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Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Ehhhh.
Even without AI. A at home exam is just begging for ones to cheat.
Flight instructor here:
I kept having to undo the damage that academia did to my flight students, because looking things up to make sure you knew it right felt like "cheating" to them. So. Many. People have acadotrauma, y'all. Do you know how often I had to resort to behaviorism models to convince grown ass men it's okay to be seen using a checklist? I had to ask our chief pilot to watch me do ground procedures on an airplane in front of the student to establish it as a norm. You know, the way they trained Alex the parrot to talk. Because a checklist is a piece of paper with the answers on it and we hurt people for having those. Same with writing down frequencies. What? You're going to memorize the A/FD?
Or would it be edutrauma?
I see the same thing in the software industry. Programming is something where it's perfectly common to need to have cheat sheets at your desk and reference the documentation regularly. But freshly graduated students think that's cheating. They're convinced they need to memorise all aspects of a programming language and it's standard library. The amount of new information I take in every day, it would be impossible to remember everything. The real skill is information retrieval, being able to look up what you need to know when you need it.
This split shows up in interviews, even for senior-level positions. It's infuriating. Want to get hired? Memorize the right snippets from the documentation!
Want to do the job? Be able to find what's helpful in the docs and incorporate it into what you're trying to do.
Yep. I always thought open book tests are the best.
Otherwise if you read it but can't memorize it, gl.
If you did the work or can find the answer quickly without having done the work /studied, you'll do okay in the real world too, because you have those skills to figure out the correct answer quickly.
Sure...when someone has crashed with no heartbeat in the ER, just ask Grok.
Some professions, like ER doctor, require a high level of memorization. But that's also part of medical training.
Others don't need that level of memorization, even other kinds of doctors. I've seen medical specialists in private practice leave the exam room to look up symptoms to help make a diagnosis. And I think that's a good idea, since only TV doctors can "know" everything about incredibly rare diseases.
Til grok is a book
I'm sure you could probably dig up an exception or two, but by and large "using tools to trace real-life objects and photographs" isn't an accurate portrayal of the sort of thing that gets people flak online. Every tracing scandal I've seen on tumblr is an artist essentially plagiarising work from another artist in the same community.
It's the difference between "my character is shooting a bow in this panel, let's find some references for archery poses so I can get it right" versus "oh hey that's a cool picture someone drew of an archer, I think I'll trace it and fill in my character's face and colours instead and post it online and pretend like I made it all myself without crediting the person who actually did 99% of the creative process"
Depends on the exam though. I've got ones that made me wish they only do in class tests.