'There's a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI To Cheat' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0176746225
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/03/16/2119235/theres-a-good-chance-your-kid-uses-ai-to-cheat
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/there-s-a-good-chance-your-kid-uses-ai-to-cheat/ar-AA1B04d6
>
>> Wall Street Journal
> K-12 education reporter Matt Barnum has a heads-up for parents: [2]There's a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat . Barnum writes:
>
> "A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn't want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year. Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old told The Wall Street Journal with her parent's permission, shows how generative AI has rooted in America's education system, allowing a generation of students to outsource their schoolwork to software with access to the world's knowledge. [...] The New Jersey student told the Journal why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult. She wanted a better grade. A few times, she procrastinated and ran out of time to complete assignments. The student turned to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, to help spawn ideas and review concepts, which many teachers allow. More often, though, AI completed her work. Gemini solved math homework problems, she said, and aced a take-home test. ChatGPT did calculations for a science lab. It produced a tricky section of a history term paper, which she rewrote to avoid detection. The student was caught only once."
>
> Not surprisingly, AI companies play up the idea that AI will radically improve learning, while educators are more skeptical. "This is a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for," said Marc Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~theodp
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/there-s-a-good-chance-your-kid-uses-ai-to-cheat/ar-AA1B04d6
This is largely irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
They still have to learn the material to pass the tests. The only thing this does is make homework trivial and we have reams and reams of studies that show homework is less than worthless.
Basically we are using schools to decide who gets to have a decent life and who doesn't because we don't want to give more than about 20% of the population a decent life. That's for a wide variety of terrible reasons.
So we overwhelmed kids with homework to see which ones will break. It's not a good system but it is a system.
There was a sci-fi show a while back about a world where if the kids didn't get good enough grades they were euthanized. Honestly with how we treat the bottom 80 that might be less cruel.
Re: (Score:2)
> They still have to learn the material to pass the tests. The only thing this does is make homework trivial ...
From TFS:
> Gemini solved math homework problems, she said, and aced a take-home test.
> ChatGPT ... produced a tricky section of a history term paper, ...
Re: (Score:2)
Take home tests are as dumb as homework.
A proper test is administered at school with someone monitoring to make sure the kids don't cheat.
Ideally we wouldn't even do that at the high school and college levels. All testing should be done by a separate group than those who do the educating, so that there is no incentive nor option to inflate grades under a misguided attempt at leaving no child behind.
Grades that do not objectively measure competence are worthless.
Re: This is largely irrelevant (Score:2)
You understand that kids are graduating without mastering basic math/reading, right? And this is before ChatGPT.
One girl is suing her school district because while she graduated with honors and got a scholarship to state college, she can't read her diploma and her learning disabilities (dyslexia, for one) wasn't diagnosed until the final month of her senior year.
[1]https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/0... [cnn.com]
A couple years ago Baltimore was in the news for having 13 high schools that had the distinction of not having one
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/27/us/connecticut-aleysha-ortiz-illiterate-lawsuit-cec
Re: (Score:2)
> There was a sci-fi show a while back about a world where if the kids didn't get good enough grades they were euthanized.
I imagine even then there were rich kids who didn't really learn anything, yet still managed to graduate anyway ... and become President.
(Wondering... In the show, could they be euthanized *after* graduating? Asking for a *bunch* of friends. :-) )
Re: This is largely irrelevant (Score:1)
Why would they ever need to be smart? We've had a number of Presidents that are obviously well down the path of dementia but get elected anyway cause it's not the other guy. Reagan and Biden were both great, recent examples of that.
Re: (Score:3)
> They still have to learn the material to pass the tests. The only thing this does is make homework trivial and we have reams and reams of studies that show homework is less than worthless.
That depends on the purpose of the homework. In my engineering class, homework counts as 10% of the grade. As I tell the students, "I make the homework worth just enough points to make it worth your while to turn it in."
I acknowledge on the first day of class that it is trivially easy to cheat on the homework, but if the
Re: (Score:2)
You should really look inward and figure out why you hold this belief given the complete lack of any actual data to back it up. You are forming synthesis with a propaganda facade instead of with reality.
AI (Score:2)
If all you are good for is copying and pasting AI answers, why do I need you?
Kinda reminds me of Office Space:
"I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Re: (Score:2)
The AI that we have now aren't actually good enough to replace knowledge workers. At best they can just save some time, but only if their output is reviewed by said knowledge workers.
So, those who rely on AI will not succeed as knowledge workers in the working world. Actual competence will be a differentiating factor, rather than what grades one got.
In for a surprise (Score:3)
> why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult.
Wait until she gets a job ...
It's time to change (Score:2)
Nothing anyone does is going to put the genie of ubiquitous and readily available information and reasoning back in the bottle. It's time to re-think what the purpose of education is, and what we want to accomplish from it.
I really don't care that a student can regurgitate the date of a US Civil War battle. I do care that they can place the civil war after the founding of the US and before WWI, and know what the Emancipation Proclamation was and about when it occurred, and what the Cold War was and about
My teacher wife has seen this (Score:2)
But cheating is nothing new, or parents doing papers for kids. She had to move to pen-and-paper for tests starting last year. Evidently the kids won't study the material, but will find time to learn to beat whatever blocks and such the schools try to apply to their Chromebooks so they can cheat.
She has also seen teachers using AI to create lessons. So now we have an AI cycle with human spectators if you don't break it with pen-and-paper somewhere... the AI-sourced lesson is tested with an AI-assisted che
AI is for advertising (Score:1)
From economist Satyajit Das - all of "tech" of the last 20 years has been about advertising. All the big, profitable San Francisco companies are advertising companies. It has not provided anything substantial. Look at Mark Zuckerberg, could there be a less inspiring "tech" billionaire. Made nothing, furthered nothing, contributed nothing.
Cheating with AI is just plain wrong ... (Score:2)
Cheating with AI is just plain wrong. Kids nowadays are doing things all wrong. They should return to cheating the way their parents did it, by getting help from Cliff Notes, past tests/papers/projects, crib sheets, notes stored in calculators, hand signals, friends, family, the free-enterprise market of "study aids", etc.
It happened with Wikipedia 20 years ago (Score:1)
Just firewall AI sources at school computers and lay off the chromebooks and go back to pen and paper. Many governments are debating banning phones in schools as well, forcing students to learn offline. Both Lazy teachers and Lazy students, today's millennial teachers got their degrees from reading wikislop so can't complain about AI slop.
Re: (Score:3)
You know if you're going to do an old man yelling at cloud troll post complaining about AI slop you could at least take the time to write a troll post that doesn't read like AI slop... Just saying...
Re: (Score:2)
When I was in school, I think it was expected to look things up an an Encyclopedia, or other sources, and distill the information, maybe add in an opinion or two, and I don't think Wikipedia is substantively different than an Encyclopedia, except on steroids. That seems like part of the learning process. Typing your homework into an AI and copying the answers, seems ... well not much of a learning process.
Re: It happened with Wikipedia 20 years ago (Score:2)
You equate "typing your homework into AI" with "having AI do your homework", they are not the same.
Using AI as a "spellchecker on steroids" is fine, feeding AI your assignment and having it do the homework, not so much.
In the end, it's the students that are depriving themselves of the education they need.
I'm old enough to remember when using a calculator in math class was a hot topic - yes, in the future everyone will have a calculator, but the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide without a calcula
Re: It happened with Wikipedia 20 years ago (Score:2)
> Wikipedia is substantively different than an Encyclopedia, except on steroids
Interpreting it as such is a terrible idea. In many cases, Wikipedia has outright misinformation. Shit that's just incredibly bad. Take this for example:
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
There is not and never was a win64 api. Yet there's an entire paragraph written about it on wikipedia. What's funny about it is the number of people who go around referencing it, even here, and when I ask WTF they're talking about, it eventually comes out that they're wikipedia educated and they really don't know what the fu
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. All that happened with Wikipedia is a bunch of teachers told students to not cite it as a source. Just like you don't cite an encyclopedia as a source. Which is perfectly fine since there are citations which can be cited instead.
Starting with encyclopedias was always a good way to start - you get a brief overview, and the sources listed after the article give you a starting point for your research. The only thing teachers didn't want you to do was cite Wikipedia itself, or copy and paste it.
Usin
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia is an excellent source of information except with controversial topics where the editorial bias is subject to change, unlike other sources whose bias are generally predictable and consistent. Understand that limitation and it is still quite useful for the vast majority of knowledge that is not controversial.