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I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was Deflating
(discuss.tchncs.de)
‘But there is a difference between recognising AI use and proving its use. So I tried an experiment. … I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.‘
Article archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20251125225915/https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/set-trap-to-catch-students-cheating-ai_uk_691f20d1e4b00ed8a94f4c01
Distillation:
The only problem I have with the whole "Don't be afraid to fail" thing, is that so much rides on the grades a student receives it makes it very difficult to not treat every assignment as a highly critical task which must be as close to perfect as possible. I totally agree with this professor and I believe he did the right thing by the students. The problem is the system itself.
Those who are going to outsource their work are likely to always outsource their work or take the path of least resistance. You can't moral lesson or embarrass that away, usually. But the rest of the class seems to have learned a valuable lesson, or at least learned how to cheat better.
Regardless, we need to stop having everything boil down to the grades. There's good reasons grades are important, but there are even more that are detrimental. I don't know the answer, I just know the system is broken. Maybe it's just capitalism that's broken.
Society: "don't be afraid to fail!"
Also society: actively punishes failure with intricate systems such as admissions, CV screening, and increasing fewer safety nets
holding a gun to your head "why are you so nervous?"
The most ironic part of this is, if those kids did understand the basics of Marxism, they'd be able to see this much more clearly.
I agree, the biggest thing that stood out to me here is that they were afraid to fail. If students were focused on creating the work that appeals to them, rather than just the work that will get the highest grade, think of the creativity that could be explored. Instead students are just focused on saying the "right answers" and dont get to think critically about the material. Sad
And it's ironic because once I let that go my grades improved. Professors wanted me to think for myself and do something weird, but only when I thought for myself.
My undergraduate school didn't assign grades below a C. If you did piss-poorly, the class just didn't show up on your transcript. This encouraged me to take classes I might otherwise have avoided, if I was worried about my GPA.
I fully agree. This was decades in the making. Good grades became the only important thing, we told students every day they won't amount to anything if they don't have straight As and then act surprised when they panic and use any tool to make it.
But we also leave them alone with a bunch of technology way too young which fosters a mentality of "Why do it myself when I've so many ways to have it done by a computer".
Yeah. Afraid to fail is bullshit, just like a college degree has become bullshit. Right down to actually needing to take prerequisite base classes to get your degree in something. Almost no one goes to college because they have a general thirst for knowledge. They go so they can get a job, or because mommy and daddy told them to go.
Listening to a guy talk in a 200 person class you're paying six figures to attend while in the age of the internet is stupid.
I get what you're saying in general, but I don't think most profs actually want their students to fail when they're actively trying. I assume that the assignment where he asked them to "read and reflect" on an essay that it was probably something ungraded. I know there are some courses (especially large lecture ones where there could be hundreds of students in one class) where you don't have a lot of signposts other than tests telling you how you're doing in a class, but there really should be something outside graded assignments for you to get feedback on.
When failure means having to pay another thousand or more to retake the subject and spending another year at uni, I can understand why some people would take the easy route