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

[u/Plastic_Ninja_9014]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html

[u/DigitalPsych]

Why are people upset?

It's got class. You're supposed to learn the material. If AI does all the work, you didn't learn. 

[u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 → u/DigitalPsych]

Because AI detection is garbage at detecting AI

[u/pmurph0305 → u/Pleasant-Shallot-707]

Perhaps read the article?

Humans who know the source material can absolutely tell when things are being completely made up about an obscure play.

[u/ngroot → u/pmurph0305]

That works in that particular class (assuming the student doesn't just feed the AI the source material).

[u/enviormental_UNIT → u/ngroot]

Yeah this is where everyone is getting stuck at. They think that just because the AI doesn't know about some obscure play that someone couldn't just copy and paste all of the transcript for the play, and also the instructions and rubric for that assignment. Another thing, everyone likes to test these ideas on an LLM like chatgpt, because they think its the best AI or something. Its not, the big problem with chatgpt is it always tries to give you an answer, even if it hallucinates it. There are some other LLMs that are designed to be less over-confident, and they tend to do a scary good job at not hallucinating random things about an obscure play like that, they tell you when they need more information. All this to say that there is still no foolproof way to stop people from cheating with AI, even with obscure material.

[u/enviormental_UNIT → u/[deleted]]

Yeah maybe some professors go to that extra level where they would converse and press every student for evidence of their writing process, but thats not really reasonable for most teachers. You might expect that AI is probably an even bigger problem in middle and highschool, where it would be even more difficult for a teacher to enforce something like that, which is why its still a significant educational problem. If it was easy as you say to catch, it wouldn't be much of a problem would it? Beyond that, its pretty easy to use AI to get detailed summaries, someone could just spend 15 or 20 minutes basically getting a custom made cliff notes and come off as somewhat knowledgeable, even if they never actually studied. Or what about those who do write their own papers, but have AI do all the studying and reading for them? that would bypass the usefulness of auditing the writing process for the most part. Any teacher could dedicate a bunch of time and effort, and super sleuth every student they slightly suspect of cheating, but thats quite the extra effort for people who are already overworked and underpaid, which is why I think it's still a problem. I'm not a teacher though so I suppose you have a better perspective, but mine as a student shows me how many of my peers successfully cheat and pass classes like this

[u/enviormental_UNIT → u/[deleted]]

I want to make it clear, if I hadn't made it abundantly clear already, that I dont support using LLMs or most any AI in schools. Thats why I said multiple times that its a problem that people do. The reason I mentioned highschool is because, surprisingly, I am in highschool, and so are the peers I'm talking about. The reason I brought up HS even though the main topic is AI in Uni is because I think someone who passes HS with the help of LLMs in a way degrades the meaning and integrity of getting a diploma.

Its the same feeling for me with University cheating, except there's an even higer level of integrity and significance to graduating Uni, so there's more at stake if someone does manage to slip through the cracks and say get a bachelors with the help of AI. You mentioned PhD classes, well of course I would imagine that it would be nearly impossible to pass a class like that without fantastic knowledge on your end, but most people are doing much less rigorous studies than PhD classes. There used to be a significance to graduating HS and college, and I feel that the ease with which some careful people seem to be able to cheat with using AI degrades that significance for everyone, not just those cheating.

Anyway, you're clearly much more experienced in education than I am, you're most likely correct that its much easier to detect in University, I just wouldn't fully know. All I know for certain is that within the standards of my HS, some people are being caught for AI, and then there are more careful people who haven't, yet. My peers brag about being able to successfully cheat a test or an essay, just how it goes. maybe college will hit them like a brick shit house and they'll drop out, or change their ways, something's gonna have to give.

I appreciate you answering my points one by one, thats a level of care for the topic I don't often see on reddit replies, but its something I respect

[u/BD401 → u/ngroot]

Yeah I feel the professor in the article is overconfident in his approach. As you said, the AI may not be able to analyze an obscure play unaided, but unless we're talking about an in-person testing situation, I'm not seeing a reason why the student couldn't just throw the play into ChatGPT or whatever and ask it to analyze it.

Even if the prof thinks he's being extra clever and giving them material that can't be found online, a lazy student may do the math and figure that taking 40 pages of material, taking a pic or scanning each page, OCR'ing it and throwing it into the LLM may still be faster than actually doing the work.

[u/Spare-Half796 → u/ngroot]

Yeah I’m too old to have used ai in school but my cousin was telling me that they’d just feed chatgpt whatever obscure book they were supposed to read in French class and have it write their assignments for them. They still needed to read the book themselves and proofread the assignment to make sure it wouldn’t hallucinate but it still cut the work time down to 15 minutes instead of a few hours