How College Students Are Outsmarting Campus Efforts to Stop AI-Assisted Cheating

The useful part

Last semester, a friend of his used an AI coding tool to build a bot that completes his homework. Like a struggling student, the bot moves slowly, leaving a professor checking time stamps none the wiser. Princeton and Oberlin — institutions that have long prided themselves on faith in undergraduates' morality — are ending the tradition of unsupervised exams.

How it works

• To evade detection, Will worked back through paragraphs, sentence by sentence, rewriting each line.
• He delegated it to Codex, OpenAI's autonomous coding agent, and enhanced the model with Exa, a plug-in upgrading its web-search capabilities.
• What struck me, listening to Will and Theo, is how time-consuming cheating seems.
• Instead of doing their own work, students spend much of their late nights undoing what the models produce.
• Max Spero, CEO of Pangram Labs — one of the top firms building LLM-writing detectors — believes that if detection tech improves enough, following the rules will become simpler than breaking them.

What to take from it

"If the only way you're trying to discourage cheating is by saying 'Well, I have a detector,' then you're not going to succeed." He walked me through the system he'd devised. AI, Carr thinks, is not "a technical problem that has a technical fix." As long as students want to dupe their professors, they'll always out-engineer the tools built to stop them. Students reach for AI, he believes, "because it's so easy and accessible." If passing off a model's writing as your own gets harder, students will feel it's "relatively easier to just do the work themselves." In the meantime, many schools have turned to surveillance.

Example or evidence

• Just a year before Jared's friend pitted an LLM against WebAssign, agentic coding tools couldn't yet reverse-engineer the weaknesses in professors' grading platforms, much less build bespoke software to...
• If you whipped out your phone during a quiz, accessing a model on the building's Wi-Fi, you will likely be busted.
• Jared, Theo, and Will don't seem to think many of their classes do — and more surveillance probably won't change their minds.
• Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection giant, campuses paid an additional fee for a tool that scans essays for AI.

Details worth keeping

Melanie Lambrick At New York University, Introductory Calculus students complete their homework on WebAssign, a platform that promises to make cheating "far more difficult" than using "traditional paper and pen." But Jared, a sophomore majoring in economics, hasn't found it especially hard to beat the system. He is not sure how many classmates use similar techniques. Columbia University's Teachers College recommends educators use Draftback, a Chrome extension that lets professors replay a Google doc's entire revision history.

Related coverage

• Futurism: Have they considered simply using their time to do the work instead?
• Businessinsider: Steve Hanke, who's been teaching at Johns Hopkins for nearly 60 years, said it's "blatant when a student submission has been."
• Gizmodo: The days when cheating students were handing in bespoke products written by the greatest artisans in the cheating industry are clearly over.