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from the these-are-our-future-leaders dept.
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, 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."