The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live.
I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.
In Germany, the traditional sharp-tongued answer of pupils regarding the question "How could both of you get the exact same WRONG answer (in the test)?" is: "Well, we both have the same teacher." :-)
How the heck is that even possible? :o
Because what the cheater is trying to accomplish is to avoid having to think.
It's an act motivated by either laziness, apathy or rebellion (or some combination thereof). Not motivated by trying to get a good grade.
He just goes to our local public elementary school.
Of course, when he asked for help with his practice problems I had no idea how they were meant to solve it so I taught him to solve it algebraically.
The world at large rarely accommodates shy people. Coping skills are essential, even if they are unpleasant.
They learned that cheating gives advantage to the cheating individual. They also learned that reporting cheating harms them and non cheaters.
Tests were created to save money, more students per teacher, we're just going back to the older, actually useful, method of talking to people to see if they understand what they've been taught.
You weren't asked to write an essay because someone wanted to read your essay, only to intuit that you've understood something
I'm skeptical. Tests are a way of standardizing the curriculum and objectively determining if the lessons were learned.
The lesson of how to swim sometimes only comes in applying the learning.
Some tests require memorized knowledge, like what is the stall speed of your airplane. Some tests require reasoning skills, like what is the stress in this beam.
There are learning frameworks that explain it all well enough.
Learning what something is, vs applying what you learned has different terminology in the learning world, but not everyone might use that.
Personally I don't believe that any of the problems caused by AI are going to be solved by "more AI"
People do learn how to use the web, social media, mobile devices to ultimately work for them or against them.
How is this working out in practice? Every piece of technology is absolutely adversarial nowadays and people are getting ground to bits by it.
Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work.
The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students.
The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.
1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.
2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.
"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.
Unless you're 100% sure that a student cheated, you don't punish them. And you don't ask them to prove they're innocent.
Because the teacher was knowingly giving zeroes to students who didn't cheat, and expecting them to take it upon themselves to reverse this injustice.
The teacher effectively filtered out the shy boys/girls who are not brave enough to "hustle." Gracefully.
The time spent challenging exam grades is usually better spent studying for the next exam. I've never gotten a significant grade improvement from it.
She didn't ask them to challenge them, she asked them additional questions. The test already asks them questions.
If you are really shy, a culture where no one cheats is far better because your actual ability and intelligence shines through
Cheaters and non cheaters were punished in exactly the same way. Effectively cheating gave you an advantage and being shy gave you disadvantage.
This has nothing to do with American Hustle culture and just with that professor's judgment.
> the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.
They got the question but not the answer so they had to work it out before the test. They couldn't explain it later?
My point is that accuracy is a terrible metric here and sensitivity, specificity tell us much more relevant information to the task at hand. In that formulation, a specificity < 1 is going to have false positives and it isn't fair to those students to have to prove their innocence.
If we're being literal, accuracy is (number correct guesses) / (total number of guesses). Maybe the folks at turnitin don't actually mean 'accuracy', but if they're selling an AI/ML product they should at least know their metrics.
Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.
False positives with technology that is non-deterministic is guaranteed.
It's more than slightly comedic people being amazed when LLM math works as it's created to.
What happened is that I did a Q&A worksheet but in each section of my report I reiterated the question in italics before answering it.
The reiterated questions of course came up as 100% plagiarism because they were just copied from the worksheet.
Wow I'd have been screwed, so many of my high school papers were just rewrites and improvements on stuff I wrote in earlier years.
All it takes is one moron with power and a poor understanding of statistics.
It's shit software for schools and teachers to cover their ass. Nothing more, and deserves no more attention.
If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for education contexts that track student writing process.
Detecting the whole essay being copied and pasted from an outside source is trivial. Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. These methods dramatically increase the effort required to get away with having AI do the work for you, which diminishes the benefit of the shortcut and influences more students to do the work themselves. It also protects the honest students from false positives.
I guess you could use AI to guide this, at which point it's basically a research tool and grammar checker.
Crude tools (like Google docs revision history) can protect an honest student who engages in a typical editing process from false allegations, but it can also protect a dishonest student who fabricated the evidence, and fail to protect an honest student who didn't do any substantial editing.
More sophisticated tools can do a better job of untangling the fractal, but as with fractal shaped problems the layers of complexity keep going and there's no perfect solutions, just tools that help in some situations when used by competent users.
The higher Ed professors who really care about academic integrity are rare, but they are layering many technical and logistical solutions to fight back against the dishonest students.
I guess some people can type out a 5,000 word assignment linearly from start to finish in 2 hours at 40wpm but that's both incredibly rare and easy to verify upon further investigation.
Keystroke dynamics can detect artificial typing patterns (copying another source by typing it out manually). If a student has to go way out of their way to make their behavior appear authentic then it's decreasing advantage of cheating and less students will do it.
If the student is integrating answers from multiple AI responses then maybe that's a good thing for them to be learning and the assessment should allow it.
The best solutions are in student motivations and optimal pedagogical design. Students who want to learn, and learning systems that are optimized for rate of learning.
online programs, limited infrastructure, dishonest students exploiting accessibility programs, are some examples where it's easier to say than do what you're suggesting.
Also AI can help students cheat in class too. Smart glasses, pens with cameras and LED screens on them (yes really), or just regular smart phones. Even switching to pen and paper won't reduce the ease of access.
Instructors don't want to police cheating, they want to teach (or do research). Either way, they don't want to police.
Students cheat when they think what they're learning is low value, the learning process is too clunky, or they place too high a value on the grade. All these imbalances can be improved with better pedagogy.
The only enduring way to actually solve the cheating crisis isn't to make it harder, it's to reduce the value of cheating. Everything else is either temporary or performative.
Manually re-typing another source is something these tools were originally designed to detect. The original issue was "essay mills", not AI.
It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need to stop cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you seed skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the rest of the kids see what the real target of education looks like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks in they learn way better spontaneously from their peers than any other method.
Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.
Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.
Pre-k is preschool aka kindergarten?
Is this really needed? It's really stressful for kids under 5 or 6 to read and is there a big enough statistical difference in outcome enough to rob them of some of their early youth?
I started reading around 6 years old and I was probably ahead of the vast majority of kids within 6 months.
Kids starting around 6 years old have much better focus and also greatly enhanced mental abilities overall.
In general, I don’t really understand educators hyperventilating about LLM use. If you can’t tell what your students are independently capable of and are merely asking them to spit back content at you, you’re not doing a good job.
Sounds as though you do understand it.
If it looks like AI cheating software will be a problem for my children (and currently it has not been an issue), then I'm considering recording them doing all of their homework.
I suspect school admin only has so much appetite for dealing with an irate parent demanding a real time review of 10 hours of video evidence showing no AI cheating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ('Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ("Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 ("Machine Bias (propublica.org)")
> language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of [African American English] be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death.
This one is just so extra insidious to me, because it can happen even when a well-meaning human has already "sanitized" overt references to race/ethnicity, because the model is just that good at learning (bad but real) signals in the source data.
We are already (in the US) living in a system of soft social-credit scores administered by ad tech firms and non-profits. So “the algorithms says you’re guilty” has already been happening in less dramatic ways.
The only thing prevents them from doing so is the fact Google is too big to sell a "plagiarism assistant."
- Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the google docs, it is date and time stamped.
- Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab.
If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written apology to remind the future detectors.
Edit: clarity
It's only an obvious choice if you have total faith that your teacher will be fair, which you might doubt if the situation starts with "You're a cheater unless you prove me otherwise". In the worse case scenario you'll be grilled for one hour and still be marked as a cheater because you didn't convince the teacher.
Once this becomes routine the class can become e.g. 10 minutes conversation on yesterday's topic, 40 minutes lecturing and live exercises again. Which is really just reinventing the "daily quiz" approach, but again the thing we are trying to optimize for is compliance.
Honestly, students should have a course in "how the justice system works" (or at least should work). So should the teachers.
Student unions and similar entities should exist and be ready to intervene to help students in such situations.
This is nothing new, AI will just make this happen more often, revealing how stupid so many teachers are. But when someone spent thousands for a tool, which purports to be reliable, and is so quick to use, how can an average person resist it? The teacher is as lazy as the cheaters they intend to catch.
The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.
Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.
But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working.
And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.
We learned how government and justice worked.
And to add to that, there should be a justice system there. The idea of due process is laughable in most educational settings.
Bizzare and unfair
https://decrypt.co/286121/ai-detectors-fail-reliability-risk...
I could see why he didn’t, so I wasn’t offended or defensive and started to tell him the steps required to build web apps and explained it in a manner he could understand using analogies. Towards the end of our conversation he could see I both knew about the topic and was enthusiastic about it. I think he was still a bit shocked that I wrote that paper, but he could tell from the way I talked about it that it was authentic.
It will be interesting to see how these situations evolve as AI gets even better. I suspect assessment will be more manual and in-person.
To wit, show the teacher that YOU did the work and not someone else. If the teacher is not willing to do this with every student they accuse of malfeasance, they need to find another job. They're lazy as hell and suck at teaching.
Computer, show "my" work and explain to the teacher why "I" wrote what "I" did, describe why that particular approach to the narrative appealed to "me" and "I" chose that as the basis of "my" work. Produce an outline on which the paper could have been based and possible rough drafts, then explain how I could have revised the work to produce the final result.
This sounds like, a good solution? It’s the exception case, so shouldn’t be constant (false positives), although I suppose this fails if everyone cheats and everyone wants to claim innocence.
I guess we could go back to giving exams soviet Russia style where you get a couple of questions that you have to answer orally in front of the whole class and that’s your grade. Not fun…
You can’t keep hiding behind being an introvert your whole life.
2. Speaking about your work in front of 1-2-5 people is one thing, but being tested in front of an entire class (30 people?) is a totally different thing.
It’s not that different from speaking up in your neighborhood group.
Speaking in front of people and advocating for yourself is a core human skill. If you don’t practice it you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I would even say it has nothing to do with introverts and extroverts.
In this particular resolution example, it would be quicker to ask the student some probing questions versus have them re-write (and potentially regurgitate) an essay.
For exams you’d need a proctored environment of some sort, say a row of conference booths so students can’t just bring notes.
You’d want to have some system for ephemeral recording so the teachers can do a risk-based audit and sample some %, eg one-two questions from each student.
Honestly for regular weekly assignments you might not even need the heavyweight proctoring and could maybe allow notes, since you can tell if someone knows what they are talking about in conversation , it’s impossible to crib-sheet your way to fluent conversational understanding.
So why is the issue you described an issue? Because it's about a grade. And the reason that's relevant is because that credential will then be used to determine where she can to to university which, in turn, is a credential that will determine her breadth of options for starting her career, and so on. But why is this all done by credentials instead of simple demonstrations of skill? What somebody scored in a high school writing class should matter far less than the output somebody is capable of producing when given a prompt and an hour in a closed setting. This is how you used to apply to colleges. Here [1], for instance, is Harvard's exam from 1869. If you pass it, you're in. Simple as that.
Obviously this creates a problem of institutions starting to 'teach the test', but with sufficiently broad testing I don't see this as a problem. If a writing class can teach somebody to write a compelling essay based on an arbitrary prompt, then that was simply a good writing class! As an aside this would also add a major selling point to all of the top universities that offer free educational courses online. Right now I think 'normal' people are mostly disinterested in those because of the lack of widely accepted credentials, which is just so backwards - people are actively seeking to maximize credentials over maximizing learning.
This is one of the very few places I think big tech in the US has done a great job. Coding interviews can be justifiably critiqued in many ways, but it's still a much better system than raw credentialization.
[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
Just so we're clear, the coding tests are in addition to credentialisation. I'll never forget when I worked at Big Tech (from Ireland) and I would constantly hear recruiters talk about the OK school list (basically the Ivy league). Additionally, I remember having to check the University a candidate had attended before she had an interview with one of our directors.
He was fine with her, because she had gone to Oxford. Honestly, I'm surprised that I was able to get hired there given all this nonsense.
I'm a drop out (didn't finish BSc) from a no name Northern European university and I've worked at or gotten offers from:
- Meta
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- Uber
- xAI
+ some unicorns that compete with FAANG+ locally.
I didn't include some others that have reached out for interviews which I declined at the time. The lack of a degree has literally never come up for me.
It seems to be a US role thing in my experience.
In a way, I think the hiring process at second-tier (not FAANG) companies is actually better because you have to "moneyball" a little bit - you know that you're going to lose the most-credentialed people to other companies that can beat you dollar for dollar, so you actually have to think a little more deeply about what a role really needs to find the right person.
Sure, but it takes < 1 second to read a GPA.
We need some way to distill the unbelievable amount of data in human brains into something that can be processed in a reasonable amount of time. We need a measurement - a degree, a GPA, something.
Imagine if in every job interview they could assume absolutely nothing. They know nothing about your education. They might start by asking you to recite your ABCs and then, finally at sunset, you might get to a coding exam. Which still won't work, because you'll just AI cheat the coding exam.
We require gatekeepers to make the system work. If we allow the gatekeepers to just rubber stamp based off of if stuff seems correct, that tells us nothing about the person itself. We want the measurement to get close to the real understanding.
That means AI papers have to be given a 0, which means we need to know if something is AI generated. And we want to catch this at the education level, not above.
But assuming in-person day long batteries of tests for universities and companies is probably not very practical.
You can argue whether university is a very efficient use of time or money but it presumably does involve some learning and offers potential employers some level of a filter that roughly aligns with what they're looking for.
We should expect this if employers can efficiently and objectively evaluate a candidate's skills without relying on credentials. When they're unable to, we should worry about this information asymmetry leading to a "market for lemons" [0]. I found an article [1] about how this could play out:
> This scenario leads to a clear case of information asymmetry since only the graduate knows whether their degree reflects real proficiency, while employers have no reliable way to verify this. This mirrors the classic “Market for Lemons” concept introduced by economist George Akerlof in 1970, where the presence of low-quality goods (or in this case, under-skilled graduates) drives down the perceived value of all goods, due to a lack of trustworthy signals.
[0] https://quickonomics.com/terms/market-for-lemons/
[1] https://competitiveness.in/how-ai-could-exacerbate-the-skill...
I mean, it certainly seems to. I've been in hiring roles in tech for 20-ish years, and have definitely seen changes in how college hire patterns based on credential values. Some schools have gone way up in how much we value their credentials (Waterloo), some have gone somewhat down (MIT), etc.
Its also the only way that students can actually be held to the same standards. When I was a freshman in college with a 3.4 highschool GPA, I was absolutely gobsmacked by how many kids with perfect >= 4.0 GPAs couldn't pass the simple algebra test that the university administered to all undergraduates as a prerequisite for taking any advanced mathematics course.
If you dont even know that the american civil war ended in 1865 how could you do any meaningful analysis on its downstream implications or causes and its relationship to other events.
I'd imagine millions if not billions of people have found basic math useful without ever learning what "commutative" even means.
Also the teachers have a vested interest in giving the highest grades they can to as many students as they can without making it obvious that they aren't actually grading them fairly. i don't mean this as an accusation against anybody or some sort of insult against teachers as a whole, I merely mean to point out that this is what they are incentized to do by virtue of the fact that they are indirectly grading themselves by grading their students.
Goodhart's law.
In education, regarding exams, Goodhart's law just means that you should randomize your test questions instead of telling the students the questions before the exam. Have a wide set of questions, randomize them. The only way for students to pass is to learn the material.
A randomized standardized test is not more susceptible to Goodhart's law than a randomized personal test. The latter however has many additional problems.
"The only way for students to pass is to learn the material."
Part of Goodhart's law in this context is precisely that it overdetermines "the material" and there is no way around this.
I wish Goodhart's law was as easy to dodge as you think it is, but it isn't.
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowestRun The Jewels - Walking In The Snow
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-M15L4BTqI
> https://genius.com/Run-the-jewels-walking-in-the-snow-lyrics
School needs to provide opportunities to practice applying important skills like empathy, tenacity, self-regulation, creativity, patience, collaboration, critical thinking, and others that cannot be assessed using a multiple choice quiz taken in silence. When funding is tied to performance on trivia, all of the above suffers.
Parents of the children who can't pass the standardized tests also get a vote.
I wish I would agree with you, but I think that having a degree (or rather the right degree) is more important than ever.
Basically grades exist to decide who gets a laid back high paying job, and who has to work 2 low paying labor intensive job just to live paycheck to paycheck.
As one teacher told me once: we could have all of you practice chess, make a big tournament and you get to choose your university based on your chess ranking. It wouldn't be any less stupid than the current system.
Rather:
Grades exist to decide who gets a stressful, but rather high-paying job, and who has to work 2 low paying labor intensive job just to live paycheck to paycheck.
Laid-back high-paying job (unluckily) barely exist.
I mean, what is the problem? It's my report! I know all the ins and outs, I take full responsibility for it. I'm the one taking this to the board of directors who will grill me on all the details. I'm up for it. So why is this so "not done"? Why do you assume I let the AI do the "thinking"? I'm appalled by your lack of trust in me.
Perhaps it's an artifact of LLMs being trained on terabytes of autistic internet commenters like me. Maybe being detected as AI by Turnitin even has some diagnostic value.
If no, why not?
Personally I would rather read a human's output than their selection of machine outputs.
Nowadays, often I put my text into the LLM, and say: Make more concise, include all original points, don't be enthusiastic, use business style writing. And then it will come with some lines of which I think: Yes! That is what I meant!
I can't imagine you'd rather read my Dunglish. Sure, I could have "studied harder", but one simply is just much more clever in their native tongue, I know more words, more subtleties etc. Over time, and I believe due to LLM use I do get better at it myself! It's a language model after all, not a facts model. I can trust it to make nice sentences.
I understand the sentiment, even appreciate it, but there are books that draw you into a story when your eyes hit the paper, and there are books that don't and induce yawning instead (on the same topic). That is a skill issue.
Perhaps I should add that using the LLM does not make me faster in any way, maybe even slower. But it makes the end results so much more pleasant.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter". Now I can, but in similar time.
Recently there was a non-native english speaker heavily using an LLM to review their answers on a Show HN post, and it was incredibly annoying. The author did not realize (because of their lack of skills in the language) but the AI-edited version felt fake and mechanical in tone. In that case yes, the broken original is better because it preserves the humanity of the original answers, mistakes and all.
You know maybe it is annoying for native speakers to pick up subtle AI signals, but for non-natives it can be annoying to find the correct words that express what you want to say as precisely as in your mother tongue. So don’t judge too much. It’s an attempt at better communication as well.
One of the funniest things was being accused of plagiarising Wikipedia, when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.
Surely it would be relatively easy to offer to show the edit history to prove that you actually contributed to the article? And, by doing so, would flip the situation in your favour by demonstrating your expertise?
The fact that you should have to is pretty annoying but also fairly edge case. And if a teacher or institute refuses to review that evidence then I don't think the credential on the table worth the paper it's printed on anyway.
It turned out he ran it through a plagiarism detector and multiple lines of code where identical to lines in their database.
It was very silly because there’s a lot of boiler plate code in win32 projects
Of course, there will be complaints from many students. However, as a prof for decades, I can say that some will prefer an exam-based solution. This includes the students who are working their way through university and don't have much time for busy-work, along with students who write their essays themselves and get lower grades than those who do not.
but if u talk like this boss i had, then obv ur a human, kthx
Great incentives. /s
She can't because she didn't write the essay herself, obviously.
This reminds me of when GPS routing devices first came onto the scene. Lots of people drove right into a lake or ocean because the device said keep going straight. (because of poorly classified multi-modal routing data)
The great thing about AI is that with a bit of imagination it can be used to amplify teachers too.
In this case, yes, you need to do a viva voce to convince the teacher (though I suspect they should be able to get fairly confident in 10-15 minutes).
But you could also have students convince an AI (probably in a proctored space?) if you need to scale this approach out.
I think AI got me some brain rot as I concern to finish stuff on time and I can't bare to spend brain energy on that (and spend on it anyway because AI sucks)
He also told me that he had in fact used AI, but asked AI multiple times to simplify the text, and he had entered the simplified version. He liked the first version best, but was aware his teacher would consider it written by AI.
Guess the teachers have already lost...
Bart Simpson, we need you.
"AI detection" wasn't even a solution in the short term and it won't be going forward. Take-home essays are dead, the teachers are collectively just hoping some superhero will swoop in and somehow save them. Sometimes such a thing is possible, but it isn't going to happen this time.
It is beginning to become an awful situation where these companies are selling tools that undermine the student. Education is suppose to be the great equalizer in society, not another toggle or tool for oppression.
Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.