Comment by alcidesfonseca
7 hours ago
Professor here. Every single one of us that looks for it, finds plenty of examples of students “cheating”. Learning takes effort, and humans (some more than others) are designed to minimize effort.
We have designed education around exams and evaluation. If I design an exercise that does not contribute to their final grade, students don’t even look at it. If I design a 30min tutorial on a programming subject, students will not look at it and will spend 8 hours on the (graded) assignment that was designed for 1 hour on top of the 30 minute tutorial.
I am making some changes: evaluation will be as randomly as possible to minimize overfitting to our exercises. Draw from real world if possible.
I would also like to get rid of bologna’s modular structure and go to the UK’s one-exam-at-the-end-of-the-degree model.
But overall, we need more passionate students. Those don’t care about all this cheating and would appreciate that professors and future employers see their effort and success.
I think my primary curiosity is: does "rampant AI cheating" mean "most students in most classes" or "a few students in a lot of classes"? The latter is my expectation based on my perception of pre-AI cheating, so I'm wondering if AI has made it 1.5x worse or 10x worse?
AI has made it 10x worse.
My wife is a professor. Tons of students cheat. Often badly. It is a complete phase shift from pre-chatgpt. Detection methods keep having to adapt. Usually she catches people because a writing assignment will say something like "using material from the readings..." and the students don't care enough to provide the readings to the AI so the AI writes something coherent but which brings in a bunch of material that wasn't covered and that the student doesn't know anything about.
Five years ago you cheated on a writing assignment by paying somebody else to do it. Today you type a few words. She's getting 10-20% of the class admitting to cheating when initially confronted. There doesn't seem to be a pattern in who cheats. The bad students who don't come to class cheat. The good students who pay attention in class cheat. It is everywhere.