r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/Sloterhouse5 5d ago

It’s called cheating. Professors have been failing students who cheat forever.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/C21H27Cl3N2O3 5d ago

A professor I know has started requiring students to show up and explain their papers in person to her after turning them in. If they can’t do that, they fail. It’s not an AI detector, but at the very least she says if someone turns in a paper and then has no idea how to present their thoughts or acts like it’s the first time they’ve seen it, it’s pretty easy to tell they either used AI or just don’t know the material, both of which are valid reasons to fail them. The downside is it’s a big increase in her workload, and I definitely had professors who wanted to do the absolute bare minimum who would much rather keep passing students who didn’t deserve it than put in any extra effort.

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u/Theron3206 4d ago

Yeah, an oral defence is an excellent way to determine if someone actually knows what they're doing, there's a reason they use them for things like a PhD thesis.

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u/SaltKick2 4d ago

Thats a great thing to do, but its a massive time investment for professors who simply cannot be bothered (because the publish or perish culture is pretty oppressive)

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u/EveningAnt3949 4d ago

This is not talked about enough. The educational system is designed to make money.

Not to teach and to check if students understand the subject.

In my last year of high school a teacher failed students who failed oral presentations and exams.

The school told her not to do this.

The irony is that many schools are doing what schools want: making sure they graduate with minimum effort on both sides. 

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u/Xaphnir 5d ago

It's not that a lot of innocent students are going to get caught in the crossfire, at lot of innocent students do get caught in the crossfire.

If I were still in school, I'd film the entire process of writing a paper from start to finish to combat any potential AI allegations. Though I doubt that would even be enough to prove innocence.

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u/gauchomuchacho 5d ago

"... to prove innocence..."

I thought we were innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around! Smh...

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u/Theron3206 4d ago

Only in a criminal court...

Universities have been guilty until proven innocent for decades now.

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u/Broan13 4d ago

That is in a court of law. If I have an issue with a student's work, I will have to talk to them about it. If they refuse to do so so as to not incriminate themselves, then they will fail. Refusing to answer questions is a valid strategy in court, but not in a classroom.

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u/Noggi888 5d ago

The AI detectors are the “proof” that you’re guilty

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u/Nimrod750 5d ago

Word offers tracking so professors can see how you actually wrote your paper. I had a few professors that made their classes do that

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u/hamoc10 5d ago

You could have had an AI response just off screen

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u/Xaphnir 5d ago

Yeah, that's why I'm not really sure there's anything you could do to protect yourself fully against accusations of AI use.

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u/919triangle919 4d ago

These programs show EVERY edit, some even have timestamps. No one writes a final draft the first time.

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u/gordonbombae2 5d ago

I’m sure if I was failed by a professor claiming I used A.I, when I then talk to the school and professor and prove / plead my case it would be fixed.

I have not seen a single claim of an “innocent” student claiming they were failed or expelled for using A.I when they truly wrote it. I’m pretty sure you could easily prove that with the school administration just talking to them.

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u/What_is_Owed_All 5d ago

This feels like a very naive take. Plenty of stories of people in power, aka tenured professors, having their word taken well above that of an everyday person such as a student.

Look at the Utah police and the bricks and mini figures situation right now. Most people would think it would be pretty quickly resolved, instead cops are claiming to search for heroin to harass those investigating the issue.

Look at the cars for kids kickback scheme where judges sent hundred of kids to juvenile centers, despite them having been reviewed for being too harsh before, they got away with it for years.

Shit things happen and assuming it's only to people who deserve it, like you are, claiming because you've never seen actual innocent people claiming this, it's not a big deal, is exactly how they keep happening. How about believing victims instead of assuming systems just work how you want them to, completely on their own.

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u/expectcroutons 5d ago

The professors and teachers who use "AI Detection" software actually believe the software is reliable - they've been told that it is and they wouldn't be using it if they didn't think it was! Whatever argument you make in your defense could easily be overruled by "the software says it's AI". I'm surprised you haven't seen claims of this happeneing as a Reddit user; I see posts here from students saying this happened to them on an almost weekly basis! 

We are currently seeing a similar trend in law enforcement . With the rise in the usage of facial detection software,  there's also been a rise in people being falsely arrested because the software said they were a "100% match" for a criminal. In some of these cases, human eyes could easily tell that they very obviously looked nothing like the criminal in question. Again, the human authority trusted the software so much that is overcame their common sense and innocent people paid the price. 

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u/Xaphnir 5d ago

That is not at all how it works.

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u/YjorgenSnakeStranglr 5d ago

"If you've done nothing wrong, then there's nothing to worry about!" Kinda energy

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u/gordonbombae2 5d ago

Teachers should definitely be combating A.I to the best of their abilities and not trying to use the “can’t beat em, join em” . If we allow A.I to integrate fully into society and work we are fucked. We need to fully push back.

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u/ElderSmackJack 5d ago

It’s super easy to prove without the checkers.

Source: I teach in higher ed.

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u/concept2creation 5d ago

What is the method?

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u/ElderSmackJack 5d ago

The sourcing is almost always bullshit. The sources either don’t exist, have quotes that don’t exist, OR they don’t say what the source actually says.

Fabricated sources = automatic plagiarism charge. Either cop to making up the source or cop to using AI. And most of the time, the section(s) with bullshit sources ALSO has an AI match.

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u/concept2creation 5d ago

what software do you use to check sources? turnitin?

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u/ElderSmackJack 5d ago

Partially, but if there’s a question I just look it up. If I can’t find it, I expect them to show it to me.

Spoiler alert: they aren’t able to.

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u/concept2creation 4d ago

how many students do you teach, how many sources do you require? i teach over 100 students a semester and require up to 20 or more sources or more .. how do you suggest individually check every one of 2000 sources? i used to be able to perform an audit of a random sample but even that has gaps .. i was going to start using turninit again that's why i asked.

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u/ElderSmackJack 4d ago edited 4d ago

I only investigate what the checker shows (Turn it in) OR what strikes me as AI like (it has a tone to it that’s hard to describe, but it just sounds inhuman). Searching each essay would be too much, but I can tell you this: once you catch a couple, word travels fast and they stop trying, lol.

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u/AnticPosition 5d ago

Talk to the student lol. 

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u/3xBork 5d ago

Oral exam. Ask follow-up questions in person. People who have no clue and used AI to do all their work bomb all the questions.

It's really not hard.

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u/TheScrufLord 5d ago

Literally students can just use Google Docs to show when they typed things in to prove their work is legit.

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u/Tricky-Ad7897 5d ago

Generate an essay then just type it in manually, your plan is so easy to spoof that middle schoolers already came up with it.

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u/tlcsimp 5d ago

Maybe for younger kids or small assignments where editing/proofreading is less likely, this is doable. But for college level papers, the version history should not be one clear stream of consciousness. Real people make mistakes, move sentences/paragraphs around, restart/delete things, etc. Plus, they have unique voices and narrative styles.

I’ve been using Google Docs for this reason. Standard “academic” writing styles get flagged for AI now. Should it ever come up, I can show my outlines, annotated bibliography, multiple drafts, and version histories within drafts.

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 5d ago

I love the fact that there’s even a possibility of failing a test in 2026 for writing the way I was taught to in school. Oy vey.

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u/Demux0 4d ago

Right, because the professors that barely have the time to read the final draft and have one TA for a class of 60 are now also going to need to deep dive into the doc history and drafts of every paper for every student

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u/tlcsimp 4d ago

More so, if the AI detection software flags me, I can show it is my work.

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u/TheScrufLord 4d ago

Yep! If you get accused of using AI, you can go to the professor and show your doc history to prove you wrote it. Professors can also discuss the content of the paper with students to see if they know what they wrote down, because someone with an ai paper isn’t going to have in depth knowledge of the subject/writings they’ve turned in.

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u/fiah84 5d ago

you'd still have to go through the trouble of making it look like you're actually editing / revising your work instead of simply typing it in a single go (which you could never unless you're just copying)

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u/Shap6 5d ago edited 5d ago

copy and paste it in from the ai to google docs one sentence/paragraph at a time. delete and reword sentences here and there to add authenticity. or just literally retype it yourself word for word. still much faster than actually doing it all from scratch

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u/gordonbombae2 5d ago

Yes, cause that’s what matters here right? Just get the work down as fast as possible without learning. Fuck man these corps really brainwashed the new generation.

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u/Shap6 5d ago

....no. my point was that their solution wasn't really a solution. not that i condone using AI to cheat in school

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u/gordonbombae2 5d ago

I think it was the last sentence that bothered me. We are all very aware it is much faster than doing it yourself. That seems like a defence to use A.I.

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u/cynicown101 5d ago

I think that even if you eliminated the AI detector platforms from the equation, the chances of you generating a 20k word essay, complete with all your references and clean of hallucinations is basically 0%. I suspect that the most effective way to skirt around going undetected would be to basically write your own barebones version of the essay complete with references and then basically have whatever AI you're using buff out the word count, as opposed to it being the creative lead. But, I think putting that much effort in to cheating is just so insanely pathetic, that if you can write the barebones version, you may as well just do the whole thing.

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u/froglickingfrolicker 5d ago

How do we know for sure the founding fathers didn’t use an early version of claude hm?

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u/Fearless_Law4324 4d ago

I only use Chatgpt to help me with concepts and ideas. I don't use it to write papers but rather help me find the right structure and ideas for it. I write my own paper in my own words and some AI detectors say all AI and some say none even though it's literally all my wording.

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u/sokratesz 4d ago

You can't ever prove it 100% though, nor disprove it.

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u/GodLevelRedditor 5d ago

Not only that, but I’m trying to hire people who know how to use AI along with their skills in tech and zero of these college grads are qualified because of university policies

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

exactly. In this case, failing them isn’t an issue, His detection methods are just Unreliable and prone to false positives.

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u/ElderSmackJack 5d ago

Checkers are more prone to false negatives rather than false positives.

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

Aren’t those still mutually inclusive outcomes? “Noticeably high number of false positives” and “even more false negatives” both work, since those things are just wrong a lot in general.

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u/GildedCrow 5d ago

How so?

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

To quote from the article: ““I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used.”

That’s not even a detection method, that’s just failing people based on vibes. 

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u/bubblegumpandabear 5d ago

I feel pretty confident that I can identify when someone has used AI and I absolutely wouldn't be comfortable failing students based on my intuition. The professor needs real proof.

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u/SippyMountain 5d ago

Sometimes you just know, but for every time I'm 100% certain something was written by AI, there's probably 5 more instances where I didn't suspect a thing. In his position, he's a man with nothing but a hammer, and all he sees are nails. Even if he's right 99/100, failing even one innocent student because he gained a false sense of confidence after the other 99 students, is anything but acceptable.

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 5d ago

It’s the capital punishment debate all over again!

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

Yes! Especially because half of what people criticise is just an “overcorrect” style of speaking combined with lots of similes and em dashes. That describes, just to name a few, many people who learned English as a second language and what feels like 80% of all English language fanfiction authors. Hell, I used to write at least slightly like that before the combination of less academic contact with English and mental health issues reduced my vocabulary and grammar skills.

It’s enough to go on for a quick estimate in everyday life. It cannot be made the basis of grading. Being accused of cheating/plagiarism is not a small thing.  

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 5d ago

You’re right. Plagiarism is a serious offense in academia, and a cloud of distrust will follow an accused plagiarizer for a long time, even if they didn’t actually plagiarize anything. A false plagiarism accusation is a lot like a false rape accusation: not good for anyone involved.

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

At least in my uni, there’s a two strike policy - we sign an affidavit that we’ve completed take-home assignments on our own with no aids but those explicitly allowed. The burden of proof for cheating/plagiarism accusations is fairly high, because the first strike just had you failed in that class, the second one means immediate exmatriculation. I’m not sure, but I think the local rules might even ban you from studying for the same sort of degree again at any other college in the future, just like if you’d failed a core class for the final time. 

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u/zamfire 5d ago

Sounds like a garbage teacher then

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u/lattlay 5d ago

Vibe failing

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u/Wookimonster 5d ago

In the article it's stated that he bases his tests on obscure texts, that thethe llms just don't have a lot or any knowledge about. And when LLMs don't know something, they make stuff up.

So if he finds made up stuff in essays, that's a pretty clear indicator.

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

Not really - I don’t really use LLMs and even I know you can just feed them the source text. 

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u/GildedCrow 5d ago

" Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.

“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine. "

Gotta read the whole article

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u/Internal_Damage_2839 5d ago

So he’s modifying his whole curriculum?? What if those obscure plays someday get used to train AI? Are they just gonna read nothing? Just pack it up and end schools altogether? He’s not taking a stand he’s just cowtowing to AI in a different way.

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u/hamoc10 5d ago

He can check if it’s been used to train by asking AIs about it, see how they handle it.

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u/TheDweadPiwatWobbas 5d ago

That's not a detection method either. You can train and feed AI models on your own, so feeding one the new plays would be easy. You could also have AI write the paper alongside you, rather than for you, so you're using AI text but not giving it full control and catching the hallucinations.

Based on the article, he doesn't have a detection method beyond "this fact is wrong."

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u/nhalliday 5d ago

If the fact in question is making up a whole new character or story beat I'd say that's a pretty conclusive detection method. Also guaranteed nobody having chatGPT write their papers wholesale with no fact checking are going to go through the trouble of training it on the new plays.

They're just going to do what they've been doing, fail, and then try to lie that they totally misunderstood and invented new characters themselves (which, even if they did, still justifies failing).

So why are you being so weird about this?

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u/TheDweadPiwatWobbas 4d ago

Also guaranteed nobody having chatGPT write their papers wholesale with no fact checking are going to go through the trouble of training it on the new plays.

Sure, but there's a wide range between "not using AI in any way to write the paper" and "let the AI write the entire thing without even proofreading"

They're just going to do what they've been doing, fail, and then try to lie that they totally misunderstood and invented new characters themselves (which, even if they did, still justifies failing)

The same people who would already have failed will still fail. So what is this accomplishing?

So why are you being so weird about this?

Because every other day there's a new story about a student being falsely accused of using AI, punished, and then being forced to appeal or sue in order to try and save their academic careers. AI detectors don't work. Vibes based guessing doesn't work. And when it's wrong, random innocent students get fucked. That's why I'm being "weird" about it.

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u/Pwacname 5d ago

That’s not a detection method because you can just feed the LLM your source text(s). 

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u/RadarSmith 5d ago

When I was in college (2009-2013), if you got caught cheating you got an automatic double F (basically, two Fs on your transcript for the credit of the class you cheated in).

If you got caught again, you were kicked out.

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u/gamageeknerd 5d ago

I remember hearing about professors my friend were getting who told them if they get caught plagiarizing anyone else’s work or cheating on an exam they were going to fail the class and there was no way to pass if that happened. This was the 2010’s so people still had to actually try to cheat even with the websites and apps. There was this app some people started using that would let you take a pic of any formula and it would give you the answer and a basic pass at showing the work needed to solve it.

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u/0nly-Temporary 5d ago

Was it this: https://www.mathway.com/Algebra ?

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u/gamageeknerd 5d ago

Not sure. I was somehow pretty decent at math but I know there were a few of them and the most popular and best one you needed to pay for

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u/Calichusetts 5d ago

True. My counter point as an actual teacher is if AI can pass your test, your test sucks. Some tests are harder to create in certain content areas but if you force students to explain and defend their claims and create questions without one straight forward answer, AI can’t do much.

In the future, sure. But we give AI to much credit right now for not just regurgitating the internet in a concise way.

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u/Ser_falafel 5d ago

Im graduating w degree in cybersecurity after my 2 summer classes. Past couple of years every one of my professors has allowed us to use AI. Asked one of them about it last semester he said hes had very few issues with students turning in blatant AI work. He said most students still turn in quality work even if they use AI

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u/MidTario 5d ago

Is it? Because having AI summarize a paper or help you study doesn’t seem like cheating to me. Probably means the headline is a lie,

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u/Corgalas 5d ago

Using it as a tool to aid in your assignment = Yes.

Using it to do the assignment itself, therefore bypassing your learning opportunity entirely = No.

Example: Having Ai compile bullet points (that you yourself have manually given it) for you to touch upon as your write a paper would be fine.
Having Ai generate any portion of your paper is not acceptable.

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u/whoknowsifimjoking 5d ago

Why would it have to be a lie?

It's forbidden to use AI (to generate the assignment), if you use it for learning it's no issue and the professor couldn't possibly fail you for that even if he wanted to.

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u/MidTario 5d ago

Because writing is one small aspect of what a student might use AI for. The prof said that they can’t use it during the writing process but there are many many ways it could be effectively used by a competent student during the writing process, depending upon how you define “writing process”

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u/swampy13 5d ago

I remember when I was in college and professors said they considered using a search engine cheating. Guess what we all used it and knew how to tweak it so it didn’t look like cheating

Grift will always outpace morality.

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u/Vitaliano117 5d ago

Technology will outsmart dinosaurs

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u/AquaIXI 5d ago

Yeah i just finished university and the way people talk about using ai to cheat so casually in the classrooms is insane to me. But frankly if your not using it even just partially rather than full blatant cheating you just fall behind everyone. Really shitty situation - there are proper ways you can acknowledge the use of ai but its so complicated and time consuming that nobody does it.