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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: 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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