studying, learning and to gain as many skills and experiences and friends and contacts as you can.
I kinda forgot where I was going with this but it adds to the discussion to I'm going with it
How many pay for college because they want to learn vs because it's a requirement?
I also skip through bullshit i dont care about but am required to do.
I went to college because I wanted to learn new things. And I did.
Happy for you 🥹
39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI
That's better than my class. I taught CS101 last year, code not papers. 90%+ of the homework was done with AI. There was literally just 1 person who would turn in unique code. Everyone else would turn in ChatGPT code.
I adapted by making the homework worth very little of the grade and moving the bulk of the grade to in-class paper and pencil exams.
My algorithms professor does that too and it's better than nothing but still causes problems.
For example I still have to do other classes' homework before I can start studying.
Meanwhile cheaters can just skip homework for the other classes and focus on studying for exam.
I still appreciate this technique much better than the more popular alternative of "make exams much harder to make up for the grade inflation." Thank you.
I think a good way to deal with this would be assignments that also (partly) prepare you for the written exam. So if you sit down and do it yourself and actually understand the assignment you already did some learning for the exam.
I had one course at university with homework assignments that were super tough. I did it all by myself but in the end I learned so much that I didn't even need to study for the written exam and got a top grade. Others who did not do their assignments on their own had to study hard for the written exam and in most cases got way worse grades or failed.
Yeah I had a class once where the exams were always just slightly modified versions of some of the homework questions. So if you were confident you could understand and complete all the homework you knew you'd be fine on the exam. It actually caused some people to study more since they felt like there was a more 1:1 between study time and exam success.
I think a good way to deal with this would be assignments that also (partly) prepare you for the written exam. So if you sit down and do it yourself and actually understand the assignment you already did some learning for the exam.
My networking degree was built on a similar principle. A large part of the degree was configuring Cisco switches and routers, which is done through a command line interface, and you can streamline this by copy/pasting a series of commands. The first test was simply setting the hostname, a password and configuring ssh access. This was a full hour+ test, meanwhile by the end of the semester that was the first five minutes of an hour long test to configure more advanced functionality on these devices
The entire degree program was setup so that you take the configs you wrote in the first week and keep building onto them and keep copy/pasting bits and pieces of the configs all the way through graduation and into the workforce.
I could absolutely see a programming degree program taking a similar approach, where you write code snippets in the first class of your freshman year that evolve and you're ultimately still using by the time you graduate. It forces you to know your code, gives you good code to build off of professionally and makes it really difficult to coast by with nasty hacks and/or AI doing it all for you. It also sets the perfect trap for those trying to have AI do everything for them, where they won't know what it's doing or why it's breaking as the underlying snippets are constantly being changed. Especially if it's structured with a lot of easy "plumb your existing snippets together" assignments where it's dead simple for those actually doing the coursework but really hard for those relying on AI entirely. They'll be forced to learn or drop out which is really important for a college experience!
I think the only solution is the Cambridge exam system.
The only grade they get is at the final written exam. all other assignments and tests are formative, to see if they are on track or to practice skills... This way it does not matter if a student cheats in those assignments, they only hurt themselves. Sorry for the final exam stress though.
I had a couple classes in college where the grade was 8% homework, 42% midterm, and 42% final exam. Feels a bit more balanced
I think we should also be adjusting the criteria we use for grading. Information accuracy should be weighted far more heavily, and spelling/grammar being de-prioritized. AI can correct bad spelling and grammar, but it's terrible for information accuracy
What were the other 8 percent?
My math undergrad classes were largely like that, too, and that was before there were smartphone solver apps, let alone "AI". A typical grade breakdown was 10% assignments, 30% midterm, 60% final in first and second year. Then in third and fourth year, it was entirely midterm + final.
They gave a few marks for assignments in lower years since high schoolers often come to them thinking the only things that are important are grades, so won't practice unless it's for marks. If you haven't figured out that practice is important by third year...
And agreed re: changing the focus of our assessment, just like memorizing facts for history "trivia-style" assessment should no longer be used by anyone in a post-search Web 2.0 world. (Although it was never good assessment, regardless.)
also bad at synthesizing new ideas.. however, it is likely that future models will be better at those things.
then whole situation sucks and I'm glad I'm out of uni.
A significant percentage of my classes at University were a midterm and final, or just a final. I thought they worked just fine.
I took three history classes while I was in college. It's been a while, but I recall most of them having a paper or two and those papers counting for a pretty big chunk of you grade. The author of the article is a history teacher, so essays make some amount of sense.
My engineering classes were basically as you described.
My engineering classes were basically as you described.
Because engineers need to get it done the first time. No room for bullshit.
Except this is terrible for a lot of people and then only measures how well people do at taking tests.
I'm open to alternatives that can't be chatgtped. tech bros destroyed them all
What is a "Cambridge exam system"?
Meant how the university of Cambridge does their tests. rather than year long exams and assignments being a fraction of your grade. the only grade that matters is that of the final yearly exam. I think it is the only one in the UK that does that. not sure how it works in the rest of the world, but I think that is rare. but likely the only AI proof system.
IE, you can literally goof off the whole year, not even be in town, and if you show up for the exam and ace it you get a good grade.
God that's great. I've failed classes in Uni where I got As on all the tests, just because I didn't do the homework >:0
Classes like Calc 2,3, Thermo/fluid dynamics, chem classes etc never had required homework for me, just suggested. The only classes with required homework were engineering projects building something physical or programs I had to submit in C or what not. I suppose I had a writing course that required I turned in essays, but I don't know how you'd get around that.
Or reversly, you have one bad day
yhea, I think you can take then again if you fail. not a good day to wake up with a migraine
Don't really know how to feel about this because 15 years ago, all I did was reword Wikipedia pages to make a good paper. I went to college because I was led to believe it was a requirement to do well in life. I still learned a lot, but that was mostly through the social interaction of coursework. And honestly, I don't use anything from college in my current engineering job, it was all on-the-job panic learning. If I were to go back to college today, it would be such an enlightening experience of learning, but when you're a kid getting out of high school, you're just trying to get by with some gameplan that you've only been told about. Idk. I don't blame them for using a tool that's so easily accessible because college is about fun too. I guess I wouldn't do it different at that age .
I think that rewording wikipedia is slightly better though. It still requires you to digest some of the information. Kind of like when your teacher let you create notes on a note card for the test. You have to actually read and write the information. You get tricked into learning information.
Ai, just does it for you. There's no need to do much else, and it's reliability is significantly worse that random wiki editors could ever be. I see little real learning with ai.
With AI you cane solve an assignment without:
- reading the assignment
- reading the source of information
- reading the answer that "you" "wrote"
With the rewording Wikipedia approach you had to do all of those three things
Another thing is, you often gain interest on the topic, and Wikipedia indeed has the neat little thing of articles being related to each other, so it's very plausible to start on Chandler Bing and end on the Atlantic slave trade, for instance. With LLMs, this is much, MUCH rarer, considering whatever you find interesting must be researched manually, since LLMs are more or less useless.
Apparently you learned to learn, which I suppose is one major goal of college.
I'm in the same boat, and for me personally no, in uni I learnt to do as minimal of a job as possible to "pass" the arbitrary goals set by uncaring world. I had to unlearn all of that very quickly when I got my first real job that I actually like. My uni broke me, for sure, and I'm lucky I fixed a little bit of that decades later.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Would you say that your experience was typical or was it especially bad for you (as in not designed for your needs) while other people were better off?
Not the best university at the time, in not the best country, so I'm not unique in that. Teaching practices were literally the opposite of what scientifically recommended. But on top of that, neuro diversity wasn't as normal back then, so not only I wasn't diagnosed, but I had to mask as hard as possible, which didn't help at all.
Only very specific type of people thrived in that environment, everyone else coped, some more successfully that others.
That's a nice ideal but the reality is that this world is cruel and we're burdening future generations with debt for their degrees and the job market sucks. If reality was different, then maybe kids could enjoy learning in college. But it's not, so they need to make sure they are capable of being good little sheep that can do what the C suite wants otherwise they're going to be in poverty and debt for the rest of their lives with very little safety net.
US here, in case it wasn't obvious.
You hit the nail on the head.
The problem is the cost of education in the US.
But not all of the world is such a capitalist hellscape as the US is, where people were embezzled of affordable living, healthcare and education.
That doesn't make the concept of education a bad one. The framework in which it's implemented is to blame and the people who created said framework.
This refrain I keep hearing of "I don't use anything I learned in college" is an INSANE take. Unless you went to some fly-by-night for-profit scam college, you learned way more than you think, even if it didn't include some specific engineering technique. You mentioned social interaction, but critical thinking is the big one. We need to stop devaluing education-it's critical for our future. We can't dismiss it just because capitalist vultures are ruining it. We need to fight to make it what it should be.
This quote is particularly amusing because the author used en dashes where he should have used em dashes, while making a point about how no one uses em dashes.
Damn, I finally had to go learn what the em dash is, and by contrast what the en dash is. Your comment will haunt me to the end of my days.
And you don’t put spaces around em or en dashes.
It’s not a hard rule unless you’re using a hard format like Chicago, MLA, or APA format. In the US it’s common to not use spaces, but in the UK and some parts of Europe it’s common to use spaces for em dashes and en dashes if they are being used to denote parentheticals.
Edit: I just noticed this article is hosted on HuffPost UK. If you go look at the US version of the site, it uses em dashes. In the UK it is becoming common to use en dashes in place of em dashes for parentheticals. Though even in the US version there are spaces, so it’s still not a clean comparison.
Yeah it sure does, as does outlook.
The em dash used in MS word is different to the one used by ChatGPT as far as I can tell, it looks more like the en dash used by GPT.
I use the en dash – often mistaken for an em dash — quite regularly but I think it can be legitimately used to get a hunch, and he then got proof via hidden prompt injection and student confessions.
I feel like I have to train myself out of using em dashes in my writing now to avoid being mistaken for AI, and it sucks.
I sometimes use different dilimiters [you know, like "(" {or also "[" or "(" (as they are used in programming -- since the em dash is essentially one of these, just with the added benefit of giving you a breath for thinking --)}].
I use a dash all the fucking time - it proves a point and keeps the train of thought going
That's a regular dash. The em dash is longer.
I'm going to need to see you passing a capcha test
Oh fuck don't tell jhex but dogs and bicycles look the same to me
I think AI would be better at captchas than me.
The dash you used is neither an en dash nor an em dash. It's a regular dash, which is much more commonly used since it's on a standard keyboard
From later in the article:
Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a saviour. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.
I think this is the big issue with 'ai cheating'. Sure, the LLM can create a convincing appearance of understanding some topic, but if you're doing anything of importance, like making pizza, and don't have the critical thinking you learn in school then you might think that glue is actually a good way to keep the cheese from sliding off.
A cheap meme example for sure, but think about how that would translate to a Senator trying to deal with more complex topics.... actually, on second thought, it might not be any worse. 🤷
Edit: Adding that while critical thinking is a huge part. it's more of the "you don't know what you don't know" that tripped these students up, and is the danger when using LLM in any situation where you can't validate it's output yourself and it's just a shortcut like making some boilerplate prose or code.
People always talk about how students are afraid to fail, but no one ever mentions that the consequences of failure in our society are far greater than the rewards for success, unless you are already at the top.
For me its the $5k for the class down the drain lol
[...] Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.
But did he consider some may just be Lemmy users?
Oh my god, you're right. The number of .ml users that "learned their theory from someone else" instead of reading source texts is mind-boggling. To be fair, I don't want to read 150yo texts to inform my own opinions, but moreso because I find them archaic in their reasoning, not because they're dull and pompous (they are).
If you "learned your theory form someone else" you're somebody's goon, not a maxist.
Nearly every human on earth would be in that category. The whole basis of human knowledge is that we take the knowledge of others and build upon it
You build on the knowledge. Not the person.
We are anarchists with Leninist tendencies, not Marxists, you imperial dog.
Is joke, I barely know any of these words.
when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”
Yes.
"The professor seems like one of those woke liberals Marxist types he'll love it"
Is this really how we fix the red-scare?
In that case, I think the student could easily prove their authenticity. Invite the student in and ask them to explain their understanding of and perspectives on several conflicting flavors of Marxism. Compare and contrast Leninism and Maoism. Or find other ways for them to demonstrate some understanding of Marxism. If the student really is just such a big Marx fan that they shoehorn the topic into every paper they can, it is reasonable to expect they have at least some surface-level understanding of Marxism, or at least to the level that would be necessary to write the paper they submitted.
LMAO
underrated comment.
Is it? It wasn't even 15 minutes old when you commented.
It's still underrated. Should be top.
It wasn't a top level comment. Either way you may like to take a look at the behind the scenes of Lemmy's various sorting options.
It's a novelty in a world of opaque blackbox algorithms.
Students would want to learn instead of doing less work if there were incentives to learn instead of just get out with a degree.
It seems AI is putting more light on this problem of the academic system not really being learning oriented.
Not that it matters. There was already enough light on it and now it's just blinding.
There are incentives to learn. The smartest kids do far better than the average kid.
Maybe in school
In the real world, the luckiest people do the best.
no way, all studies show students who do well academically out preform their peers post education.
Did it mention and account for the economic class of the students?
yes of course
Sweet
Then it would account for how the students who are luckiest have more successful lives.
yes but thats besides the point. The point is that people do better in life if they do well in school. Pointing to a tiny subset of people and saying "but these people also do well" doesnt change anything and I genuinely think you're intentionally trolling.
Sadly, lockdown era students all got their WFH piece of paper they can safely wipe their asses with. We have never had so many grad students fail out as this cohort. They literally got degrees with no practical knowledge, tehn thought tehy could cost to a career with the same work ethic.
Well they're still getting jobs and are instead just learning on the iob
They just need to learn to make AI do it. Then they can do more than most.
It should be treated the same as if another student wrote the paper. If it was used as a research tool where you didn't repeat it word for word then it's cool, it can be treated like a peer that helped you research. But using it to fully write then it's an instant fail because you didn't do anything.
Okay, sure. But how can you identify its use? You'd better be absolutely confident or there are likely to be professional consequences.
Not to mention completely destroy your relationship with the student (maybe not so relevant to professors, but relationship building is the main job of effective primary and secondary educators.)
Have the student submit drafts with the first rough draft written in class and submitted at the end. Then weekly or daily improved drafts. If the finished paper is totally and material different then it's a red flag. If the student wants to drastically change the paper then the teacher must approve.
“Chat GPT, this is my rough draft. I want you to polish it a little and add some, but not a lot. This is meant to be a second pass, not the final draft. Make a couple mistakes on the grammar.”
Can easily be faked with AI. You can just prompt AI to make outlines, drafts, mistakes, fix the mistakes, etc.
I've presented on this at teacher conferences, for what it's worth. There's no effective way to detect AI usage accurately when the text-writing process isn't supervised. The solutions need to accept that reality.
Then papers will all have to be written in person on an internet free machine or hand written.
Or we could focus on the core of teaching, which is building relationships with students. Then, with that rapport, students will trust their teachers when they explain why getting AI to do the work for them is hurting their own education. We can also change our assessment practices, so that students don't feel the pressure to write a "perfect" essay.
And, yes; occasionally require students to do a bit of writing with invigilation.
that is an unrealistic solution
True, it has never been tried before.
Well said! It's like plagiarizing from another student. Using AI as a tool is one thing, but completely relying on it to write the paper is cheating in my book.
But I am a historian, so I will close on a historian’s note: History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost for many Americans, ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognised that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognised that literacy is liberation.
It's scary how much damage is being done to education, not just from AI but also the persistent attacks on public education in the US over decades, hampering the system with things like No Child Left Behind and diverting funds to private schools with vouchers in the name of "school choice". On top of that there are suggestions that teachers aren't even needed and that students could be taught with AI. It's grim.
What the business wants and what they say they want are two completely different things. They still want people to be able to think and solve their own problems, even if they end up assigning the praise for your hard work on the AI you only pretended to use
I think that most of all they want you to feel like AI could replace you if you misbehave.
This is a new pattern that I am seeing. C suite is required to launch AI initiatives because of market expectation, tech staff expected to launder their work through Claude
And literally all of them can fuck right off and fire me before I do that, the only thing keeping me from being fully radicalized against this system is that I am still(just barely) able to afford food and shelter.
I heard of something brilliant though: The teacher TELLS the students to have the AI generate an essay on a subject AND THEN the students have to go through the paper and point out all the shit it got WRONG :D
This is discussed in the article
Brilliant
I'm guessing 33 people were too lazy to copy data into a box and relied on ChatGPT OCR lol.
This was a great article about the use of AI, but I think this also exposed bad/zero effort cheating.
There's a reason why even the ye olde Wikipedia copy-pasters would rearrange sentences to make sure they can game the plagiarism checker.
Microsoft Word had auto summarize as far back as the early 2000s (and probably before then, I only found it my junior or senior year of high school). Plop a wall of text into a word docume, click auto summarize, limit the number of direct quotes to three words max, hit enter. I was clever af (except that one paper on Gorbachev where the paragraph entirely composed of wingdings exposed my strategy a bit), or so I'd have thought.
Lo and behold my cheating somehow didn't prepare me for regular life, and so I had to learn lessons in college (the one year that I went), and early on in my career, in my early 20s, that I should've learned in school. The lesson was that you sometimes need to just do the fucking work. Hopefully the kids in this experiment learned that, but more than likely they learned to cheat better.
Okay fine and all, but are we not going to talk about the cat?
We can talk about it if you’d like
Yes, @Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works, let's talk about the cat.
That's a great cat.
I'd take a college course from that cat.
In fact I'm pretty sure that cat wrote the article.
It's the power behind the podium.
Great article.
How do we teach that when a student doesn’t want to learn?
Good question. But maybe we've gone overboard with the density of information and we just need to relax a little and give the kids their childhood back.
It's not the density of information. It's the end goal of the process. Students are only given motivation to learn for a career and people have figured out that most jobs are bullshit. If they can bullshit their way though college, they can bullshit their into a career. When layoffs are done by lottery, it's not even like the sincere students can be safe. It's bullshit stacked on top of other bullshit.
I was thinking of primary school. I'd say back then learning is more intrinsically motivated if not overdone.
So am I. From the very beginning, kids are constantly asked what they want to do when they grow up, which should be fine, but the adult asking that will always follow up with a suggestion.
I'm all for letting children be children, but this article is about college students who are, generally speaking, supposed to be adults.
Fair.
You would not believe how many seniors use this ploy.
You're right, if there's anything wrong with education in the US, it's that we do too much of it 🙄
I think a fair argument could be that we have the wrong mix, the wrong emphasis.
For example, my kids history class focusing more about memorizing dates and names rather than the broader picture. We need history, but rote memorization of the trivia isn't that helpful. More analytical perspective about connecting events to outcomes and comparing the scenarios to one another, but I suppose that's too hard to fairly grade and so we don't like it...
Rote memorization is the lowest of four levels of learning. It's the easiest to achieve, the easiest to test, and the least useful. Guess what our entire goddamn education system has designed itself around?
This was goodly written;
How do we expect students to want to learn when the point of school is to get a piece of paper that says you get paid more?
People care about their careers, because that's what's going to let them survive, they don't care about the journey to getting to the point of stable survival.
If school wasn't about getting done as fast as possible so you can go make money, if people didn't have to constantly minmax their time and money, then people would actually want to learn and go to school.
So I'm a flight instructor. I--unlike a shocking number of college professors--was taught how to teach.
Today's subject: Thorndike's principle of readiness. Students learn best when they're ready to learn. What does it mean to be ready to learn? Well, we turn to Maslowe and his hierarchy of needs.
If you took a Psych 150 class, you probably studied Maslowe's hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, with the wide base layer being the physical needs like food, water, moderate temperatures, sleep etc. then the safety and security layer, then the social layer, on up to the "self actualization" layer at the peak which presumably means becoming a Star Trek TNG character. This model is a bit flawed because it prescribes one set of priorities for all people, at all times. But it's useful I suppose as a model to start from, and it will do for us.
As a teacher, you have to ask yourself: What need on my students' pyramid is my lesson going to serve? If you're a Russian literature teacher or something, that "need" is probably pretty high up the pyramid, right? You've got to have a lot of the rest of your life pretty thoroughly solved before you go "I'm sick of novels written in the Latin alphabet, let's give one of the ones in Cyrillic a try."
Is that where most undergraduates are in their lives?
No; the majority of them have just had their social lives upended by graduating from high school, having most of their childhood friends and acquaintances move away and now having to make new friends, quite often having physically moved themselves to a new town away from their parents and support networks. Many of them are falling chin first into doing domestic chores for themselves, learning how to feed themselves, wash their clothes etc. A number of them have dependents already and have to work to support them, others simply have to work to feed themselves.
Why are they even here? Well, they've been told--lied to, really--that sitting through four years of your shit will somehow cause employers to pay them more. A woman in a UNC lanyard walked into a high school class I was taking to assert exactly that complete with a Powerpoint presentation full of charts.
Your gaggle of undergraduates is also likely in significant debt. They might have walked into that career center that their campus tour guide made such a big deal about maybe trying to arrange an internship or something only to be handed the classifieds page out of the local paper, or gone to one of those pointless career fairs at which no one ever seems to get hired.
And in amongst all that, there stands the humanities professor, more self-important than the Baptist god, bitching about students using ChatGPT to write their essays.
I didn't really have much of a problem with that teaching flight school. First of all, all of my students wanted to be there. Nobody goes to flight school for resume candy, they do it because they want to fly a plane. Genuine curiosity in the subject will put students most of the way through the textbook themselves, when I was a flight student I'd ignore high school or college textbooks to read my flight school books. But then you've got things like the weather. Meteorology is boring and dense, especially given all the abbreviations they cram into it. It is the teacher's job to demonstrate why this is important to the student. "So you don't crash and die" often does the job.
Had trouble with this myself teaching. Students this semester have been good about it (probably because I've been very explicit in my contempt and also it kept blundering) but last semester was tricky.
One thing I learned was I need to also insist no Grammarly. That used to be allowed but it makes original writing sound very AI. I also riddled my assignments with short oral segments and personal stories.
It cuts into class time but I've managed to make those sessions educational since my "presentations" are always conversations w/ students. No ppts. Actually kinda fun and very much weeds out cheaters lol
Interesting post, would be good to support the author/publisher with a source link. Especially since it isn't pay walled.
Great story with predictable results. Welcome to your AI future where people give their thinking over to machines made by sociopaths.
I’d just fail every kid that obviously used ai. You’re just gonna waste both of our time with this shit I may as well waste your money. Like what are you even doing here?
Its cheating, they should be treated the same as any other cheater on the course. A lot of UK unis would go as far as kicking some one off the entire degree for persistent cheating and its highly probable this was not the only paper they cheated on.
Until there are actual consequences it wont stop being so blatant. Only real way to prevent this is an actual defense of any end of module work and exams, either in person or via Zoom/Teams.
The point of education is to learn something. I think "using AI to generate complex ideas will prove you don't know what you're talking about to anyone that does" and "if your use of AI is suspicious, you're better off blaming AI than dying on that hill defending it" are decent lessons. One can hope that shame would be a course correction to a successful education.
True, the use of ai or not could in fact just be the test for an early exam, and if they fail it then they fail it. Moving forward it would determine how they do in the class moreso than the initial ai catcher test.
If I'm being generous, usually the second chance comes in primary education. The AI stuff is new enough maybe they could get one shot at reformation. Though they should plainly see it's cheating, so I'm not sure I'm really convinced by my own argument, but I'll at least try to put forth the devil's advocate argument...
Yes, I suppose I would give them one chance to do it again properly and if it’s still ai that second time and they seem more just annoyed that they were caught, then buhbye!
Parents force their kids to go to school so they can get better paying jobs.
None of these motivations include learning.
You just know there is a guy in class who just wrote the essay from Marxist perspective because he does everything from a Marxist perspective.
I am gonna be honest: That's the best article I have read in quite some time. I can 100% agree with everything the author says.
Would be better if they revealed what the Trojan Horse was for me, that was what I was most interested in. Saying it's an infallible way of exposing AI usage without actually revealing what it was is questionable.
They did, they mentioned that they asked to look at the rebellion through a Marxist lens, while it had nothing to do with Marxism. It effectively caused anyone using AI to out themselves.
Ah, there's a random block of white space on the page for me indicating that the article was finished. Thanks I'll read the rest now.
The most common way to catch AI is to write instructions in white. Something like "Use the exact sentence xyz in the second chapter".
To be fair if I received an assignment and it said "Use the exact sentence xyz in the second chapter" I'd be unlikely to ignore that as a human?
That's why you write it in white on a white background. A human can't see it but the computer will.
Whatever happened to the tests which you have to sit and do to prove you know the thing you’re writing about?
Google glass HUD with AI. transcription
Should be pretty easy to detect with the right equipment. Like I assume it's not doing much of that locally, so a wifi detector and triangulator will catch any wifi devices that are powered on and roaming proctors could carry bluetooth detectors for people trying to evade detection by using short range signals (and I guess processing it on their phone with wifi disabled).
Institutions don't want to catch students tho especially for private universities.
I know at least one college where they give exams on laptops and their anti-cheating system doesn't work on mac.
Mac users can open google or chatgpt during their midterm and finals. The school knows, they just enjoy better pass-rates.
In a more general example, every college including mine give all students premium chatgpt and copilot accounts paid to Microsoft by our tuition.
Lol wut. You just detected 80 WiFi devices in a room with 3 people. Most of them are outside the classroom
... Then they locate the ones inside the room and deal with them accordingly.
Guessing you didn't understand the triangulation part of my suggestion, but you can detect the direction of the source of electromagnetic signals (which is what wifi, Bluetooth, and the cellular signal all are). If you have two sensors that can detect direction, then you can use those to get two lines pointing at the source, which will be where those two lines meet.
Though if one person was moving around with a directional sensor, it would also be able to lead to the location of the device. But having two to triangulate with would allow for quick automated filtering of all the outside devices detected.
They could also build a faraday cage around the exam area to prevent any outside signal from getting in, at which point they know any detected signal is coming from within. Plus they might catch people just by looking for visible frustration at not being able to connect to the internet.
We already have local LLMs
Do they run on glasses? If not, the glasses need to connect with whatever device is running the LLM. Which will also generate heat that can be picked up with a thermal camera.
I see no reason they can't run on glasses. If not now, in some years
There would still be the heat issue, which would be even harder to fix or hide on glasses.
OP can you please post the actual link too and not just the archive so you don't spam the archiver?
Also, it looks like it's already been taken down. archive.today is less likely to respond to takedown requests
Back in 2001 when I went to college they gave us a warning not to plagiarize reports and assignments. Saying they had sophisticated tools at their disposal and sites like cheat.com
Fun fact: at that time (and maybe still now since I checked a while ago) cheat.com was a porn site. So they were full of shit.
But AI detection is being really, really scary since the amount of false positives are staggering.
Solution, begin requiring students to work inside a monitored room where they have to log in to access and have to write down everything by hand on paper that remains in the room. No electronics allowed inside, only notes regarding the research they may have done are allowed. These notes would have a similar process to be gathered, you'd have to register your access to the reference you are going to be sourcing, likely limited to those printed in the library, and save them there to be used when writing the report. Make them go through metal detectors on the way and get rid of any piece of electronics they could cheat off of.
Who am I kidding, Idiocracy seems to have been spot on.
Idiocracy made one critical mistake... the biggest idiots are the ones in charge. In idiocracy the president and his staff were actually far smarter and more dedicated to doing a good job than the fuckers currently in charge.
I am currently at a university. Everything that is written is normally turned in through 'turn-it-in' that does all the checking. I get a percentage of quotes, plagiarism, and it scans references. They have also added in a preliminary AI scanner that tells 'possibility ' of ai writing.
I mean, there are a lot of places that are way too happy about monitoring everything you do on a computer or phone, I doubt they'd want to part you from your digital shackles - they'll instead force you to use shitty monitoring apps to "ensure you don't cheat"
Yeah, cheat.com forwards you to phonesex.com that has the number 1-800-PHONE-SEX you can call to get help fucking yourself.
Obviously, the inclusion of Marxism is a decent test, but I have taken samples of things I have written years ago and submitted them to see what it would say about my writing.
It says a high probability of my writing was done by AI, because I do use emdashes, oxford commas, and other such punctuation.
We can't trust anything checking to see if something was written by AI, any more than we can trust something written by AI.
Anything can be analyzed by a Marxist perspective, which basically just uses a class and imperialism type analysis. If there's a human society it can be applied.
Have you read the article?
Is proofreading a lost art?
You can proofread all you want, but if you don't understand the assignment in the first place it's not going to help much.
Curious why you're only posting the archived version? This article is not paywalled...
Great read
Damn it sucks that the system that says you need a diploma to not be an impoverished slave your whole life encourages people to get the diploma but not to care how they get it.
I've been using it for a personal project, and it's been wonderful.
It hasn't written a word for me. But it's been really damn helpful as a research assistant. I can have it provide lists of unexplained events by location, or provide historical details about specific things in about 5 seconds.
And for quicky providing editing advice, where to punch up the language, what I can cut, or communicate more clearly. And I can do that without begging a person for days to read.
Is it always perfect? Not at all, but it definitely helps overall, when you make it clear to be honest, and not sugar-coat things. It's definitely mostly mediocre for creative advice, but good for technical advice.
It's a tool, and it can be used correctly, or it can be used to cheat.
when you make it clear to be honest
It has no idea what honesty is. It has no idea what bias is.
It is fancy auto-complete. And it's wrong so often (like 40% of the time) that it should not be used to seek out factual information that the prompter doesn't already know.
it should not be used to seek out factual information that the prompter doesn't already know.
Eh... Depends on the importance and purpose of the information.
If you're just trying to generate ideas for fiction from historical precedents, it doesn't matter if it's accurate. Or if you're using it as a starting point, then following the links to check the original source (like I do all the time for Linux terminal commands).
Hell, I often use Linux terminal commands from Google's search results AI box—I know enough to be able to parse what AI is suggesting (and identify when the proposed commands don't make sense), and enough to undo what I'm doing if it doesn't work. Saves a lot of time.
Copilot fixed some SQL syntax issues I had yesterday, too. 100% accuracy on that, despite it being a massive query with about a dozen nested subqueries. (Granted, I gave a very detailed prompt...) But, again, this was low stakes--who cares if a SELECT query fails to execute.
Exactly, and yes it's for historical fiction, not a history book. So if it gets some details wrong about Spanish colonial forts, or Queen Anne's Royal Court, and the role my witches may have had in it, I think I'll survive.
But if I had to do all this research, or seek out editing help myself, I'd be on page 5, instead of 67, and my story wouldn't be anywhere near as tight as it is.
Well, no, it has no opinions. But it can compare it to other work, and determine what patterns are considered good or bad, and that's not too different from a designer putting together a board of trends--or being Quentin Tarantino. It can tell by comparison if something is clearly communicated or clunky or funny, and and then you can either listen, or ignore it.
And it can either treat me like a 12 year old with Down Syndrome, or like a creative who can take criticism.
I'm 100% certain it would be completely useless to Stephen King, but I'm new to this.
Do you then check those historical details against trusted sources? If so, how often do they need correction?
I do, but it's for fiction, so if some thing end up through the cracks, I think it'll be ok. It gets a few things wrong or confused maybe 10% of the time.
Honestly though, I'm finding ChatGTP way smarter than the Google AI. Google's is a fucking moron. GPT is like Joe from Idiocracy with his coffee.
And the issue is that for the people who call for a Butlerian Jihad, we are part of the problem.
I'm just wondering who and how to contact the dilf in the photo
Is he single tho? 🫦
Higher education deserves this for their part in recreating indentured servitude
The solution if anyone wants to cheat the system is become friends with Indiana and Africans. Back home it's common practice to find family and/pr people to write those papers for you. I know of multiple people in Canada who have done this albeit for collage but same shit different pile.
Edit - and for anyone who might complain I very much live by "don't hate the player hate the game."
If you live outside of the 1st world you would already know the game is rigged. They're exploiting it, you should be too.
Foreign students cheat with AI too...
No I mostly agree with this one.
Due to false positives not all, but at least the ones that lied about it being an accusation at first then admitted under questioning should be written up to the Dean.
Also don't feel bad if you are a professor reading. I have a family member that got caught at least 6 times and just cried about losing scholarship to not be punished.
The reason I know is that they come to me right after and boast about how "cunning" they were.
I can't be bothered to pay attention to anything UK related. Its like Greenland and Antarctica to me.
Ok? That's a weird thing to say...
This just in, today's soup is really hot and really wet.
I'm surprised the college is allowing him to fail them
We fail students, especially en masse for cheating, all the time; this idea that we dont is anti-intellectual BS conservatives have spread around to descredit university systems. "Everyone passes because the woke means nobody can be excluded and everyone gets their participation trophy" nonsense.
It's plagiarism with extra steps.
Or
It's plagiarism all the way down.
It's just plain ol' plagiarism, AI isn't doing anything new except lower the barrier to entry.
Plagiarism with extra layers may be more accurate. Before they would just copy a few sources or just wikipedia like the author says. Now they're using the plagiarism engine. It's built upon plagiarism, it is its lifeblood.
The most common form of plagiarism in highschool might have been just copying wikipedia, but certainly in college the most common version (prior to gpt) was copying the structure and form of the arguments but reworking the details and language used - which is what GPT does.
before that, was various sites have essays written, or had a preview of the essay subject you are about to write. so people copies it or just modify it slightly. like essay of a non-fiction book you have to write, is readily online in various sites prior to AI, either as a introduction paragraph or with the thesis, people just lift it off there.
Are you a college professor in the US? I've been considering attempting to go that route, but I don't know if it's actually worth it, considering how few and far between the positions are, and that most universities seem to employ mostly adjunct professors at seemingly slave wages. Am I just being pessimistic, or is it as bad as it seems? I want to teach creative writing. I plan on teaching English as a second language when I finish out my bachelor's.
which subject? faculty positions are very competitive to be honest, especially in stem, and if your doing research , you should have written science papers, or been published quite a few times. since its teaching english.essay writing, some colleges might be desperate enough for english teachers, faculty positions seems hard to get , because there are tenure, and you might be a temporary hire/adjunt. i just know stem/bio department is super competitive asf.
You're right about the adjunct professor situation, it's really BS and should be illegal. They will get away with doing it as much as possible. I think a lot of professors have to start that way until an opening comes along
[not the person you asked]Colleges are having a rough time of it in today's political environment, so keep an eye on that, too.
Does you college library subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Ed? I find it neat to read the headlines, see what other people are thinking on.
i think that has a less effect on college, COnservatives dont go to college so that wouldnt count. plus participation grades have been around for decades, ever since early 2000s and its mostly for BUDGEt reasons for the school, they dont care if the person fails or not in the future, and they did the disservice by passing them in HS when they should be repeating it.
The idea that conservatives don't go to college is silly. They go to college, and while having a college education does have an impact on a person's political leanings, it's not the outsized one that gets played up in the culture war.
Data from the US:
Participation grades exist, I've taught classes that have them - but they seldom give credits towards degrees, and they aren't a thing in accredited programs (in fact the opposite is usually the case, competitive programs generally have massive classes where you're required to fail hundreds and hundreds of students at a time. The most soul-sucking experiences I have ever had while teaching have been running 600-1200 person weed out classes).
The funding process of a university is not straightforward - but no, the loss of a set of students, especially for cheating, is not a budgetary concern at an accredited institution. Academic standards enforcement is a condition for accreditation, even.
Woops you don't realize I have worked in a couple colleges over the past 10 years, and also have friends who work in other colleges, and have seen how professors are pressured/forced to pass students who shouldn't. But it's not part of some "woke" shit, it's because the college doesn't want to lose a paying customer, and it also makes their numbers look better to recruit future students. I'm surprised, but happy, to see not all colleges are going this path because it really is some slimy shit.
What did you do at those universities (and were they notably accredited)? There's a world of options here, and the difference in areas of budgetary interest between being something like a provost vs. a lab manager is vast. Both deal with budgets, but the familiarity with the broad scope of the uni's budgetary policy vs. the realities of budgetary specifics is very relevant to the impression you present here.
For example, a reputation for enforcing academic rigour greatly improves things like grant allocation, which cover far more of a university's budget than a small percentage loss of tuition from academic dismissal of students does. That is not an aspect addressed directly below the level of deans (or program leads at larger unis, and PIs at research-heavy ones) but one that has a tremendous impact on the daily operation of the institution.
It's just not an either/or issue here, and in general academic dismissal is a net zero for a university because of those huge areas of unstated complexity.
Except he isn't. He decided not to punish them.
I'm one of these types of students. What do you expect when you are forced to write discussion posts every week like it's the most important thing ever(200 words per class, I have 3). Also responding to people's posts like you care(1-2 50 word posts per class). I understand this post is talking about a report, but it's literally inducing chronic stress. Na keep using AI classmates.
Also, you know damn well the professor isn't reading all of our responses so what's the fucking point.
Tbf this comment alone was 85 words.
People are so lazy. Too lazy to read and write now. Get an AI summary of a long article so you don't "have to" read it all. Get AI to write your 200 little words to participate in a discussion. Guess they have to save their precious time to get back to watching videos of talking heads blabbering their reactions to videos of other talking heads on their phones.
Meanwhile, their unused little brains shrink smaller everyday from lack of exercise. These fuckers need some kind of Hans and Franz brain boot camp workout to exercise their puny little minds.
How many words is this? I'm just ranting here like a sexy Grandpa Simpson without an onion tied to my belt, but it's not difficult for me at all to come up with some words on a topic.
So after you have the AI read the article for you and write your opinions for you, how do you validate the content it produces as a result? What if it has produced some garbage that's 85% inaccurate but you never learned enough about the topic you're pretending to write about to know any different?
What do you expect
I think that you believe what you described - 700 words a week - would be "obviously absurd" to everyone here... What you described is such a tiny work load it's shocking to see you frame it like this.
But to answer directly: What you're expected to do in school is learn, not fake your way through so you can come out an utter dumb ass on the other side. I know I would have used the tools if I had them as a kid. No adult could have convinced me of the damage I'm doing to myself and the world. I doubt anything any of us say will change your mind - but I am sure a great many students will hate themselves for doing this to themselves 10 or 20 years down the line.
College is, ironically, one of the worst environments I have ever been in for actually learning anything. I already completed a BS in engineering before LLMs, and now I am pursuing a master's, not because I want to learn from the college, but because the degree is necessary for better job opportunities in my field.
The funny thing is that the 6-month period of no college after I finished my bachelor's was the most productive learning period of my life. I absorbed more on my own than I ever did in a classroom. Once the master's program started, that freedom disappeared. Everything felt restrictive again, and there is always constant pressure to keep track of deadlines rather than focus on real understanding.
I have had jobs and internships where I was overworked and handling entire projects by myself, but those environments were still infinitely less stressful than college. In college, you pay them to rail you. On top of that, you are forced to hit word quotas for weekly topics and other low-effort, box-checking assignments. Some topics are interesting, but most of the "discussions" boil down to writing, "I learned how to do xyz," and then replying to a classmate with, "I like how you described exactly what I said. Amazing insight!" This happens every single week for every class. It wears you down.
It is easy for someone to mock this by reducing it to, "You can't write 700 words?" Thanks gramps, but that's not the issue, especially since I clearly have no problem writing given the length of this comment. The real issue is that college is a terrible environment for learning because it rewards grades and GPAs by any means, which usually means everything except real understanding, since it's more efficient in terms of effort to result ratio. When I was a naive freshman, thinking that doing my best based on my understanding was the way, I would always do poorly on homework assignments. From then on, I switched tactics to memorization and was rewarded with a better GPA. And I'm ok with that because I've already proved to myself that I can learn completely on my own without any help from AI or a professor.
So all of this rambling is to say that ignoring the issues and mocking students like me is about as helpful as telling an angry wife to “calm down,” instead of addressing the root cause.
Exactly. The point is educational alignment: designing coursework to achieve learning objectives given that students have access to generative AI. That requires work from the educators and honest communication with the students about the capabilities, dangers, and moral hazards of generative AI. You can't just pretend that word calculators don't exist.
The point is for your own learning and your benefit I guess. My studies weren't literacy type though, so I can't relate to how frustrating it is. I never used ai though, I actually enjoyed my subjects so much that I wouldn't let it take the fun a way haha
dude 200 words is like three paragraphs. if that's too stressful, you might want to find a career than doesn't require college
'Can't' write a few hundred words for a university class, can write almost 100 words whining about having to write 200 words, okayyy buddy
How can you possibly expect me to write 600 words in a week! THAT’S ALMOST AN ENTIRE PAGE!
You cant write 600 words a week?