One thing I want to say here is that "entrapment" isn't a moral principle; it's a legal one, and it isn't universal. We don't get it from English Common Law, where it wasn't widely known before the founding of the US, and was rejected when it did come up. Entrapment is a checks-and-balances balance of power mechanism, not a general rule of conduct.
Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter), it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam. You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it anyways. You're culpable.
Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of entrapment (although all are relevant in the legal sense) is the second clause: coercion.
Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.
I would disagree about entrapment not being a moral principle (or its related to one at least). At its core it is basically just saying it is wrong to convince people who wouldn't otherwise be evil, to be evil.
Indeed. Entrapment is such a narrow case and is designed to stop the government from taking advantage of vulnerable people.
If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I’ll get you enough to buy baby food that’s entrapment, assuming they weren’t already involved in the drugs trade and this “crime” would never have happened without the government willing it into existence.
Today I had to submit my final grades for my Java class, meaning I had to grade all the final exams for it last night.
During the exam (which I had to administer remotely this time) I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Bing AI, no Google Bard, and also no Googling, etc. I repeated this several times and also wrote it in bold font on the top of the test. I really didn't have any way to enforce this, but I was hoping people would be honest.
I'm pretty sure that most of the students were honest on this; the answers I got generally fine, but had grammatical mistakes and were "basically correct but had light factual errors that are common with people new to programming but aren't bad enough to count as 'wrong'". One student, however, who has submitted broken sentences and broken code the entire semester, managed to suddenly have decent writing skills, decent explanations of everything, and his code was clean and concise.
I'm about 95% sure he used ChatGPT to generate answers to the questions. I tried getting ChatGPT (and Bard and Bing AI) to give me a word-for-word copy of what he submitted, but I couldn't. It got somewhat close, but never an exact match.
Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved. It's also technically possible that he used Grammarly to make sure his writing was ok (which was technically against the rules but I wouldn't really consider cheating in a Java class), and so I just had to swallow my pride and grade the test assuming he was being honest.
It's kind of upset me all day; I have worked pretty hard trying my best to be available to students if they have questions, and I worked pretty hard to try and make sure that the final exam was a reasonable level of difficulty. I think most of my students were fine, but one bad apple is enough to really ruin my day.
Universities are going to have to adjust. That's really all there is to it. It's not that hard for an exam, since you can put them in a properly designed classroom with human monitors. Homework? Projects? Much more difficult.
The current system worked in 1960. Not in 2023, and probably not since the late 1990s, when technology started to make our evaluation processes obsolete.
Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools? As a software developer I use these tools daily, and if I or my colleagues stopped our productivity would suffer - it sounds like the same genre of thinking that leads to having students write out code by hand because using an IDE is “cheating”.
If it would be possible to take a bottom-tier CS student and turn them into a decent programmer using AI tools, the hiring landscape would be /very/ different. These tools aren’t magic, and to me it sounds like the tests are failing at measuring the students competence if they can so easily be gamed by using an AI/old fashioned googling.
Maybe the solution should be to move towards a style of exam/grading that actually measures the competence of the student in a situation closer to what a professional developer will be in, rather than an old fashioned artificial exam setting?
> Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved.
As an early procrastinator (rehabilitated perhaps?) I've had a history of doing very well on finals through cramming.
In your student's case it might very well be more likely they are cheating, but those unlikely but possible students who study extra hard to recover their grades for a final deserve the benefit of the doubt.
How unlikely can academic recovery get? I spent an entire semester completely lost in a second level Macroeconomics course...
... I was able to read and write chapter summaries of a semester and a half of content (about 15 chapters, corresponding to the first level and the second level courses) in a single weekend and aced the exam, with the highest marks in the class.
That was the hardest I've ever crammed in my life and I had trouble speaking in the hours that followed the study session.
I later got a recommendation letter from that prof, totally worth it.
I'm starting to see this come up in coding interviews.
I had one candidate that struggled MIGHTILY on a coding problem that was easy (kept running into syntax errors) but then pulled out an esoteric solution for the second problem in no time flat.
I can't prove that he was cheating but it very highly suggestive that he is.
I hate it, but I'm starting to think I have to do an AI detection question now. It's not hard, just ask someone to do something impossible. However, I don't like the fact that now I need to be "tricky". I've never believed in making coding challenges hard, I just want to see if you can write code.
Whilst it's unfortunate this kid might be cheating the system, I don't think it's worth being upset if they got through. The point of these exams is to allow students to study and learn these topics, which it sounds like they did. It sounds like while maybe you failed in gatekeeping the cheaters (an impossible post gpt task) you have succeeded in the real goal which was to help these kids learn and improve.
Today you learned a lesson. You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? It is a good tool of getting the general idea but one you need to audit. This class is where you are going to learn the basics and know when this thing is wrong when you use it' That thing is not going away any time soon.
Honestly, unless the grade for that class translates into taking something directly tangible from other students, and a "java" class sounds pretty intro, I wouldn't give any thought to it. Cramming for exams and then immediately forgetting everything you hastily memorized is a-okay even though you didn't learn anything either.
A random college class, to me, isn't the kind of thing where cheating really matters. The stakes are low, it's expected that most students will do well, and everyone gets the same degree at the end. If someone wants to sabotage their own education then fine, and if it doesn't bite them later good for them.
I wonder if it would be worth it to give some sort of in person feedback to convey (a) you noticed the dramatic improvement (b) you were even worried they might be cheating (c) you decided to give them the benefit of the doubt (d) congratulations on their hard work paying off (e) but if they did cheat they got lucky and if they keep it up it's going to backfire on them one day.
So the purpose of academia is teach pupils a subject, that they can the use in real life.
When you're solving the same problems in real life you do have access to all those tools that you banned. Because in real life, if you manage to solve a problem it doesn't matter that much how you solved it.
Sure, if you just Google things and always solve your problems by copy pasting. Your solutions will lack depth, and at some point this will catch up to you.
My point is, cheating is primarily cheating on yourself, and it will catch up to you.
I think this is the framing you should have with regards to cheating.
Some students cheat. As an adjunct instructor at the university level, I had similar experiences.
You have to both adjust your expectations and make a significant part of your grading use an in-person one-on-one oral exam or project walkthrough.
It is a huge commitment of time - most professors I know seem to have quietly accepted cheating will be be rewarded because they don't have enough time to verify student performance.
> I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work
You're swimming against the riptide. If I were teaching coding today, I'd allow, even encourage, use of AI, with some ground rules. Students using AI would have to show their work (i.e. the conversation with the machine).
The content of the prompts and in particular follow-up questions, can demonstrate competence. E.g. situations in which the student spotted that something was wrong in the generated code and made an intelligent hint to the machine to fix it.
Students should be prepared for tomorrow's world, not yesterday's.
I'm old: when I went to school we weren't allowed calculators "because there'll be a situation where you need to do basic arithmetic and don't have a calculator". I occasionally laugh at this while firing up the calculator app on my phone. We'd have been better off if they'd taught us sign language rather than arithmetic.
Our education system is going to have to adjust to the new reality. Setting an essay task is now the equivalent of learning the times table - utterly redundant (unless you plan on a career writing essays or doing maths).
Given that this was an ethics course, I think it's interesting/surprising that the professor doesn't seem to be trying to engage with what I'm guessing was the course material in this discussion. "Am I the unethical one" the right question? How about "Under which formulations of normative ethics is my behavior wrong?"
1. Is it _good_ to catch cheating? If these are students who are just checking some distributional requirement box, does it matter if they actually understood the material? Potentially there is harm (delayed graduation, literal costs, etc) from failing students (or having them be subject to some other discipline). Perhaps under a consequentialist framing, catching cheaters isn't good. But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters?
2. Is the method of catching cheaters relevant? If catching cheaters is good for consequentialist reasons, isn't any effective means of catching cheaters (which does not cause other harms) also good? Certainly the objection that the professor was dishonest by uploading the bad test sounds like it's from a deontological / rules-oriented view.
You're making it too abstract. The professor's actions are hilarious and fair game by any measure. Bravo, well played. It's such a good idea that I'm surprised its not already commonplace.
As for consequences, thats up to university policy
> I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.
> But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters?
Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material is adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of challenge.
When cheaters come in and destroy that curve and inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop, the non-cheaters suffer from increased difficulty.
So yes, there is some obligation to keep the playing field fair and accurate.
Given that grades can have an impact on real-world outcomes (e.g. admission to a desired graduate program) then it’s possible that allowing cheating can have broad impacts beyond the students. Imagine if you took some 4.0GPA students under the assumption that they actually learned what they claim, then discover that they have no idea what they’re doing because they cheated the whole way.
Also, the mind boggles at the suggestion that catching cheaters is bad because they might face some consequences for their dishonesty.
> I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. ... My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves
I kinda don't get this. Doesn't this also potentially catch students who used Quizlet to study and happened to find this teacher's "poisoned" exam? It seems like there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of the 1/3rd of the students who profess their innocence are telling the truth. Was anything done to account for that, or was it assumed that use of the site is cheating?
> I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.
If one is willing to admit that they are not a forensic mathematician they can also be willing to admit that they made a mistake with their forensic mathematics. This person seems to have over-assumed a lack of mistakes in their understanding considering the certainty with which they choose to end these academic careers.
Edit:
> As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. (emphasis mine)
So they just assume that a person using the website is cheating. One might actually make flash cards based on previous exam questions/answers using said information to be certain that their flash cards are accurate. What if that person was thinking to themselves, "This doesn't sound right, but if that's what's on the test..."?
Yeah, it entirely depends on the timeline of the poisoning.
If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during the exam period.
If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what they could recall.
In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study material, these students may have actually known the material, felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.
Everything you say might be true. But it seems that the only "studying" that really stuck was when they went to quizlet. Read the rest of it where most of them admitted to cheating -- which probably means pulling it up and copying the answer.
Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over backwards to rationalize it.
In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the class and used unverified information in place of learning the material.
Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is nothing wrong with this.
Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. They were wrong.
> My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)
If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.
The answers were purposely wrong though and supposedly obviously so. Something I have seen in every multiple choice test I have ever taken.
I don't think it's possible anyone legitimately studied using easily determined false information. If they did, failing the course seems appropriate anyway.
The article explicitly states that the school policy disallows the use of previous tests without the professor’s approval. So any use of the test as a study aid is cheating.
To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected. Saying a website that lists old exams is 'ostensibly' a study aid seems disingenuous. Poisoning said site with wrong information is just making things harder for the students which is the opposite from what a teacher is supposed to be doing.
However what I don't understand is why that even mattered.
Were the students just learning the questions and answers by heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding, it is not dishonest.
Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere? Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other.
Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently, which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or the student's?
Honestly, it's kinda wild to me that the final(!) is just multiple choice questions, and that it's similar enough to the one last year that you can cheat by looking at previous exams? That's just a badly designed course, feels like the students are the ones getting scammed here...
I have done 2 ethics courses during my education at a Dutch 'Hogeschool' (honestly not sure how this maps to US education wikipedia says 'Vocational university'). I did a specific design ethics course and a broader ethics course as part of a philosophy minor, and in both of them you had to write papers or apply the things you learned to a case study. There were some little tests with multiple choice, but they often had additional questions where you had to explain your reasoning.
Maybe there is a language difference here, but I would expect something more involved from a course given by a professor at a university, or is this a course for people who are in high school or something.
Why even go through the process of accusing them of cheating? If the fake answers were all wrong, just grade the test honestly and the cheaters will get what's coming to them without any ambiguity or additional overhead on his part.
I would just ignore any problematizers who question the ethics of testing students' honesty. I think those people are silly and should rightly be ignored, except to mock them. But that's probably why I'm not a philosopher.
A teacher at my university was fired for failing students who were caught cheating in an introductory CS class. The ones in charge didn't like that he was causing a disturbance. They would rather have had the cheaters get away with it. The system is broken.
It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my stab:
Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical.
Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two situations are ever identical.
I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of approval.
Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class, and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100 students.
From my experience working at a university (in the foreign language department), I found a number of students who put a large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have taken to get an A.
If I were in this professor's case, I'd just mark the answers wrong, and in the future upload more wrong answers. The students who use these sorts of online dumps aren't the ones who study and will beg at the end of the semester for some sort of extra-credit. If it were necessary, perhaps have a second gradebook where the number of "exactly the same wrong answer as the bait" were kept.
I don't think the honeypot is necessarily unethical, but giving a take-home multiple choice final exam for a philosophy course seems like several levels of bad pedagogy.
Yes, he is unethical. He didn't just catch students cheating. He actively sabotaged the cheaters. He says he placed a (metaphorical) camera to catch the cheaters, but if he didn't pay attention to it they would have failed anyway because he planted wrong answers for them to find. Thinking about it now, he could have just graded them with the wrong answers and left it at that (a different ethical question), but it seems he was determined to "get" them, call them out, and punish.
To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do that.
Why is it unethical to be determined to call out and punish cheaters? When I was in college, we had like an academic honesty pledge that made it clear we would get kicked out of school if they caught us cheating. It's not uncommon (or, I think, unethical) to punish cheating in academic programs.
I'm inclined to agree. If you're actively putting out misinformation, that's always bad. It feels a bit "entrapment"-ey.
Sort of tangential, but I have always thought teachers/professors who put "trick" questions on tests to be sort of assholes. It's fine if it's an extra credit thing and isn't going to take away from the final grade, but when you write a question that literally everyone in the class gets wrong, I think that says a lot more about your communication or teaching ability than the students.
Exactly. Whether he intended to or not, he - HIMSELF - put two different, equally authorially-dominant, sets of answers into the wild and expected students to pick the best one in what can only be described as an unauthorized (afaik?) social experiment.
Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But, I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he caught the obvious cheaters, right?
Are you trying to teach kids to not cheat? Or are you trying to teach them how to conceptualize, illustrate (if not demonstrate), and structure ethics such that they can make critical and thoughtful deductions or contributions to the field?
Because, if it's the former: great job, Ranger Rick. You definitely used a method that will root out cheaters and give them some (small/limited) incentive not to cheat anymore.
But, if it's the latter, you've failed your students in every respect. It's not even a clean example of the ethics of cheating, because you've tipped the scales in ways that affect multiple variables, instead of just one.
Neither of which is ethical or unethical in the vacuums of consideration that any subject remains neutral in. But if the context is that it's a philosophy class, I would expect the teacher teach me philosophical ethics and let the chaff fall where it may, rather than try to "prove" some nebulous idea of what it means to "know" something, and why one method of being able to 'prove' it is inferior to some other method. Put simply: I'm in this class to learn. If you're giving me the information and then I pass the test, that's your entire responsibility. Whatever third parties are doing - so long as it's not infringing on you - is not relevant. Not to your class and my grades. Sorry you're one of THOSE teachers, but learning isn't a test. It's a lifelong pursuit and you can't force people to pursue what they're A) not interested in or B) deft enough to use digital memory for.
> I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were.
I think that’s reasonable. I would even consider expelling students who did this; specially in college, specially in an ethics course.
I work in a small university with local students that are aggressively average, if not a bit below that. Especially when it comes to writing a thesis, our expectations are extremely low, and the success rate is abysmal (something like 30% of the students in a year will actually defend their theses). If a student can reach something like, say, 10 people to do a usability test, we are extremely happy and will pass them with a smile on our faces.
This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic. If he had done it via Zoom I might maybe believe, but in person? Sorry, but no. I asked him what did his parents think of it, and magically they were both travelling that specific week. Then I asked him to scan and send me the signed consent forms for each participant; he promptly said "ok, coming!" then about 8h later I got a bunch of signed scans. Not sure what to do anymore, I guess he'll have his thesis.
> who recently caught 40 of the 96 students [...] cheating
That 40 is reported suspected, by one individual. The same individual claims that only 2/3 of those were admitted at time of writing.
Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. IMHO, that threshold would be too low to "prove" guilt in such a potentially serious matter (negative mark on student record, reputational damage among college social and professional networking peers, and potentially including suspension or expulsion).
Add me to the list of people who see nothing wrong with this. If he didn't encourage or incentivise his students to cheat in any way (and in fact actively warned them against it) then the idea that this was some sort of entrapment is laughable.
The only room for ambiguity I can see is the arbitrary 1% threshold. If there was a student just over the line then it's plausible that they were honest but unlucky here. Given the consequences of being tagged as a cheater both for this exam and beyond I would want much lower odds of a false positive and I'd certainly feel obliged to give a borderline case the benefit of the doubt.
But if it was clearly understood that this kind of behaviour constituted cheating and innocence is a billion to one shot? Throw the book at them. Anything less is unfair to every student who didn't cheat.
On the case presented I have to say, the professor is being unethical. Looking up questions and answers to previous exams is practically studying. The point is to know the subject matter not to read it through a specific source or in a specific format.
He should stop being lazy and vary the questions every year. If after a few years there is a body of previous exams covering the entire subject matter, then great the students "cheating" will be studying the entire course in Q/A format.
back in my day — which really wasn’t very long ago — profs used to google their exams before administering them. if they found results (like this), they would simply administer a different (new) exam.
it’s work: it might mean maintaining a pool of questions double the size of your exams ready to go at any moment, but it’s a decent way to just not have to worry about this.
the response, hopefully unsurprisingly, is that past students would circulate their exams under the table. every big frat maintained a dropbox (or megaupload, at the time) of scanned exams, with links shared only to the frat members.
i actually did study for exams. i wasn’t in a frat but one day a friend from a frat showed up to our study session with some “practice exams” for us. i learned about these scans and worked some grease to get access to these files for a good 4-5 different frats.
if doing homework is prep for the exam, then working through past exams is even better prep for the exam. having access to realistic exams was a huge leg up for me, even when the questions didn’t overlap. the best profs were aware of this and just published their previous exams on their course webpage to level the field. yeah, it’s extra work to write a new exam every year but that’s just what you do: especially if doing so encourages your students to study!
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter), it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam. You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it anyways. You're culpable.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|2 years ago|reply
Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|2 years ago|reply
https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
However this is case is clearly not entrapment.
[+] [-] CPLX|2 years ago|reply
If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I’ll get you enough to buy baby food that’s entrapment, assuming they weren’t already involved in the drugs trade and this “crime” would never have happened without the government willing it into existence.
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tombert|2 years ago|reply
During the exam (which I had to administer remotely this time) I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Bing AI, no Google Bard, and also no Googling, etc. I repeated this several times and also wrote it in bold font on the top of the test. I really didn't have any way to enforce this, but I was hoping people would be honest.
I'm pretty sure that most of the students were honest on this; the answers I got generally fine, but had grammatical mistakes and were "basically correct but had light factual errors that are common with people new to programming but aren't bad enough to count as 'wrong'". One student, however, who has submitted broken sentences and broken code the entire semester, managed to suddenly have decent writing skills, decent explanations of everything, and his code was clean and concise.
I'm about 95% sure he used ChatGPT to generate answers to the questions. I tried getting ChatGPT (and Bard and Bing AI) to give me a word-for-word copy of what he submitted, but I couldn't. It got somewhat close, but never an exact match.
Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved. It's also technically possible that he used Grammarly to make sure his writing was ok (which was technically against the rules but I wouldn't really consider cheating in a Java class), and so I just had to swallow my pride and grade the test assuming he was being honest.
It's kind of upset me all day; I have worked pretty hard trying my best to be available to students if they have questions, and I worked pretty hard to try and make sure that the final exam was a reasonable level of difficulty. I think most of my students were fine, but one bad apple is enough to really ruin my day.
[+] [-] bachmeier|2 years ago|reply
The current system worked in 1960. Not in 2023, and probably not since the late 1990s, when technology started to make our evaluation processes obsolete.
[+] [-] joefourier|2 years ago|reply
If it would be possible to take a bottom-tier CS student and turn them into a decent programmer using AI tools, the hiring landscape would be /very/ different. These tools aren’t magic, and to me it sounds like the tests are failing at measuring the students competence if they can so easily be gamed by using an AI/old fashioned googling.
Maybe the solution should be to move towards a style of exam/grading that actually measures the competence of the student in a situation closer to what a professional developer will be in, rather than an old fashioned artificial exam setting?
[+] [-] rmellow|2 years ago|reply
As an early procrastinator (rehabilitated perhaps?) I've had a history of doing very well on finals through cramming.
In your student's case it might very well be more likely they are cheating, but those unlikely but possible students who study extra hard to recover their grades for a final deserve the benefit of the doubt.
How unlikely can academic recovery get? I spent an entire semester completely lost in a second level Macroeconomics course...
... I was able to read and write chapter summaries of a semester and a half of content (about 15 chapters, corresponding to the first level and the second level courses) in a single weekend and aced the exam, with the highest marks in the class.
That was the hardest I've ever crammed in my life and I had trouble speaking in the hours that followed the study session.
I later got a recommendation letter from that prof, totally worth it.
[+] [-] cogman10|2 years ago|reply
I had one candidate that struggled MIGHTILY on a coding problem that was easy (kept running into syntax errors) but then pulled out an esoteric solution for the second problem in no time flat.
I can't prove that he was cheating but it very highly suggestive that he is.
I hate it, but I'm starting to think I have to do an AI detection question now. It's not hard, just ask someone to do something impossible. However, I don't like the fact that now I need to be "tricky". I've never believed in making coding challenges hard, I just want to see if you can write code.
[+] [-] elliotto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumtechguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
A random college class, to me, isn't the kind of thing where cheating really matters. The stakes are low, it's expected that most students will do well, and everyone gets the same degree at the end. If someone wants to sabotage their own education then fine, and if it doesn't bite them later good for them.
[+] [-] saalweachter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shinryuu|2 years ago|reply
When you're solving the same problems in real life you do have access to all those tools that you banned. Because in real life, if you manage to solve a problem it doesn't matter that much how you solved it.
Sure, if you just Google things and always solve your problems by copy pasting. Your solutions will lack depth, and at some point this will catch up to you.
My point is, cheating is primarily cheating on yourself, and it will catch up to you.
I think this is the framing you should have with regards to cheating.
[+] [-] clusterhacks|2 years ago|reply
You have to both adjust your expectations and make a significant part of your grading use an in-person one-on-one oral exam or project walkthrough.
It is a huge commitment of time - most professors I know seem to have quietly accepted cheating will be be rewarded because they don't have enough time to verify student performance.
[+] [-] kazinator|2 years ago|reply
You're swimming against the riptide. If I were teaching coding today, I'd allow, even encourage, use of AI, with some ground rules. Students using AI would have to show their work (i.e. the conversation with the machine).
The content of the prompts and in particular follow-up questions, can demonstrate competence. E.g. situations in which the student spotted that something was wrong in the generated code and made an intelligent hint to the machine to fix it.
Students should be prepared for tomorrow's world, not yesterday's.
[+] [-] i2cmaster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|2 years ago|reply
I'm old: when I went to school we weren't allowed calculators "because there'll be a situation where you need to do basic arithmetic and don't have a calculator". I occasionally laugh at this while firing up the calculator app on my phone. We'd have been better off if they'd taught us sign language rather than arithmetic.
Our education system is going to have to adjust to the new reality. Setting an essay task is now the equivalent of learning the times table - utterly redundant (unless you plan on a career writing essays or doing maths).
[+] [-] abeppu|2 years ago|reply
1. Is it _good_ to catch cheating? If these are students who are just checking some distributional requirement box, does it matter if they actually understood the material? Potentially there is harm (delayed graduation, literal costs, etc) from failing students (or having them be subject to some other discipline). Perhaps under a consequentialist framing, catching cheaters isn't good. But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters?
2. Is the method of catching cheaters relevant? If catching cheaters is good for consequentialist reasons, isn't any effective means of catching cheaters (which does not cause other harms) also good? Certainly the objection that the professor was dishonest by uploading the bad test sounds like it's from a deontological / rules-oriented view.
[+] [-] paulsutter|2 years ago|reply
As for consequences, thats up to university policy
> I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|2 years ago|reply
Most courses are either graded on a curve or the material is adjusted in difficulty to target a certain level of challenge.
When cheaters come in and destroy that curve and inject false signal into the difficulty feedback loop, the non-cheaters suffer from increased difficulty.
So yes, there is some obligation to keep the playing field fair and accurate.
Given that grades can have an impact on real-world outcomes (e.g. admission to a desired graduate program) then it’s possible that allowing cheating can have broad impacts beyond the students. Imagine if you took some 4.0GPA students under the assumption that they actually learned what they claim, then discover that they have no idea what they’re doing because they cheated the whole way.
Also, the mind boggles at the suggestion that catching cheaters is bad because they might face some consequences for their dishonesty.
[+] [-] lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|2 years ago|reply
I kinda don't get this. Doesn't this also potentially catch students who used Quizlet to study and happened to find this teacher's "poisoned" exam? It seems like there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of the 1/3rd of the students who profess their innocence are telling the truth. Was anything done to account for that, or was it assumed that use of the site is cheating?
> I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.
If one is willing to admit that they are not a forensic mathematician they can also be willing to admit that they made a mistake with their forensic mathematics. This person seems to have over-assumed a lack of mistakes in their understanding considering the certainty with which they choose to end these academic careers.
Edit:
> As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. (emphasis mine)
So they just assume that a person using the website is cheating. One might actually make flash cards based on previous exam questions/answers using said information to be certain that their flash cards are accurate. What if that person was thinking to themselves, "This doesn't sound right, but if that's what's on the test..."?
[+] [-] 1000100_1000101|2 years ago|reply
If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during the exam period.
If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what they could recall.
In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study material, these students may have actually known the material, felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.
[+] [-] LanceH|2 years ago|reply
Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over backwards to rationalize it.
In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the class and used unverified information in place of learning the material.
Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is nothing wrong with this.
Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. They were wrong.
[+] [-] DanHulton|2 years ago|reply
> My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)
If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.
[+] [-] iinnPP|2 years ago|reply
I don't think it's possible anyone legitimately studied using easily determined false information. If they did, failing the course seems appropriate anyway.
[+] [-] MengerSponge|2 years ago|reply
You want to tune your policies so that students will bring that extra test that was lost in the printer tray back to you.
[+] [-] balderdash|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contravariant|2 years ago|reply
However what I don't understand is why that even mattered.
Were the students just learning the questions and answers by heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding, it is not dishonest.
Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere? Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other.
Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently, which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or the student's?
[+] [-] polytely|2 years ago|reply
I have done 2 ethics courses during my education at a Dutch 'Hogeschool' (honestly not sure how this maps to US education wikipedia says 'Vocational university'). I did a specific design ethics course and a broader ethics course as part of a philosophy minor, and in both of them you had to write papers or apply the things you learned to a case study. There were some little tests with multiple choice, but they often had additional questions where you had to explain your reasoning.
Maybe there is a language difference here, but I would expect something more involved from a course given by a professor at a university, or is this a course for people who are in high school or something.
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
I would just ignore any problematizers who question the ethics of testing students' honesty. I think those people are silly and should rightly be ignored, except to mock them. But that's probably why I'm not a philosopher.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|2 years ago|reply
Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical.
Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two situations are ever identical.
I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of approval.
Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class, and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100 students.
[+] [-] Tangurena2|2 years ago|reply
If I were in this professor's case, I'd just mark the answers wrong, and in the future upload more wrong answers. The students who use these sorts of online dumps aren't the ones who study and will beg at the end of the semester for some sort of extra-credit. If it were necessary, perhaps have a second gradebook where the number of "exactly the same wrong answer as the bait" were kept.
[+] [-] Aunche|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|2 years ago|reply
To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do that.
[+] [-] sanderjd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|2 years ago|reply
Sort of tangential, but I have always thought teachers/professors who put "trick" questions on tests to be sort of assholes. It's fine if it's an extra credit thing and isn't going to take away from the final grade, but when you write a question that literally everyone in the class gets wrong, I think that says a lot more about your communication or teaching ability than the students.
[+] [-] catapart|2 years ago|reply
Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But, I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he caught the obvious cheaters, right?
[+] [-] catapart|2 years ago|reply
Because, if it's the former: great job, Ranger Rick. You definitely used a method that will root out cheaters and give them some (small/limited) incentive not to cheat anymore.
But, if it's the latter, you've failed your students in every respect. It's not even a clean example of the ethics of cheating, because you've tipped the scales in ways that affect multiple variables, instead of just one.
Neither of which is ethical or unethical in the vacuums of consideration that any subject remains neutral in. But if the context is that it's a philosophy class, I would expect the teacher teach me philosophical ethics and let the chaff fall where it may, rather than try to "prove" some nebulous idea of what it means to "know" something, and why one method of being able to 'prove' it is inferior to some other method. Put simply: I'm in this class to learn. If you're giving me the information and then I pass the test, that's your entire responsibility. Whatever third parties are doing - so long as it's not infringing on you - is not relevant. Not to your class and my grades. Sorry you're one of THOSE teachers, but learning isn't a test. It's a lifelong pursuit and you can't force people to pursue what they're A) not interested in or B) deft enough to use digital memory for.
[+] [-] hartator|2 years ago|reply
I think that’s reasonable. I would even consider expelling students who did this; specially in college, specially in an ethics course.
[+] [-] low_tech_love|2 years ago|reply
This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic. If he had done it via Zoom I might maybe believe, but in person? Sorry, but no. I asked him what did his parents think of it, and magically they were both travelling that specific week. Then I asked him to scan and send me the signed consent forms for each participant; he promptly said "ok, coming!" then about 8h later I got a bunch of signed scans. Not sure what to do anymore, I guess he'll have his thesis.
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
That 40 is reported suspected, by one individual. The same individual claims that only 2/3 of those were admitted at time of writing.
Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. IMHO, that threshold would be too low to "prove" guilt in such a potentially serious matter (negative mark on student record, reputational damage among college social and professional networking peers, and potentially including suspension or expulsion).
[+] [-] Silhouette|2 years ago|reply
The only room for ambiguity I can see is the arbitrary 1% threshold. If there was a student just over the line then it's plausible that they were honest but unlucky here. Given the consequences of being tagged as a cheater both for this exam and beyond I would want much lower odds of a false positive and I'd certainly feel obliged to give a borderline case the benefit of the doubt.
But if it was clearly understood that this kind of behaviour constituted cheating and innocence is a billion to one shot? Throw the book at them. Anything less is unfair to every student who didn't cheat.
[+] [-] WesolyKubeczek|2 years ago|reply
Cannot find for the life of me what could be possibly unethical about this. If anything, it’s very, very educational.
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|2 years ago|reply
He should stop being lazy and vary the questions every year. If after a few years there is a body of previous exams covering the entire subject matter, then great the students "cheating" will be studying the entire course in Q/A format.
[+] [-] colinsane|2 years ago|reply
it’s work: it might mean maintaining a pool of questions double the size of your exams ready to go at any moment, but it’s a decent way to just not have to worry about this.
the response, hopefully unsurprisingly, is that past students would circulate their exams under the table. every big frat maintained a dropbox (or megaupload, at the time) of scanned exams, with links shared only to the frat members.
i actually did study for exams. i wasn’t in a frat but one day a friend from a frat showed up to our study session with some “practice exams” for us. i learned about these scans and worked some grease to get access to these files for a good 4-5 different frats.
if doing homework is prep for the exam, then working through past exams is even better prep for the exam. having access to realistic exams was a huge leg up for me, even when the questions didn’t overlap. the best profs were aware of this and just published their previous exams on their course webpage to level the field. yeah, it’s extra work to write a new exam every year but that’s just what you do: especially if doing so encourages your students to study!