‘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
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.
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
Interesting post, would be good to support the author/publisher with a source link. Especially since it isn’t pay walled.
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.
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.
Curious why you’re only posting the archived version? This article is not paywalled…
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.
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.
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
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.)
What were the other 8 percent?
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.
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
Students would want to learn instead of doing less work if there were incentives to learn instead of just get out with a degree.
There are incentives to learn. The smartest kids do far better than the average kid.
They just need to learn to make AI do it. Then they can do more than most.
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
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
that was the trap.
I don’t get it. I try to see everything in life through Marxist and feminist lens.
". 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 in the some I got in the 00s on my writing.
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?
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
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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
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
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.
Great story with predictable results. Welcome to your AI future where people give their thinking over to machines made by sociopaths.
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.
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.
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.
You would not believe how many seniors use this ploy.
Fair.
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.
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;
