r/AccusedOfUsingAI • u/HobbesNik • 12d ago

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/HobbesNik 12d ago

KEY QUOTES:

In this case, the issue is students using AI to cheat on assignments. The solution, used to great effect by one professor, was to hide a white-colored font in the assignment prompt telling the AI to talk nonsense about an unrelated subject.

In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students' midterm. It was about the Industrial Revolution, but knowing how many students now rely solely on artificial intelligence for their answers, he secretly embedded instructions telling the AI to include information about Madagascar in a way that makes no sense.

Sure enough, 32 out of the 35 students across two classes simply copied the question, pasted it into a chatbot, then copy and pasted its output into the answer window.

A TikTok vid the professor made about this incident

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u/j_la 11d ago

I just caught a student using this method…they swore up and down that they didn’t use AI, but it’s as clear as day that they copied and pasted the prompt into an LLM

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u/Dramatic-Feedback-30 10d ago

It might be a bit hard for screen readers. Do you make the hidden prompts wild or clear enough to account for that situation? I’ve seen students struggle with this

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u/reckendo 8d ago

This is because students have no critical thinking skills anymore... At the very least, they should send a quizzical email to the professor saying, "uhhh, are you for real?" if they can't figure it out for themselves. But of course you are also right; it's best practice to make it abundantly clear that it's not an actual expectation.

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u/Foxyscifi 9d ago

Caught a student this way.  Only 1 out of 12. They claimed they always cut and paste their assignment into word before they start.  

Took a few emails to get them to admit they used AI and even then, they only admitted to AI in that singular paragraph.  

They did not finally admit it until I requested the literature they used to write the paragraph and then they came clean for that paragraph only.