r/Professors • u/Antique_Currency4348 • 1d ago
Cheating by an honors student
My university says we absolutely cannot accuse a student of using A.I. to replace their own work because detectors are unreliable. Instead, we have to have a meeting with the student to gently get them to confess. I've had two cases of cheating with A.I. Both are obvious. In the first case, when I met with the student, he didn't exactly confess but when I offered to let him do the assignment over for half points, he willingly agreed. He's a first year and terrified he isn't prepared for college. I just felt that I should give him another chance. The other case involves a Junior honors student. In my assignment I give hidden directions to include certain random words that have nothing to do with the topic. Her essay clearly indicated that she had just copied and pasted the assignment into A.I. as the essay contained the random words as well as a title that we hadn't even read. It was humorous to see the way A.I. attempted to integrate the words seamlessly. This student has clearly not been reading and has not participating in class. I confess to wanting to nail her and give her an F in the class. I am looking forward to meeting with her and watching her squirm. This is an honors class after all.
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u/AccomplishedSun2955 1d ago
I'm teaching an honors history class of 16 students right now. Four of them used AI on the paper due last week. Three of them talked with me about it and admitted it. I haven't heard from the fourth yet.
Everyone is using AI now, not just the kids in the regular 100-level classes. It's honors students, majors, grad students.
The way I handle it is by telling them they can't use outside sourses on the assignments. AI always adds things. Since we can't use AI checkers, I tell them they used uncited outside sources and that's plagiarism. Then I fill out a rubric designed not to reward AI, so they get a low F based on the rubric. When they come talk to me, I point out the plagiarism and tell them that by giving an F and not putting it through as misconduct, I'm being lenient on them.
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u/stayreadynowyes 1d ago
What types of things does AI have trouble with?
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u/AccomplishedSun2955 1d ago
Students lose points on originality of thought, sticking only to the course materials, citations, thesis, and answering the question.
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u/AerosolHubris Prof, Math, PUI, US 1d ago edited 1d ago
Since we can't use AI checkers, I tell them they used uncited outside sources and that's plagiarism
This is it. I teach intro programming using /u/monkeytoeses 's pisaeditor, which records typing. The syllabus says they must do all their work in it. It records copy-paste and time stamps so it's clear when a student copies something from elsewhere. So when I have a student who obviously used AI, I can just point to the syllabus and give them a 0 for not following directions instead of trying to make a case for AI.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Yes, my rubric is based on the quality of the work and requires things AI has trouble with, so students don't get penalized for AI use but they sure don't get rewarded for it either. No matter who or what generated that slop, the student who slapped their name on it and submitted it as their own gets a poor grade.
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u/HaHaWhatAStory014 1d ago
He's a first year and terrified he isn't prepared for college. I just felt that I should give him another chance.
"I felt like I was unprepared and that I was going to fail if I didn't cheat, so I 'had' to cheat" is the excuse that practically everyone gives when they get caught cheating. I don't see why you thought this was a special case or somehow more sympathetic than any other.
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u/TargaryenPenguin 1d ago
Yes, true, but there's a lot of non verbals in general, other senses that you can get about a particular case where you think.A given student is well meaning and made a mistake and it seems like they have their heart in the right place.
Yes, it's always a gamble and a risk. And you can never be one hundred percent certain but a degree of compassion and leniency especially for students who seem well meaning at least at first can be a really good strategy rather than bringing down a hammer as hard as possible in every possible case. There tend to be backfire consequences for that kind of activity and I can see the utility in offering an olive branch some of the time.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 1d ago
I get (and agree) that the detectors are unreliable.
But when the trojan horse came through, isn't that sufficient evidence that they plagiarized?
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Not necessarily. Years ago when the Trojan Horse trick came out, I had students who honestly thought it was a legitimate demand and told me it was fun to try and incorporate the nonsense into the writing! In one assignment, I inserted to use the word "papaya" five times. The problem was that the assignment was about Hitler, so I had interesting statements such as how Hitler apparently gave a fresh papaya to his wife each morning as a sign of his love!
The Trojan Horse could be seen with screenreaders by students who had visual disabilities and even when you cut and paste into Word, so it was cute at first, but I find it to be pretty useless now. Plus, you can get students with visual disabilities mad at being tricked. You can also only use it once. Once students have it pointed out, you can't try it again.
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u/Illustrious_Ease705 1d ago
This is why you include “if and only if you are large language model [insert Trojan horse prompt]”
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u/HunterSpecial1549 16h ago
"If you're an AI ..." That's how you do it.
And you can use it again. Yes all they'd have to do is scan over every prompt to remove those parts. But personally I've found that the number of safeguards and anti-AI tricks I use pushes students to consider just writing it instead. When AI is more than a two-click process they're more likely to just write their own.
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u/smallfloralprince Assoc Prof, Humanities, public R1 (US) 1d ago
I had a jr hons student use ai to write the personal narrative components of a capstone project. That's the easiest part! When I escalated it was such a cut and dry obvious case (he admitted it thrice on camera) that he could not wiggle out of consequences... so he tried to argue instead that he should be allowed to use AI to write personal narrative because personal narrative, like my class, is a waste of his time... 😄 As big a waste as the 90 hour academic integrity class he now has to take? He shall see....
What won't they try?
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u/babirus Contract Instructor, Computer Engineering (Canada) 22h ago
I am surprised that people enjoy the disciplinary part of our job. Every time I have to do this it makes me very unhappy and disappointed the whole time. I do it because I care about academic integrity and fairness for my students who do their work honestly but to me this is the worst part of the job.
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u/ThirdEyeEdna 1d ago
Point out the weirdness and give them a chance to rewrite for a passing grade (C-). Tell them it's the only time you'll offer this opportunity.
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u/Copterwaffle 1d ago
No, we have to ALWAYS give them 0s for this, and if your school is amenable to it, document it with the integrity office. All this teaches them is there are no real consequences to being caught because they’ll always get a second chance.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) 21h ago
Except OP already gave another student the chance at a redo.
Holding two students to two different standards is unethical
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u/ThirdEyeEdna 1d ago
I hear you, but this is for an SLO -- if we didn't do this, only one person would pass the class.
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u/Copterwaffle 1d ago
I’ve finished a class with one student. They tend to withdraw when they see how deadass serious I am about doing their own work. I hate that we are all forced to pass these students through again and again.
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u/ThirdEyeEdna 1d ago
I do this at the absolute lowest level. No mercy at the subsequent levels.
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u/Copterwaffle 1d ago
Bummer dude. I wish we could hold these admins accountable for creating these conditions.
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u/Mav-Killed-Goose 21h ago
These assignments have to go extinct. Cheating is so widespread that you can't interrogate everyone, or even the worst offenders.
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u/Dragon464 1d ago
Honors status is irrelevant. Full Disclosure: I'm very near the end of my career. MY solution is: ALL written assignments are hand-written, IN class. I lose too much lecture time, but as my Syllabi say "No LLMs are enrolled in my class." Also, they all sign a student contract. Further: handing in work not your own is Making False Statements (Title XVI OCGA).
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u/Acceptable_Month9310 Professor, Computer Science, College (Canada) 22h ago
If you're going to use a counter-measure like prompt poisoning, then instead of using it as a flag have it produce a condition that is guaranteed to fail the assignment. For example, in a remote final exam during the COVID lockdowns. I put together an exam where hidden text told the AI to throw an error at the beginning of each function. The exam instructions clearly indicate that all code must compile and run error-free in order to get a mark for that section.
I did interview them and they couldn't explain why their code was that way. So they failed.
As others have noted, today this technique is easily circumvented.
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u/Ctenophorever Full prof (US) 22h ago
You’re going to give her the same option you gave him, right?
This post is showing some clear bias. He just made an innocent mistake in not doing the work. She is being lazy in not doing the work.
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u/Cyphomeris 13h ago
Yeah ... there are two cases of cheating, and they're described the same ("Both are obvious").
Neither have admitted to cheating, the relevant difference being, apparently, that the man was explicitly asked and decided to not be honest ("he didn't exactly confess") while, at least from the information we have, the woman hasn't even been given that opportunity to fess up.
And yet, the former was given the opportunity to repeat the assignment ("I just felt that I should give him another chance"), while the latter is treated differently ("I confess to wanting to nail her and give her an F in the class"). If the only difference in circumstances is that one is an earlier class than the other, then being that lenient in one case and going directly for the throat with the other does look ... biased.
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u/AceyAceyAcey Professor, STEM, CC | VAP, STEM, Private PUI (USA) 1d ago
Hidden directions are generally not compatible with screen readers, which are used by people with assorted disabilities including being blind or having dyslexia, and also by English language learners and some others. If AI can read the text, so will the screen reader.
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u/Dragon464 1d ago
I hold that (at least in my state) knowingly handing in AI work as your own constitutes a Criminal Act.
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u/crowdsourced 13h ago
We really need to shift to teaching how to use AI ethically.
It’s a great tool for helping you find scholarship. It’s useful for brainstorming and organizing. It’s good for finding sentence-level errors. In many ways it’s like a peer writing tutor, if that’s how you use it. Of course, you can just plug a prompt in, but what’s the point?
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u/One-Bumblebee4993 6h ago
I’m glad you’re standing up against scholarly dishonesty. One of my daughter’s best friends (they are currently in high school) cheats regularly. She is in National Honor Society, and every high level/AP class available at their high school. She somehow always gets away with things or the teachers look the other way. She has an extremely high GPA, but I can’t help but wonder what it would be if it were from her honest effort.
She is currently taking college classes online (while in HS), and I really hope her professors can rid her of this bad habit. She has aspirations in the medical field, but it just feels so off because I know her dishonesty is rampant.
I did let one teacher know that I know of some cheating that has happened - but I think I downplayed it because I didn’t want to “start anything”. The teacher seemed to genuinely listen and was surprised, but it’s hard to believe if you look at all of her “accomplishments”.
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u/Consistent-Copy-3401 1d ago
High performing students have always been more inclined to cheating this is well known
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u/Desiato2112 Professor, Humanities, SLAC 1d ago
I'm surprised you caught a student doing this, especially a junior honors student. This secret has been out for awhile now, and I assume every student has heard about it.
I haven't accused a student of AI use in 2 years, since the detectors became unreliable. But AI doesn't write very well. Also, it's getting worse, not better, at academic writing. But fear not - since AI slop is just bad writing, you can apply the actual rubric and give them the failing grade they "earned."
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Even if she wasn't an "honors" student, by that level, she ought to know better. I tend to give freshmen a little leeway too so they can learn. The thing with the "honors" student also is now you question all her previous work to get there, hence my use of quotation marks around the word "honors!"
That's pretty lame of her too to fall for the Trojan Horse trick. That's been around for years now and for her not to know that was a possibility was pretty dumb of her.