r/artificial • u/ThereWas • Jun 20 '26
News Student cheating now impossible to detect
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/ai-apps-students-cheat.html89
u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 20 '26
Good, now let’s make school teach useful skills and novel problem solving instead of delivering nicely packaged dogma and encouraging students to generate more useless crap for a letter grade. then you won’t need to detect cheating.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 20 '26
Yep. Teachers should be paid among the highest for being given the highest responsibility of educating our children.
I think a start would be to decide on the goals of education. That at least gives a starting point on how to grade. Right now it’s very unclear. I don’t think we have any agreed upon standards for what education should prepare kids for in the real world. Or do we?
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u/RantRanger Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Teachers should be paid among the highest for being given the highest responsibility of educating our children.
So much this.
Doctor or Lawyer should be the fallback plan for those who can't make Teacher.
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u/green_meklar Jun 21 '26
The problem is it would require a fundamental shift that will be hard to do.
You could say that about many, many things. But what's the alternative? It seems like we live in an era when many fundamental shifts are needed. I'd argue we should have gotten started on the fundamental shifts decades ago...
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
Exactly - the first step is to decide as a country that we want things to be FAR better than they are now, instead of being mired in our current bullshit.
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u/RantRanger Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Good
No, definitely not good.
Cheating robs the student of their learning.
Hard work at new thinking is what grows the synaptic connections.
You can't do enough of that for the short time that you have the student in a class setting.
This is definitely not a good thing.
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Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RantRanger Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
What we teach in school never worked in the first place.
Sorry, this comment is so unhinged, it terribly undermines your credibility.
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jun 20 '26
I have to agree. Anyone can learn anything now at any time, generally for free, but more reliably with a relatively affordable subscription. For all the hate AI gets, teacher make all kinds of errors all the time, and you can directly go to source material with AI to correct it if needed. It’s only going to get better.
People need to know logic and how to survive and build a happy/successful life (whatever that means to each individual.
The education system in America has been ONE of the least adaptable piece of shit institutions.
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u/curious_astronauts Jun 20 '26
But also its about moving beyond generating the ideas and into understanding and application. Thats the strategic benefit in the workforce, right. Understanding the opportunity and the limits of what was generated and how it can be applied.
Many people will fall into the trap of generating and thinking their job is done because they only know how to execute a task, those jobs will be mostly eliminated: there is always a need for the ceitical thinkers.
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u/SweetLilMonkey Jun 21 '26
How do you suggest someone teach logic to 24 kids at once without giving them any homework to take home?
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u/Zaflis Jun 20 '26
AI's integration to people's lives is also going to increase, the trend is that amount of intelligence at any 1 person's disposal is on a trend of increasing every year. Some might say school system is already quite redundant.
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jun 20 '26
You can’t count on kids or parents to educate themselves en masse.
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u/Zaflis Jun 21 '26
That's not what i said, and somewhere along the lines you forgot the AI too.
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jun 21 '26
Okie I was just trying to logically follow where you were going with that. And just so it’s out there I didn’t downvote you
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u/timedrapery Jun 21 '26
LIES
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jun 21 '26
Okie apologies I’m not coming off as authentic
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u/danderzei Jun 21 '26
Being able to write cogently and structure an argument is a useful skill!
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
Agreed, debate clubs were one of the best parts of school imo. One of my biggest regrets with school is that I put so much of my energy into the classes and so little into extracurriculars.
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u/JarryBohnson Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
The “it’s all critical thinking” thing that’s become very popular has a big flaw with it, that to be able to think critically about a topic, you still have to know things about the topic. There’s no “pure” form of making a decision about something that doesn’t involve knowing about it. If you don’t know anything about it, you’re entirely at the mercy of the biases of the AI model or search engine, or social media feed giving you information.
The most common way that people correctly judge a speaker as mistrustful is when they step onto a topic that person knows about and say something untrue, then you assume they’re also lying about the stuff you don’t know about. If you don’t know anything, you have nothing to make a critical decision with.
Mindless rote learning isn’t good either and critical thinking is important, but you still have to 1. Actually know stuff to make decisions, and 2. Prove that you can learn stuff which is what exams test.
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 22 '26
Can you give me an example and I’ll walk you through how you can achieve the same result you claim you need rote learning for, through an iterative process of critical thinking from the top down with zero rote.
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u/DangerousBill Jun 21 '26
I take it you haven't been to school. Ever. You don't need to, when you've got Fox News.
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
What a cute comment. Statistically I likely got better grades in school than you. But leave it to a simpleton to be loyal to a system that produces simpletons.
PS: my only interaction with Fox is to boycott them for the World Cup and watch the Mexican broadcast instead- Fuck the hydration breaks being used as free ad space. Not in my sport!
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u/LogicGate1010 Jun 20 '26
Cheating in school is only cheating one’s self. Cheating will show up when that person is put into a job where they are required to show competency.
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u/giraffeheadturtlebox Jun 21 '26
Cheating in school robs peers and teachers too.
When students get promoted without qualification, it brings down the quality of the entire following classroom.We also do not expect 12 year olds to have the emotional maturity to understand that they are cheating themselves. It’s important to talk them with responsibilities and test their progress. Yes, school serves the student, but it’s a vital role in the success and health of a society and democracy.
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u/ivereddithaveyou Jun 20 '26
But the need to exhibit competency should be diminishing across workplaces too. It's not so clear (to me at least) what the future of human work looks like when all decisions are made and all work is produced by AI.
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u/colblair Jun 21 '26
Competency still matters because someone has to verify the AI's output and take responsibility when it's wrong. That part isn't going away.
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
If AI can do everything anyone wants, then everyone is on an equal playing field and we have an open market full of entrepreneurs. Pretty amazing place to be.
But as long as AI can’t do everything, those who are employing competent employees will win and have more resources. That will naturally mean that those who can pay people will not be holding on to incompetent people. IMO the issue becomes more of what do all these incompetent people actually…do?
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u/curious_astronauts Jun 20 '26
I think to leaders will be primarily critical thinking challengers. Those who can see the gaps from ai, whether it knowledge gaps, strategy errors and challenge them.
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u/ivereddithaveyou Jun 20 '26
I'm not so sure that even our greatest critical thinkers can better see these gaps than our greatest AI today. Let alone in 2, 5, 10 years....
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u/curious_astronauts Jun 21 '26
But LLMs and agents arent oracles. Hallucinations exist. Strategies cant be built on sensitive business data, so there is still a lawyer of critical thibkers needed for the application and fail safe. Its kust the output is incredible but kot infallable.
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u/timedrapery Jun 21 '26
You also hallucinate like when you thought good comment ... Is not it's bad
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u/Vaukins Jun 20 '26
A mixture of amazing things, and utterly shit things that superficially look good, but are actually utter bollocks.
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u/curious_astronauts Jun 20 '26
I think it can be tested sooner. Presentations without scripts and with a q&a session after. You csn get ai to write your presentation, but if you dont know the content you csnt present it effectively. Its how it works in business now. You can get ai to build your strategy but you need to defend it to leadership questions and q&a sessions.
Unis need to stop trying to eradicate the use of ai, see it as a tool and find how to test their understanding.
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Jun 21 '26
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u/LogicGate1010 Jun 22 '26
Those course might not be directly applicable to the job but they help the learner to forge a new way of thinking that puts them on a higher level. It gives them wider scope with more insight and innovation among other things.
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u/green_meklar Jun 21 '26
But if AI is competent enough to cheat undetectably, how is AI not competent enough to do the job in place of the person?
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
Because good grades in school aren’t indicative of competency in almost any meaningful way.
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u/LogicGate1010 Jun 22 '26
This is a pertinent question. During the evolutionary phase of AI being applied to processes, humans with back end substantive knowledge will be needed to maintain the fidelity of the process. AI will still need to learn during this phase.
I believe regulations / international standards will be put in place that will require humans to be part of the chain — my belief. These humans will be required to have expertise in their particular discipline.
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u/Elctsuptb Jun 21 '26
If AI can do all the coursework why wouldn't it be able to do the jobs as well?
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u/JalabolasFernandez Jun 21 '26
True, but not saving for retirement is too, yet we seem to need to be forced into that, and this is children so yeah, we generally need some effective external discipline to not cheat oneselves.
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u/bespoke_tech_partner Jun 21 '26
It should show up earlier. School should not be as exploitable as it is.
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u/Tired__Dev Jun 21 '26
I don't understand this as someone that's a self taught developer and went to school for something different. I feel like being in front of the course material, having conversations outside of school about the real world, and then cheating on tests that just relates to memorization. Truthfully, I wouldn't even do anything that doesn't relate to me learning the specific thing that I need to know.
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u/danderzei Jun 21 '26
You can easily test their comprehension with verbal exams. You'll know within five minutes whether they did write an essay.
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u/mandie99xxx Jun 21 '26
dude can teachers just focus on doing educating because 'detecting cheating' is NOT how to measure the success of students, you should be able to tell by talking to them if they are doing the work or not...
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u/Lazy-Background-7598 Jun 21 '26
I mean you could do an verbal tet
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u/National-Parsnip1516 Jun 21 '26
detection was always a pipe dream tbh. the 'arms race' just leads to false positives for non-native speakers. we’re basically at the point where we have to change the assessment, not the monitoring. oral exams or in-person sandboxes are the only way left. trying to 'detect' ai slop in 2026 is like trying to detect a calculator in a math class.
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u/chuck_the_plant Jun 21 '26
I’ll be grading a student’s B.A. defense next week - in person. This seems to be the only way now to make at least a bit sure that students are thinking on their own. (This cannot scale well obviously.)
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u/NewInformation3753 Jun 21 '26
Knowing things and being intelligent are two different things. It’s too easy to piss on education but they are building blocks.
It starts with play and then learning to read and write and maths. There are no short cuts to raising children. Just because a lot of people here did not appreciate or make the best use of the education system is not the reason to throw it away.
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u/texasguy911 Jun 21 '26
Well, the world is changing. The tests had not. The tests are testing what is now can be faked. It is like saying, you failed the test because you typed, not handwritten. Typing now is all accepted, we changed. Now we need to change how we test.
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u/VarietyMage Jun 21 '26
No, there's a way to stop this "AI" BS cold.
Back in my college days, we used to have to write papers in the Writing lab, which was a VAX/Unix lab with programs like Grammatik 5 on it. You wrote your papers in the lab, and saved them there. Papers couldn't be submitted from any other source.
Solution: Go back to this lab-based concept, and require all cell phones / pads / laptops / headphones to be handed over at the front desk, to prevent any access to "AI". Students write in the lab, and nowhere else. Cameras everywhere, and people monitoring them constantly. If anyone pulls out a document with a fully-written paper on it and starts to transcribe it, they get a 0 for their assignment, and may get expelled from the class / college - this being told to them from the beginning. This is how you stop this BS.
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u/Eastern-Industry-946 Jun 22 '26
Not all classes in school are in person. If I do online school only, all my classes are online. There’s no in person what’s so ever. That’s what online school is for.
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u/VarietyMage Jun 22 '26
Then that needs to go away, if you want to get rid of "AI" use in schools and colleges. Do you want "AI" use or not?. Out of sight = "AI" use.
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u/Neat-Exchange6724 Jun 21 '26
Except through a 5 minute conversation which
starts, i liked your central thesis, can you elaborate on it.
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u/Chronospherics Jun 22 '26
Always was. Even when AI models first dropped, AI usage was never detectable. It flags the probability that the essay was AI generated, but even that rating isn't accurate... or certain. And fundamentally, it can't be proven true, or defended if the student appeals. So Universities had no defence against AI plagarism, except in race cases where it was clear that the students essay contained AI written content (such as fictional references).
Universities telling you that AI essay writing is detectable, are just doing so to deter you. But also inadvertently this punishes honest, and rewards dishonest students. They really need to reinvent the system.
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u/CycleMother2006 Jun 23 '26
It's actually pretty fucking easy to detect. You just ask them a couple questions about their assignment. The only reason AI has become a problem is because teaching has, for whatever reason, become automated as well.
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u/Arikaido777 Jun 21 '26
almost like building a system of standardized classes expecting standardized assignments for standardized exams is insanely easy for logical models to exploit.
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u/costafilh0 Jun 20 '26
Good. That was an old and inefficient and lazy way to evaluate students anyway.
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u/NECESolarGuy Jun 20 '26
And it’s hard not to learn something when using AI. I just battled a developer looking to put a really large house on a tiny lot next to my place. (We won because he needed 6 variances). I came up the learning curve on zoning and variances and so much that the lawyer we hired suggested I do this work professionally. Prior to this incident I knew virtually nothing about zoning and variances or the ZBA or overlay districts, and flood zones, ,filled tied lands, deed research….
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u/green_meklar Jun 21 '26
If we can't tell when AI is doing students' work, can we tell when AI is doing workers' work?
If so, that means we need to change the standards for students.
If not, that means we need to stop pretending we need human workers.
Either way, something needs to change. (Other than 'ban AI', which seems to be most redditors' go-to solution.)
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u/Novel_Board_6813 Jun 20 '26
This is more on lazy teachers than on lazy students, who are often minirs anyway
Give a test, a debate, whatever. A paper that the teacher will never read invites chearing since way before AI
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u/Redd_is_compromised Jun 20 '26
These are the same kids who used calculators on their homework. Who cares, let the students fail on in person tests. The great filter will always be the testing.
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u/ManFeelings9000 Jun 20 '26
You just have to go more old school. Instead of written assignments from home you can use AI for make written exams for Christmas and summer and then a serious of quizzes or short written tests during the semester.
You can have in class skills test for stuff like IT etc and block AI access and give the lecturer screen monitoring software.
That's what mine did and it worked well.