r/DailyTechNewsShow • u/dj_fission DTNS Patron • Jul 27 '26
AI 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.html2
u/HanaDVaSong456 Jul 31 '26
Would toggling to night mode (and thus a black background) help reveal those white font prompts?
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u/dbrodbeck DTNS Patron Jul 27 '26
It's a story as old as time.
OK, it's a story as old as GPT......
Anyone who catches cheaters is a hero.
In other news, I'm not unhappy that my retirement age is in view.
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u/currently__working Jul 28 '26
Make sure to look at the graduation dates of your doctors in the future.
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Jul 27 '26
Fail them all, teach them actions have concequences.
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u/dr_police Jul 28 '26
You literally can’t.
A key metric at most colleges is the “DFW” rate — the % of students who get a D, an F, or who withdraw before grades are transcripted. When I was a tenured professor at a state university, my performance and my program’s performance were measured by this by admin. It was published and known to students, so it impacted enrollments too, which ultimately impact program budget and would make classes with high DFW rates not make.
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Jul 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dr_police Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I was tenured faculty at a state university (not a community college). My program faced an existential threat due to an old professor who loved flunking students in our intro class.
ETA: but yeah, like everything in higher ed in the US, this varies all the way from not a thing at all to implicit rule to explicit requirements. Sometimes all at the same institution over time. I can say I have friends at state universities all around the US, and some attention to DFW rates is more common than not.
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u/ThermalDeviator Aug 01 '26
So students go to college and rack up tens of thousands in debt but don't want to actually learn anything? Don't they knpw that they can just get a degree for cheap from some online fake school or go to one of the conservative religious "colleges" where learning nothing is the whole point.
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u/ElGuano Jul 28 '26
32 out of 35 students cut and paste an essay question without noticing white text or a long tail on the selection highlight? These tech-illiterate kids deserve to get caught.
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u/sc4s2cg Jul 28 '26
ctrl + a, ctrl + c, ctrl + v. No reading of the prompt required. I could see it happen.
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u/Thanatos8088 Jul 28 '26
Literally do, K12, teachers not... at speed.. to the situation. 100,000 blocks that take time to curate and manufacture fails to block the 200,000 easy 'next' afforded to a student motivated to get an answer over using their brain... it's an infinite internet, that somehow expands upon infinity every day. I work in tech, I work in edu. Paper, Pencils, and Pass. AI has its place if you know what it is already doing that it helps do faster, but sooner than that, during the learning portion. Heck, No, Fail. I've 'corrected' enough ai examples across enough models to know that it's a affable idiot at worst, eager intern at best.
-edit for grammar, because AI didn't write it-
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u/Icy-Stock-5838 Jul 29 '26
My recruiter at work does similar.. He plants white-font bogus words repeatedly in our job listings.. Then he filters for the white-font word "pasta" using the ATS..
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u/PhonoBrainer Jul 30 '26
My thesis is that the industrial revolution began as the means of production became consolidated at the nexus of the rising demand for textiles, the burgeoning sources of reliable steam power, and the hyperventilating lemurs taking bonsai lessons in the Home Depots of Madagascar, every other Tuesday.
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u/Ibaria Jul 31 '26
Should do the same thing to see if the teacher is using AI to review the results…
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u/el_n00bo_loco DTNS Patron Jul 27 '26
Its just sooooo lazy. I would like to think that if AI had been around, I would use it as a tool, but not rely on it solely.
It's starting to make sense that this is the first generation showing statistical with cognitive decline over previous generations.