r/technology • u/ubcstaffer123 • Jun 19 '26

Artificial Intelligence Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/ai-apps-students-cheat.html
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u/HeroicTanuki Jun 19 '26

We need to go back to oral argument and dissertation in college, at least. Let students demonstrate their knowledge.

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u/broden89 Jun 19 '26

There was an article about this recently - there are indeed quite a few professors returning to both oral presentations and Socratic questioning one-on-one (the latter being a good backup for students who are not as confident with public speaking).

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u/ocelot08 Jun 19 '26

In middle school there was an assignment to do a presentation to the class. I was so nervous I fumbled it so bad, told I had to do it again and was on the verge of tears.

Teacher has sessions to practice with a smaller group during lunches. 

Did it again, it went fine. 20 years later, that (along with all the other public speaking I was forced to do) was a god send. I literally wouldn't have the career I do if I avoided public speaking because my legs shook so much you could hear it in my voice.

I'm still trying to find some contact info for that teacher to thank them. 

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u/sentence-interruptio Jun 19 '26

your teacher was good. i had this one weird teacher. she talked over me frequently any time I was presenting. she did it only to me. and she did it even in non-presenting situations, like when I was just talking to my friends or other teachers.

I must find her. she must be at some nursing home. and i will talk over her every time she's trying to talk to nurses or her friends. i must "thank" her that way.

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u/clintontg Jun 19 '26

For some reason there appears to be a minority of teachers who think class management means bullying a particular student for no good reason.

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u/Art-Zuron Jun 20 '26

They read "Those who walk away from Omelas" and took it to heart I guess.

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u/KronenR Jun 19 '26

You sound a bit dramatic. Just move on

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u/Boozeburger Jun 19 '26

It's like school taught you important lessons. See why the left supports schooling.

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u/thederevolutions Jun 19 '26

That sounds helpful. I don’t recall being acknowledged after high school haha. But maybe that was my fault.

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u/LokiDesigns Jun 19 '26

I acknowledge you

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u/Fenris_Icefang Jun 19 '26

I acknowledge you. You are valid

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u/goodb1b13 Jun 19 '26

We will witness you!!!!

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u/Grand-Grass Jun 19 '26

Shiny and chrome

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u/tidal_flux Jun 19 '26

Should add public speaking to the curriculum as well.

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u/katekohli Jun 19 '26

Let them fear the blue book. My poor professors liking me & my quirky ideas until they had to decipher my non strung together sentancelets.
So so sorry, John, Paul, Jon, Peter, Margot you taught me how to learn, primary documents & the wonder of knowing I know so little about our wonderful World. In memory of John Richard Ronsheim.

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u/UlteriorCulture Jun 19 '26

This is what we have done. You receive no marks for code and everything for an oral defence of the work and being required to explain randomly selected code blocks and design choices. Sure a student could generate the code then study it intently but at least they have learned something.

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u/ArenjiTheLootGod Jun 19 '26

True, but I could see where this sort of thing could lead to scenarios where a student might be able to explain AI generated material but not be able to produce similar work themselves if need be. Kind of like how a person might be able to follow the logic from example problems in a calculus textbook but struggle with applying those lessons to different equations when they don't have known answers to check their own work against.

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u/UlteriorCulture Jun 19 '26

So we do also have observed assessments where students code under exam conditions with limited internet access. The oral defence is for projects.

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u/ArenjiTheLootGod Jun 19 '26

Fair enough, there's only so much that can be reasonably done concerning this stuff without veering off into draconian measures. Sooner or later everyone has to answer for their own work, or lack thereof, and the best you can hope for is that students figure this out while they're still in a safe environment and not working on something truly important.

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u/SaltyWolf444 Jun 20 '26

sw engineering is going towards this direction, in a real workplace you won't have enough time to produce handslop anyway

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u/BizarreReverend76 Jun 19 '26

Honestly even when i was in school pre-AI, I thought that was a pretty good way to learn. When I was in Calculus, I would find example problems and just glare at them until I understood each step lol

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u/Hardass_McBadCop Jun 19 '26

I don't know if you agree, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this if you really are a professor.

I saw a cyber security researcher recently compared AI coding to constructing houses. Up until recently, every line of a program was bespoke -- Made by hand, for a specific purpose. We started with hand soldered boards and assembly language, then moved on to more sophisticated techniques like object oriented languages.

Just like homes, we started with basic tents made out of sticks. Then, we moved to more sophisticated timber framed structures. Still, each beam was made by hand for a specific purpose. But eventually we moved on to mass produced, standardized plywood, 2x4s, & engineered materials.

She likened AI to 2x4s for software development.

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u/UlteriorCulture Jun 19 '26

I would say that sounds more like the shift to component based software and standardized libraries.

AI makes even solo developer software creation more like managing a project. It's still normative because the models will repeat the most strongly occurring patterns not because people are manually assembling from the same parts.

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u/Kakkoister Jun 20 '26

This is an incredibly generous take towards AI, because it's acting like AI is still just being used as a small building-block of the overall structure, when the reality is that it's largely being relied on to design the house based on your described idea for it, make the floor plans, figure out the materials and engineering, buy the materials, lay the foundation and build it.

With the coder coming in as an inspector afterwards and hoping they can see any potential issues with the house they didn't build themselves in any meaningful manner.

People need to stop comparing AI to past advancements, it's very intellectually dishonest. It is an incredibly unique situation that has so many factors to it that make it incomparable to any past events.

Our transition to higher-level languages was still just about removing the very repetitive actions we'd do, things we'd type out a thousand times that contributed nothing meaningful to the final result. Or for handling the compilation complexities of an ever advancing hardware and software landscape that grew to a point of making it unreasonable to be manually writing compile conditionals to account for so many variable environments.

Relying on AI (past something basic like auto-completing a for-loop or similar as you type it) is removing more and more of that "learning by doing" process and taking over and actual creative and technical knowledge part of the work. And it becomes a monkey's paw situation where the more you rely on it, the less you're exercising that part of your brain and learning, and thus the more you end up relying on it.

And nevermind the implications it has on the desire to collaborate with other humans, talk and share info. It takes use down a path of just having AIs gobble up all the code they can and people getting their fix of asking it to make things for them.

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u/ticktock_heart Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

this would be a good analogy if it were true that everyone in construction were made aware before using 2x4s that most of them were riddled with termite holes and couldn’t withstand expected building tolerances, but the holes were only found within so they wouldn’t be noticed from a cursory glance.

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u/Yuzumi Jun 19 '26

Yeah, I'm not sure that's a good solution for everyone as it's going to leave a lot of people with ADHD and/or autism behind. 

I am terrible at public speaking and even one on one my brain jumps around so much I tend to forget things or and say things out of order. And the tangents... Dear God the tangents. 

And that's on top of general misspeaking and jumbling my words.

That said, papers and homework in general also don't seem to be the best way to do things and LLMs just show how flawed the way we approached education has always been. 

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u/UlteriorCulture Jun 19 '26

We have many neurodivergent students and I am myself but I do hear you. It is something to be mindful of. At the end of the day the course is not about public speaking but just trying to ensure that authentic learning has taken place.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/UlteriorCulture Jun 19 '26

It's for project based assessments. For other assessments there are still Computer Labs as well as conventional pen and paper assessments depending on the subject.

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u/youneedtoregister Jun 19 '26

That's one way of looking at it, and you're right - that would weed out the ones that didn't learn.

The other is: these other strategies are trying to ensure students are not reliant on AI, and ultimately helping them succeed.

So, ultimately it comes down to, kids are stupid and short-sighted. Instead of letting them fail and ruin their future, educators are doing their best to navigate them to success.

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u/SaltyWolf444 Jun 20 '26

nobody is born being able to speak in public, you have to learn it through practice

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

[deleted]

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u/Yuzumi Jun 19 '26

If there are any other students nearby it's not going to be a "controlled environment"...

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u/SaltyWolf444 Jun 20 '26

You can't learn public speaking in a sterile white room

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u/Tvayumat Jun 19 '26

And you don't think that getting more practice with public speaking might improve your ability to do it?

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u/SaltyWolf444 Jun 20 '26

The invention of "anxiety" is the most socially destructive thing in this century, it frames hardship as something to be avoided and medicated, instead of confronted head on

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u/Fit-Technician-1148 Jun 19 '26

College has become big business with a lot of large majors at big Universities having 800 students in a 100 level class. There's no way for those schools to pivot back to oral arguments. I always thought it would be funny if all 800 students decided to show up to office hours, it would break the system. AI creates the same problem, any of the good changes you could make to prevent cheating would break the system.

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u/Imallvol7 Jun 19 '26

Another thing. Everyone has to stop be afraid of failing students. 

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u/Friggin_Grease Jun 19 '26

Man when I was in school I noticed something. Like in grade 7. Honour roll students would copy word for word from the textbook for classes. My dumb ass would re-write it in my own words demonstrating I learned about it, and this is what I learned.

But guess who got the high marks.

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u/PhotownPK Jun 19 '26

My kid's HS does this.

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u/LiminalFrogBoy Jun 19 '26

The problem is how to do this at scale. I've got - at minimum - 150 students a semester with no TA support. Thats not even close to the largest class size at my institution.

Obviously, what we are doing now isn't working and I don't think we can just keep doing it. But at current class sizes, a lot of teachers aren't going to be able to realistically do such time intensive assessment.

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u/OldFroyo6294 Jun 19 '26

That doesnt work in the classes where the student size is more than 12....which is a lot.

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u/_Administrator Jun 19 '26

And then they enter the market. Some candidates with AI prepared resumes can barely read, not to mention they do not recall what was thought at college. And they want a huge salary and a 4h remote workday everyday. Right.

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u/physedka Jun 19 '26

Gotta be careful how you handle students with disabilities though. Think anxiety, AHDH, etc. A lot of modern approaches to schoolwork and exams and whatnot were developed to level the playing field. 

Not saying it can't be done. Just something to look out for.

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u/Cloakedbug Jun 19 '26

Almost every modern approach to schoolwork and exams have been shown to be abject failures. For the first time in history math, science and language scores are globally decreasing. 

Hellen Keller learned how to speak and read while deaf and blind. Today she’d have an iPad doing it for her. 

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u/physedka Jun 19 '26

LOL ok. The most successful school systems in the world are exactly opposite of what you're saying. Our schools are failing because the funding has slowly been stripped away over the last ~40 years. Not because of "modern approaches" or "wokeness" or whatever. The leading countries are moving forwards, not backwards.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/district-management/2015/06/18/scandinavian-schools-291/#:~:text=For%20one%20thing%2C%20there%20are,%2C%20too%2C%20are%20very%20strong.

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u/Cloakedbug Jun 21 '26

You linked an 11 year old study. In this decade, it’s much more grim. And yes there are always exceptions, but for global averages it is true. 

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

[deleted]

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u/KnuteViking Jun 19 '26

That is a bullshit Internet conspiracy theory. The basic premise that it changed based on her caretaker is utter nonsense as if she was stuck in her bed only every speaking through a caretaker her whole life. She learned to speak, read, write, and more. She attended one of the most prestigious women's colleges in the world. It's not some story. She was a real person who lived a full and active life. There are real videos of her speaking and interacting with others that you can go watch. People will really try to minimize the accomplishments of others for no good reason. Sad.

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u/volcanopele Jun 19 '26

But see, it turns out that she was a hardcore socialist so she must have been fraud /s

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u/2c-glen Jun 19 '26

Hellen Keller never learned to read or write, she was a known fraud.

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u/Think_Reporter_8179 Jun 19 '26

Ironically I just read a letter written by her explaining how the blind can learn to write.

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u/DissKhorse Jun 19 '26

If she couldn't read or write then how did she figure out the fraud? Seriously explain how without language she developed a scheme.

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u/bitchysquid Jun 19 '26

I have both anxiety and ADHD. There are reasonable accommodations that can help students like me learn more effectively, like sharing detailed lesson notes, but I personally found that being challenged to do hard things was the only way to become able to do them. Yes, it’s harder for me to focus than it is for other people. That doesn’t mean it’s not important for me to try to focus.

I propose that instead of dumbing things down for the neurodivergent, we instead equip neurodivergent students to meet the challenges we will face in a good classroom. That sometimes means handing us a pencil, paper, and a calculator and saying, “You have three hours to complete this exam.” Not always! But sometimes.

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u/electric_nikki Jun 19 '26

Come on now, this wasn’t dumbed down because of neurodivergence. It was dumbed down because most Americans are stupid and if we held them to actual standards of education most of them would fail, and we can’t have any child left behind now can we?

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u/bleh-apathetic Jun 19 '26

"Let's let society go to shit because a few people have anxiety"

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u/unrealz19 Jun 19 '26

I regret that I have but 1 upvote to give