AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

BlackLaZoR , 2 hours ago

Stop relying on students to do their work in home. Most of people work from 9 to 5 yet education system expects teenagers to do overtime assignments. And noone even pays them for it.

Eggyhead , 2 hours ago

Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards. Teachers give the tools, the kids need to practice them. Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.

BlackLaZoR , 17 minutes ago

Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards

Really? Then why are they going there in the first place???

And how do you get that juicy job experience allowing you to negotiate higher wage? You spend time on homework given you by your boss???

Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.

Maybe you should be paid for passed exams and decent grades?

PenisDuckCuck9001 , 2 hours ago

Sorry but if the homework requires more than 40 hours a week of study, cheating is no longer unethical. Teach us actually useful shit and be reasonable about it then I’ll reconsider 🤷

RangerJosie , 3 hours ago

If they’re smart enough to cheat they’re smart enough to pass.

Be real now. How much of that stuff do you all really use in your daily lives?

Because the real world doesn’t care about rote memorization as long as the work gets done in my experience.

ShadowRam , 3 hours ago

The only thing the world gives a shit about:

CAN you do it? If you can, how long will it take and how much?

The how is irrelevant.

pnutzh4x0r , 2 hours ago

The how is irrelevant.

What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn’t for them to produce a particular artifact; it’s to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers… I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn’t the sorting program… it’s the process and experience.

How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.

How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.

How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.

To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.

So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.

Gaywallet , 1 hour ago

I want to start off by saying that I agree there are aspects of the process which are important and should be learned, but this is more to do with critical thinking and applicable skills than it has to do with the process itself.

Of note, this part of your reply in particular I believe is somewhat shortsighted

Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.

Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource. A single scientific study with a finding doesn’t make fact - it provides evidence for fact and must be considered in the context of other available evidence.

In addition, learning to interact with and use AI is a skill in the same way that learning to interact with and use a phone, or the internet, or an app are all skills. With interaction layers becoming increasingly more abstract (which is normal and good), people need to have skills at each layer in order for processes to exist and for tools be useful to humanity. Most modern tools require people who can operate on different levels with different levels of skill. While computers are an easy example since you are replying on some kind of electronic device which requires everything from chemists to engineers to fabrication specialists and programmers (hardware, software, operating system, etc.) to work, this is true for nearly any human made product in the modern world. Being able to drive a car is a very different skill set than being able to maintain a car, or work on a car, or fabricate parts for a car, or design parts for a car, or design the machinery that manufactures the parts for the car, and so on.

This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill. The means by which they bypass the process is extremely important - they could give it no thought at all or they may critically think about it and devise a process which still pays attention to the underlying process without fully understanding how to replicate it. The difference in approach is important, and in the context of learning it’s important to experiment and learn critical thinking skills to make a decision of where you wish to have that additional mastery and what level of abstraction you are comfortable with and care about interacting with.

pnutzh4x0r , 53 minutes ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Using AI to answer a question is not necessarily preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding. The use of AI is a skill in the same way that any ability to look up information is a skill. But blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results is very different from using AI as a resource in a similar way one might use a book or an article as a resource.

I generally agree. That’s why I’m no longer banning AI in my courses. I’m allowing students to use AI to explain concepts, help debug, or as a reference. As a resource or learning aid, it’s fine or possibly even great for students.

However, I am not allowing students to generate solutions, because that is harmful and doesn’t help with learning. They still need to do the work and go through the process, AI assisted or not.

This is a particularly long winded way of pointing out something that’s always been true - the idea that you should learn how to do math in your head because ‘you won’t always have a calculator’ or that the idea that you need to understand how to do the problem in your head or how the calculator is working to understand the material is a false one and it’s one that erases the complexity of modern life. Practicing the process helps you learn a specific skill in a specific context and people who make use of existing systems to bypass the need of having that skill are not better or worse - they are simply training a different skill.

I disagree with your specific example here. You should learn to do math in your head because it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations. Without a foundational understanding of how to do the basics manually, it becomes very difficult to tackle more complicated problems or challenges even with a calculator. Eventually, you do want to graduate to using a calculator because it is more efficient (and probably more accurate), but you will be able to use it much more effectively if you have a strong understanding numbers and how the various operations work.

Your overall point about how a tool is used being important is true and I agree that if used wisely, AI or any other tool can be a good thing. That said, from my experience, I find that many students will take the easy way out and do as you noted at the top: “blindly putting information into an AI and copy/pasting the results”.

Gaywallet , 24 minutes ago

it helps develop intuition of the relationship between numbers and the various mathematical operations

Could you expand upon this? I’m not sure I understand what you mean by an ‘intuition’.

pnutzh4x0r , 7 minutes ago

Sure. If you do enough basic math, you start to see things like how 2/8 can be simplified to 1/4 or you recognize that 10 is not a perfect square root or how you could reorder some operations to make things easier (sorry, examples from my kids). Little things like that where you don’t even think about it… it becomes second nature to you and that makes you a lot faster because you are not worrying about those basic ideas or mechanics. Instead, you can think about more complicated things such as which formulas to apply or the process to compute something.

As another example, since I teach computer science, a lot of novice students struggle with basic programming language syntax… How exactly do you declare a variable? What order do things go? How does a for loop work? Do you need a semicolon or parentheses, etc. If you do enough programming, however, these things become second nature and you stop thinking about it. You just seemily, intuitively, know these things and do them naturally without thinking, even though when you first started, it was really complicated and daunting and you probably spent a lot of time constructing a single line of code.

Once you develop a foundation however, you don’t need to worry about these low-level things. Instead you worry about high-level issues such as how to organize larger pieces of code into functions or how to I utilize different paradigums, etc.

This is why a basketball player, for instance, will shoot thousands of shots in practice or why a piano player will play a piece over and over for many hours. It’s so they don’t have to think about the low-level mechanics. It becomes muscle memory and it’s just natural to them.

I hope that makes sense.

kbal , 3 hours ago

When students want to cheat their way through the education system, the fault is not solely their own. Perhaps this will drain some of the excess credentialism out of the system.

SteposVenzny , 4 hours ago

I am entirely certain that it’s the same amount of cheating as it always was and the only thing that changed is that AI is how they’re doing it.

gencha , 3 hours ago

What exactly was the tool we cheated with in the past that was equivalent to LLMs? What is your certainty based on?

SteposVenzny , 2 hours ago

Other people writing it for you and the openness with which I heard many other students discussing that they weren’t writing their own stuff.

pnutzh4x0r , 2 hours ago

Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.

AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.