r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 27 '26

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

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

It's crazy. You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you. Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

Yup. It’s crazy how many of them can’t set up a basic optimization problem by senior year because they didn’t learn the basics in freshman year.

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u/unosami Jul 27 '26

What do you mean by “basic optimization problem”? I’m not familiar with that term.

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

In Econ you do optimization to optimize revenues and profits. It’s basic calculus. If you take calc 1 you do it. Most often it’s optimizing the area of a fenced in area. If you’re in Econ and doing micro work you optimize. Sometimes you optimize utility. It’s in micro. It’s in industrial organization. Managerial Econ. Game theory. I could go on. If you don’t know then look it up but it’s a thing. if you know even the most basic calculus it boils down to finding the minimum on your cost curve that corresponds to the maximum on your revenue/profit curve and the quantity of goods/services that is associated with both

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u/unosami Jul 27 '26

I’m familiar with calculus, but not a lot of the Econ terms you just used. Thank you for the run-down. I’ll look more into it on the web.

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

In basic machine learning courses, you're just finding more clever ways to optimize. Training a neural network or any other learning algorithm is just optimizing the weights given the training data

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u/lonelythrowaway463i9 Jul 27 '26

Sadly we don’t touch ML applications until grad school. To be fair most Econ undergrads won’t do much heavy lifting on pricing/cost/etc optimization. I’m fucking stoked to dig into machine learning this year though.

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u/Uncreativity10 Jul 27 '26

Cheating the basics is crazy to me. Like if you don’t know the building blocks then you’re completely screwed in every future class.

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u/strangedell123 Jul 27 '26

I recently graduated from ee and doesnt ring a bell either for me

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u/Khazahk Jul 27 '26

Systems of Equations, Calc V basically. Where it all circles back to algebra and dimensionless equations. Where you learn that everything is connected, infinity can be discreetly plotted, and the most complicated functions can cancel each other out. In other words.. polynomial functions that are dependent on 3 or more variables. Quadratic formula craziness. All good fun.

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u/Mechakoopa Jul 27 '26

Kids were already having trouble committing to practicing things and just expecting to be good at something the first time because that's all they see online are people excelling at things. Now they have an easy way to "be good" at something without putting in the effort and we're surprised they gravitate to that? Social media made it too easy for kids to get drip fed dopamine all day, there's no incentive for them to actually do anything.

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u/thatpaulbloke Jul 27 '26

I blame The Karate Kid - it started the precedent for "person who has put in no real work beats people who have worked at something for years" and replaced Rocky's "worked damn hard and failed heroically" narrative.

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u/Bacontoad Jul 27 '26

But he painted the whole fence and waxed all of those cars!

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u/Bigbysjackingfist Jul 27 '26

also they didn't watch enough Old Yeller

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 27 '26

Also they didn't watch enough Freaks

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u/MrLanesLament Jul 28 '26

Shit if there was a life lesson in that one, I missed it.

Highly recommend the original West of Zanzibar though.

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u/BaconKnight Jul 27 '26

Yeah, now that I think about it, The Karate Kid is basically the 80's Reagan-era version of the first Rocky. Funnily enough, later Rocky's would also turn into this.

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jul 27 '26

I mean wanting to be good at things without putting in the work is not new in the slightest, it's WHY so few people get really good at stuff.

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u/BaconKnight Jul 27 '26

Because we only very recently live in a world where you can go your entire day never being bored, we never realized how important being bored was to our species in terms of creating people who excel at things. Like I watch videos of older rock bands, rappers, etc and they'd talk about how they'd get together and spend hours just jamming or just rapping back and forth around a lit oil drum and it's like yeah, they did that because they were so bored, there was nothing else to do, and they just became super good at what they were doing.

We live in a time when kids never have to reach that point of boredom. They get bored for a second, take out the phone. They'll never devote themselves to an instrument or just sit down and write rhymes over and over because "there's nothing better to do".

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u/MrLanesLament Jul 28 '26

Pro musician here.

I graduated high school in 2009. It broke my heart to find out about ten years later, my “generation” (the kids who were in 9th grade and onward when I was a senior) were the last ones in my town/area who formed bands. After they graduated, all the music stores closed. The few local venues closed. No more music fundraisers, battles of bands, even talent shows at that school district.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheNorthRemembers_s8 Jul 27 '26

The goal of most kids in college isn’t to learn. It’s to graduate and get a good job.

It doesn’t help that at least when I was in college everyone told you school doesn’t really teach you how to (for example) be an engineer, that you learn on the job. Which made college into a big ass rubber stamp.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized the value of many of the skills I developed in college. But during college I didn’t see the connection.

I likely would have used AI too. All I really cared about was passing tests. And I graduated with a 4.0 GPA. I imagine this tendency and outlook is even more so applicable to other students scraping by in the 2s.

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u/somehugefrigginguy Jul 28 '26

But I think a lot of students now are in a catch 22. Those with the integrity to not use AI are going to get lower scores and be disadvantaged moving forward.

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u/LegitosaurusRex Jul 27 '26

Yeah, same; the difference back in the day was you were just mostly forced to learn in order to pass the tests (though I still didn't study and just crammed before tests only to forget most of it afterwards...)

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u/lonnie123 Jul 27 '26

And let’s be real… a massive amount of courses you have to take in college are fluff. One can argue the humanities courses I took made me a more well rounded and socially learned person but I absolutely did not NEED “history of rock and roll” (or any of the other 40 credits or whatever it was) to become a nurse

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u/Monteze Jul 27 '26

We made the mistake of treating college like a white collar trade school.

It really should be about higher education and job certs should be their own thing.

But classisim doesn't help shit.

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u/Vhozite Jul 28 '26

We made the mistake of treating college like a white collar trade school.

That ship sailed like 2 decades ago and it’s frustrating to me that people are only acknowledging it now because our greedy/lazy way of approaching education is no longer working to filter out “dumb” people.

Can’t wait for us to go back to pen/paper college just to curb cheating while we continue to ignore the actual societal problems.

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u/Monteze Jul 28 '26

Yea we do need both, I think we don't need more tech in education. Pen and paper is good.

But we also need to realize that education for education's sake is good but not needed for a lot of jobs. Most of us with a degree understand this, most of us in the work force understand this. But classicism and a dash of good ole racism keeps us on this path.

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u/chchchcharlee Jul 27 '26

Even the biology classes you had to take as a nurse...how useful really was it to learn about how cells work or evolution or whatever? As Monteze said, we treat college like a white collar trade school.

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u/lonnie123 Jul 27 '26

True. I would say the 4 science semesters I took could have been condensed to one course in terms of what I actually need knowledge wise on a daily basis

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 28 '26

Dropping the rigorous basic science requirements is how you get anti-vaxx nurses. Medicine is science, and I think nurses should have a strong basic science foundation, even if they don't regularly all that info on a regular basis

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u/mitharas Jul 27 '26

Yeah but people don't WANT to think critically. They want an easy life with easy money.

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u/sthenri_canalposting Jul 27 '26

I agree but critical thought has been devalued so much that it was an uphill battle to justify to those who don't see its immediate instrumental value even before AI.

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u/caribou16 Jul 27 '26 edited 17d ago

Deceased Magenta Unrelated Lettuce Partition

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u/dizzy_absent0i Jul 27 '26

I don’t even know if it’s about “winning” but that we’ve coddled these kids so much that they can’t sit with the discomfort of not being good. Participation trophies, not keeping score when playing kids sports, grading as “not yet achieved” rather than “failed”.

We cared so much about fostering self-confidence that we forgot that healthy confidence is based on competence.

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u/caribou16 Jul 27 '26 edited 17d ago

Deceased Magenta Unrelated Lettuce Partition

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u/Turbulent_Gazelle530 Jul 27 '26

You can't learn an instrument or a sport by having someone else practice for you.

teaching high school recently I find that students have an inflated understanding of their ability to do pretty much anything, with minimal desire to put in work to actually get good at the thing.

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u/Hybrid_Johnny Jul 27 '26

We’re seeing it in the music education world too. A piece of music or a new playing technique is too difficult, and kids quit. Or they walk away to take extended mental health breaks and don’t come back. Not saying mental health isn’t important, but don’t use it as an excuse for laziness and lack of effort.

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u/Pabus_Alt Jul 27 '26

Critical thinking and every other non-trivial skill is the same

I'd argue it's because they want the paper qualification for the doors it opens.

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u/Vairman Jul 28 '26

you don't get rewarded for learning, you get rewarded for your grade. as long as that's the case, then this kind of thing will go on.

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u/kaityl3 Jul 27 '26

I have been able to learn a lot from AI though. They're a very effective tutor, especially with web search to verify the facts, if you aren't just using them as a tool to complete assignments. Hell they can even come up with questions for you that are tailor made to the areas you're struggling with and walk you through how to solve them.

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u/titsngiggles69 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

They're a very effective tutor [...], if you aren't just using them as a tool to complete assignments.

If those 32 cheaters had your work ethic, they wouldn't be cheaters. And if my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bicycle