I'm not disputing that students cheat using AI, and that professors catch them and enact consequences.

But this video is a little suspicious. The fact that none of the 32 students bothered to even read the generated output feels strange. Or that those students didn't notice the extremely obvious white text at the bottom of the question when copy/pasting the assignment.

Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

The trap was hidden text instructing the AI to use the word “Madagascar” in a nonsensical way. The assignment was about the Industrial Revolution. “Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game” is an example of what a student turned in. The instructor says it was the midterm, but looks like it was more of an online discussion. Anyway, I knew cheating was bad, but this is just flagrant.

I fear for this generation of folks that are losing the ability to think. They have a very sad existence ahead.

Every few weeks I see a headline about a teacher catching 80%+ of their students cheating with AI. I wonder how much newsworthiness selection bias is taking place here? Out of all teachers that do this type of experiment, do 90% of them them find that most students cheat, or do we just hear about the 1% that have the biggest numbers?

The text would have been visible once copied into the AI interface, right?

When I was in college we had a professor that would assign a 20ish page paper due every other Saturday.

One of the students was certain the reports were not reviewed and just given a vibes grade based on the student.

So he handed in pages of literally “blaah blaaaah blaaah…” and got an A

Somehow feels relevant to this article

I think there is a vast difference between leveraging a tool and outsourcing your cognitive functions, which is what seemed to happen in this specific case. Are schools failing students? How do you instill a desire to learn? I hope someone smart is trying to solve this because the ramifications on society are bleak. One anecdotal case isn't proof but it follows general trends I've seen across campuses.

“These students have no critical thinking skills!” - large group of adults on HN believing random ragebait on TikTok while applying zero critical thinking.

> Gibson did say he wasn't using this as an opportunity to mock his students. He added that after he confronted them about the cheating, he gave them the opportunity to contest their grade. Only two did, though the fact that any of them tried to argue their case is pretty surprising.

This it the root of the problem. Gibson is concerned about mocking his students? How about failing them on the course for academic dishonesty?

If you treat cheating as an oopsie in school, that attitude continues into the real world.

I wonder if any of the three other students did use AI, but removed the Madagascar signal? So many students not proofreading suggests that they just want to make it look like they did the work but don't care about the grade, which is surprising for a midterm.

It's also a little ironic that he's showing all of this while wearing Ray-Ban Metas.

I don’t get the professor!

One approach is for AI to conduct a viva voce exam with each student: after the student answers a question on a topic, the session prompts with another question which digs deeper. This goes on for say 8-12 questions, getting deeper each time.

I checked this idea by asking ChatGPT to examine my understand of 1970’s CPU history, assuming I was a CompSci student. After it asked me a series of 8 questions on Intel’s devices from the 4004 onwards, ChatGPT assessed me as a 2nd year student and graded me with a Credit. The experience was quite convincing and at the end it summarised the gaps in my knowledge, which I agreed with. It was also able to say what criteria it was using to assess me.

So why can’t AI-viva voce be a method to help students and professors with teaching and learning?

Try it out, in a subject or language you know well. Adapt this prompt:

Pretend I am an undergraduate student of Computer Science. I am learning about early microprocessors from the 1970s. I want you to ask me an examination question as if you were doing a viva voce exam with me to test my understanding of concepts. I want you to receive my answer and then based on what I said I want you to ask me a more specific question to probe my understanding. Repeat this interaction up to 8 times. Then grade my understanding so far, by giving me a pass, merit, credit, or distinction? Can you explain how you arrive at the grade based on my answers and your expectation of undergraduate knowledge of microprocessor theory?

I don't see a problem. Fail them. This is college, a paid program, not something like K12 where we want kids to learn so they can be productive adults. If someone wants to pay to fail, that's on them. I get that the school doesn't love what it could do to their graduation stats, but c'mon, it won't take long for the following cohorts to learn that the school will just fail them right out of the program for cheating, and they'll stop.

If you do this sort of thing, for the love of God, test it with screen readers. And Reader mode. And probably a bunch of other things neither I nor you can think of, but that students will absolutely use, and then be falsely accused of cheating.

As a screen reader user, I have seen plenty of real world examples of people trying to be clever with white-on-white. The Joke is on them, I got their ID numbers and the secret instructions they gave to their coworkers. I even got my IP banned because of this once (from Arxiv I believe), back in the day when they had a "please don't click this" link on their website as an anti-crawler measure, which was accidentally made visible to screen readers.

Oral exams seem the only way to prevent wastes of time.

Anything else can easily be cheated in many ways.

This is going to sound about as dated as "VBScript virus catches 32/35 accounting students cheating with Excel" in a few years, I think.

This particular implementation of the test seems flawed. The “invisible text” which would be read by a screen reader or visible if the problem statement were copied to some persistent scratch space while drafting a response would specify the inclusion of the word whether or not the author is an LLM.

I would say any AI generated output, from a student who didnt notice Madagascar in their prompt, would have been extremely easy to detect based on basic llmisms anyway. But I suppose it's much easier to just search for "Madagascar".

Also, the professor should see the history of the student writing in the document editor.

I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it because I know how to remove llmisms and prompt effectively.

Here's an article on llmisms from people on the front lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

The ability to think and no attention to detail whatsoever. I mean, proofreading is absolutely necessary, regardless of how the text was written.

I think there's some truth to this, however, I remember hearing similar arguments when people where using calculators on things they were suppose to be working out by hand.

I bet if you had one of these students explain the rationale behind a strategy they put together for winning at TFT, he or she would likely give you a very well thought out, coherent, and smart line of thinking.

If I had to guess, I would bet that it has far less to do with people being "unwilling to think" and far more of kids becoming exhausted by the boring, learn by memorization, pad your writing to fill space, monotony of an old and outdated education system, divorced from anything at all resembling the real world.

Speaking from experience, I did horrible in school and 100% would've been using ChatGPT whenever I could just to get through it.

The second I got out of school and found out work is far more result/merit based, I "learned" really, really quickly.

The old Mark Twain classic: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

I try to be optimistic but then I talk with friends who are teachers and it is very grim. I'm sure the students will eventually learn the lesson but only after they have failed a lot in future. It really is taking the easy short term gains for hard long term punishments.

But look at many parts of the world and you see that it isn't unique.

I saw it from some Cooker-anti Vax folks the saying "You future doctor is currently using ChatGPT so you had better get your health in order now." And on that one point I had to agree with them. A weird future awaits.

Unfortunately, I think it's just a continuation of a trend that already started pre-covid. I was surprised that most juniors and interns I worked with seemed to lack the ability to "self-help" and Google basic questions they had. I think it reflects a schooling system in the US that doesn't teach any real critical thinking - just studying until you "know" the answer, without actually teaching students the intuition of how to get there. The result is that when they encounter something not even novel, but slightly unfamiliar they don't even make an attempt to start or immediately tunnel vision down the wrong path without taking a first step back. Funnily, the latter approach feels similar to how LLMs perform on truly novel problems, too.

The ability to think has never been nurtured nor valued by the education system much, passing exams with high grades was.

That was always the goal and what the adult world would rate anyway.

And that meant that memory and repetition ended up being the core of the education system and it works very well from law to very advanced math where memorizing proofs and substitution rules is most of the curriculum anyway.

Problem solving, critical thinking, these things never really showed up or were valued by the system.

It was always the grades.

So a system that has emphasized the wrong metrics has always been gamified. AI is only speeding this gamification.

The ramifications are bleak if you're destined to become an employee. Students believe that AI can do their work for them, so they shouldn't be surprised if AI gets the job they wanted.

On the other hand, these students are proving that AI is as capable as a student (in their eyes at least) which bodes very well for employers. Limitless numbers of cheap workers.

That has never been an easy question. Learning is hard work. If your parents/school didn't force you to learn it as a kid, then odds are your attempts to learn something new as an adult fail. Many adults take up a musical instrument, or foreign language -only a few learn more than the most basic phrases, these are the most common things for adults to attempt and the track record is poor. Sure adults who know C++ (a tiny subset of adults) might learn Rust with high success - but the hard part is learning to program not the syntax of the language.

A desire to learn generally only gets you to a superficial level before you get bored and realize there is a lot of hard work before you could get a useful level of knowledge. Getting deep requires years of focused effort and that almost always means forced effort. The few adults who learn a musical instrument or foreign language prove the point.

It is too late for the current crop of university students. Most of them should have never graduated middle school. The failure is very deep.

The truth is that most people don’t go to school out of a desire to learn. At least not mostly. They do it out of a desire to earn a living, to be able to get decent jobs.

If getting the degree is just a certificate to allow you to get jobs, that’s all a lot of people will care about.

We need a system of apprenticeship. Some school, yes, but we have over indexed on school and forced it into a role for which it is ill suited.