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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 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.
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(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.
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