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These Students Figured Out Their Tests Were Graded By Ai — And The Easy Way To Cheat:
On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test — it was his real grade.
[...] At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers.
Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question.
[...] Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test.
Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, but the company's online help center suggests this may be by design. According to the website, answers to certain questions receive 0% if they include no keywords, and 100% if they include at least one. Other questions earn a certain percentage based on the number of keywords included.
[...] Edgenuity offers over 300 online classes for middle and high school students[...].
Of course, short-answer questions aren't the only factor that impacts Edgenuity grades — Lazare's classes require other formats, including multiple-choice questions and single-word inputs. A developer familiar with the platform estimated that short answers make up less than five percent of Edgenuity's course content, and many of the eight students The Verge spoke to for this story confirmed that such tasks were a minority of their work. Still, the tactic has certainly impacted Lazare's class performance — he's now getting 100s on every assignment.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:17PM (2 children)
My city banned Edgenuity, because it's teachers (such as this AI) are not licensed in this state.
Good on them. Ban Google, too, because they have no respect for student privacy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:10PM (1 child)
Google is deeply respectful of a student's privacy. So much so that Google strives to vacuum up and protect every last scrap of a student's privacy.
I wonder if a specialized GPT-3 could help fill out short form, or even long form essay answers? And as a browser extension.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:07PM
I don't think a specialized GPT-3 is even remotely necessary.
Hell, the most common GPT-2 training could probably write better essays for a given prompt that I could have when I was in middle school. I was probably an adult before I wrote a single goddamn thing that I would qualify as "persuasive writing". Part of that being that 5 paragraphs essays of the form thesis, 3 supporting points, conclusion are a terrible way to frame arguments. It tends to dodge what the actual point of contention is, restate things that have been said a billion times before, and frame certainty as more persuasive than inquisitiveness.
Being taught there is a "right" way to do open-ended, subjective things is one of the education system's biggest poison pills.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:21PM (5 children)
Insight, critical thinking, and how to get the most out of computer software.
Trouble is they're supposed to be teaching history.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:12PM (4 children)
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Usually in summer school, or the following semester.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:57PM
That's just warped - but I'll give you a +1 funny.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 03 2020, @09:17PM (2 children)
My HS history teachers wouldn't give higher than a D, no matter how the essay was written - I believe they also graded papers in one second or less.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday September 03 2020, @10:53PM (1 child)
The obvious comeback being that, outside of English class, how well-written your essay is takes a distant back seat to whether it demonstrates a solid understanding of the topic in question. Or at least it should.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @01:21AM
This particular AP history class was about a bell curve, and once you had been placed on it- your position did not vary. FWIW, I aced the computer scored tests, so I could at least multiple choice better than the A-curve paper writers.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:43PM (3 children)
When I was young, I couldn't wait for the future we were promised in hopeful Sci-Fi stories.
When I was barely into adulthood, I lamented that we didn't appear to be any closer to the future.
Now I just see stories like this and cry for the past.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:11PM (2 children)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia [merriam-webster.com]
Should have read better books. I've recently read multiple Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels. They suck at spell check and grammar. I'm not sure who they're paying to edit the books, but they do a poor job.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:20PM
They're edited by an AI (maybe the same one in the TFA?). The AI looked for key letters so spelling and grammar are no longer important.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:37PM
Why attribute incompetence when ingenuity fits ?. :)
Distopia, the distant utopia.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:27PM (6 children)
Applying some silly algorithm over large load of data isn't how intelligence works. So we shouldn't use term "artificial intelligence" for technologies like this. This insults all sapient beings. A more correct term would be "bruteforce computing".
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)
I like the term "scam" for this particular one
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:14PM
Yeah, just another case of marketing hype. Or perhaps journalistic dramatization. Abuse a term into a meaningless buzzword. Real AI kicks butt against grandmaster chess players at chess. Sounds like this sad excuse for AI can't even match ELIZA's ability to parse sentences.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday September 03 2020, @07:41PM
Seems more like a combination of "con-artist technology marketing" implemented via "hash table lookup".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @09:46PM
"Applied statistical modelling"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @12:50PM
Years ago when I took a journalism class, the teacher was fond of warning us "not to allow Bill Gates to correct our work." And there was a good reason for that, computers at the time did a shit job of checking grammar.
They're still bad at it, but they've gotten a lot better. AI like this is something that should speed things up and lead to additional reliability, but we're nowhere near the point where human oversight isn't needed. At bare minimum there should be a human going through the grades and deciding whether or not the points being provided are appropriate to the goals of the exam.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @04:24PM
I think the word we are all actually looking for with stuff like the fancy AI freeform short answer checker is "regex."
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:03PM (1 child)
Looking forwards to them driving my car...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:12PM
mine too, straight into a river.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:10PM (9 children)
We've all been there, no matter how old we are. My wife brags about her ability to figure out what teachers expected when she was in school, then giving the expected answers. In fact, she and her sisters reminisce about how easy it was to manipulate some of their teachers.
In this case, the student is merely manipulating a poorly programmed "teacher". This "teacher" cues on keywords, so feed it keywords. That's not cheating, IMHO.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:17PM
Yeah, but "Teachers use shitty grading metric" doesn't contain enough buzzwords to be a headline.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:30PM (2 children)
My wife developed a template for all of her Humanities essays at University, including structure, layout of arguments, smart sounding phrasing etc. It also included standard paragraph opening lines and conclusions with little [insert here] markers for the appropriate spots. She would then take the template and just plug in the key theme, argument, quote etc into her template and consistently score high marks.
One day she accidentally submitted her template instead of the actual essay for one class. The teacher was really angry at first, thinking that my wife believed all of the subjects were just paint-by-numbers (which she kind of did). He did eventually concede that she had the right answers and a good essay structure though, but my wife was careful to avoid using the template for the rest of that particular class.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday September 04 2020, @02:14AM
I really like that idea although I'd worry if all the essays contained some duplicate phrases that the teacher might notice them anyway. You can get tools that automatically vary the wording of a text though so it wouldn't be too hard to refine the technique.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Osamabobama on Friday September 04 2020, @08:07PM
That process just needs one more step: a final script to check for the existence of field markers. Maybe the template could feature a distinctive text color that is only changed by the final script if it passes inspection.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @12:53PM (1 child)
Giving the teachers what they ask for is more or less what the K-12 education is about. The teachers are supposed to be asking for things that are in alignment with the state standards and the state standards are supposed to be in alignment with what the students need for college or whatever comes next.
In a formal academic environment that's to be expected. Outside of that environment, that kind of thinking leads to not learning a damn thing from experience, which is why those A students are so often utterly useless at anything else.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @01:45PM
Other aspect of schooling beyond regurgitation: https://www.life-enthusiast.com/articles/children-seven-lesson-schoolteacher/ [life-enthusiast.com]
"Look again at the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance – all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution’s original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @03:50PM (2 children)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/professor-jessica-krug-admits-she-lied-about-being-black-george-washington-university/ [cbsnews.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 04 2020, @06:21PM (1 child)
Of course it is cheating. Dishonestly gaming the system for financial gain is cheating. I said the same when that other little heifer, Rachel Dolezal, was exposed a couple years back. Is there a fitting punishment for these women? No, not really. Nothing that Western society could approve of, anyway.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday September 04 2020, @08:11PM
How dare you call her a heifer! That woman has children.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:49PM (4 children)
Freshman year of HS. Science teacher gets transferred. Gym teacher ends up covering science course. Gym teacher grades based on *verbatim* answer. No paraphrasing allowed. There was some general animosity between me and that teacher for other reasons--just personality conflicts I guess. The bad mark culminated in a parent-teacher conference. My grade was fixed, but of course that does nothing to fix the animosity. Gutted out freshman year in that class... I think I got a B or something. This was in Fairfax County, VA too--considered to be one of the best public school systems at the time. I shudder to think of what *bad* public schools systems were like.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @09:50PM (3 children)
> I shudder to think of what *bad* public schools systems were like.
Jr. high and HS in South East San Diego.
Jr. high had 10 foot tall chain link fence topped with razor wire. In the "war" with the other jr. high kids (11-13yr olds; although there was one kid, "Binky" who I swear was in his 20s-- dressed like a pimp with a $100 bill in his hat band) from my school brought guns, knives and teargas-- one guy showed up with a sword. Didn't learn much there except how not to get noticed.
High school had a sniper shoot our basketball team while they were practicing, some guy dragged from a rope tied to the rear bumper of a car around the student parking lot, all kinds of shit went down there. One of our two math teachers was a drug dealer, and was caught almost 10 years after I graduated. One was suffering dementia, and would suddenly get a confused look on his face as he stood before the class which was our cue to leave since he had no idea where he was. Almost 10 years later, I ran into a sociable girl that was also in my graduating class, and she named off the 25 folks I thought were most likely to escape, but none of them made it to university. I was homeless in high school, but apparently, I was the only one who made it to university. Our valedictorian was a single mother 8 months after graduating HS.
We didn't have metal detectors and searches at school, so there are worse than mine too.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday September 04 2020, @10:21AM
This list of examples from a single guy sounds utterly ridiculous, but it isn't. This is how bad some schools are these days.
The writer was AC, but I'll sign my name here to support that what it is said is actually correct.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOT3BvhjXcA [youtube.com]
Also: https://inallthings.org/why-is-school-like-a-prison/ [inallthings.org]
And in general: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758 [archive.org]
One major perspective problem in the USA is that people confuse schooling with education. It's true that sometimes education happens in school, but that is not the main thing schools are about. Congrats on obviously getting an education for yourself despite school.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday September 04 2020, @02:27PM
"Public Schools Look Like Prisons For A Reason!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D0tbRUtB7A [youtube.com]
"Prison vs. School"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTmn_-wuWjg [youtube.com]
Also: https://themindunleashed.com/2016/05/public-school-or-prison-here-are-10-ways-its-hard-to-tell.html [themindunleashed.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system [wikipedia.org]
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john-taylor-gatto/the-prussian-connection/ [lewrockwell.com]
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the “Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte — one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that “work makes free,” and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. ..."
Thinking on what you wrote about East San Diego, not that I would wish that on anyone, but maybe ironically you got a better "education" in some aspects of life through learning how to survive there through independent thinking than many kids get in a more typical "good" school?
Also tangentially related: "The Prisoner":
https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner [archive.org]
From "The Chimes of Big Ben" episode:
Number 6 (Prisoner) to Number 2 (Warden): You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
Warden: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am definitely an optimist. That's why it doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village.
Prisoner: It's run by one side or the other.
Warden: Oh, certainly. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is in fact an international community, a blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other realize they are looking into a mirror, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
Prisoner: The whole earth as the Village?
Warden: That is my hope. What's yours?
Prisoner: I'd like to be the first man on the moon.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson [wikipedia.org]
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
But a caveat from Manuel De Landa: http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm [netbase.org]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday September 03 2020, @11:44PM
If this is a real school (not a MOOC), then teachers (or more accurately their management) are cheating students of teaching time.
Is it any wonder they respond how they're taught?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Friday September 04 2020, @04:13AM (1 child)
If that had happened to me in the 7th grade, my parents wouldn't have helped me cheat, they would've been down at the school admin office the next morning demanding to know why the teacher wasn't doing his/her job and what was going to be done about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @09:00AM
Yeah, but your parents would have still been raised with expectations of humanity [wikipedia.org] in our social structures. Nowadays, anything resembling that is considered quaint and maladjusted.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by morane on Friday September 04 2020, @06:24PM
When AI is actually just some regex...