A professor used white font to hide instructions to throw off students using an AI chatbot to cheat on their midterm.

  • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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    8 days ago

    Good on him for catching them out, but they should’ve received more severe a punishment for such blatant and lazy cheating.

    And explaining how you caught them doesn’t make them less likely to cheat in the future, it simply makes them less likely to be caught doing so.

    • ExtremeDullard@piefed.socialOP
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      8 days ago

      It’s been a good long while, but when I was a student, cheating got you automatically expelled - temporarily for a small “casual” case of plagiarism, permanently for anything more egregious.

      I guess things have changed.

      • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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        8 days ago

        Yeah. When I was a student, I got sent to an academic misconduct panel just suspected of cheating, and was told I absolutely could be expelled if they found out I had actually done it.

        And sure, in reality somebody had copied my work and I could prove it, so I was fine - but at least they bothered to actually investigate in my example!

        I know policies are different between institutions, but these students got caught red-handed not just plagiarising, but outright faking coursework submissions. Why is there no investigation into their previous coursework, no misconduct panel interviews, literally nothing apart from failing the specific part of the mid-term they were caught cheating on.

        No wonder they don’t give a damn when the punishment for being caught has so little teeth!

        As you say, times have changed for the worse.

        • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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          8 days ago

          Well, the source for this story is the professor in a short form video, who doesn’t explicitly say there wasn’t any further punishment afaik.

          I haven’t actually seen it though because the fucking idiot himself is equally morally bankrupt by posting it on a weapon run by Beijing.

      • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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        8 days ago

        Colleges have become profit obsessed and students are the cash cows. Expulsion is bad for revenue.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Policy where I teach is that it’s up to the professor’s discretion, though that’s mostly because it’s not always as easy to prove as this. There’s a boilerplate anti cheating section we have in our syllabus that says it’s a reportable offense that may lead to academic probation or expulsion.

        Honestly, it’s also a ton of paperwork so I’ve just opted to fail them since usually my papers aren’t so easily answered via an LLM and rather than tell them I caught them cheating, I simply point out they missed rubric item 2, 5 and 6 so it’s something solid, not my speculation. But I also haven’t white texted them yet, lol.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 days ago

        Well you see, we don’t have DEI any more.

        Instead we simply have literally no standards, for anyone!

        That’s how meritocracy works, right?

      • fizzle@quokk.au
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        8 days ago

        I presume that the use of gen AI is not considered plagiarism.

        They probably have some kind of lame policy around “responsible use of gen AI” or something.

    • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      And explaining how you caught them doesn’t make them less likely to cheat in the future, it simply makes them less likely to be caught doing so.

      They didn’t even read what the AI spewed. They aren’t paying attention at all, they’re making zero effort. I don’t think they’ll be less likely to be caught, because they’ll never come across the explanation.