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posted by martyb on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:13PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday September 03 2020, @10:53PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday September 03 2020, @10:53PM (#1046098)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 04 2020, @01:21AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 04 2020, @01:21AM (#1046146)

    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.

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