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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 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.