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"Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating - and experts says these are tip of the iceberg"

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"Chess has enjoyed a huge boom in internet play this year as in-person events have moved online and people stuck at home have sought new hobbies. But with that has come a significant new problem: a rise in the use of powerful chess calculators to cheat on a scale reminiscent of the scandals that have dogged cycling and athletics. One leading 'chess detective' said that the pandemic was "without doubt creating a crisis"."

"Despite all the industry hype and genuine advances, generative AI models are still prone to odd, inexplicable, and downright worrisome quirks. There's also a growing body of research suggesting that the overall performance of many large language models (LLMs) may degrade over time. According to recent evidence, the industry's newer reasoning models may already possess the ability to manipulate and circumvent their human programmers' goals. Some AI will even attempt to cheat their way out of losing in games of chess. This poor sportsmanship is documented in a preprint study from Palisade Research, an organization focused on risk assessments of emerging AI systems."

"I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated"

"Big Chinese tech companies appear to have turned off some AI functions to prevent cheating during the country's highly competitive university entrance exams. More than 13.3 million students are sitting the four-day gaokao exams, which began on Saturday and determine if and where students can secure a limited place at university. This year, students hoping to get some assistance from increasingly advanced AI tools have been stymied."

""Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it's to educate them," he says. "You are assuming that students are trying to cheat-rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn." He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring."

""As with all technology, there are caveats around making sure that it is used responsibly and not as a licence to cheat, but none of that is insurmountable," he said. In contrast, New York City schools have already banned the use of ChatGPT on all devices and networks because of concerns it will encourage plagiarism. Dr Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist working at Imperial College London, best known for his research into academic integrity, contract cheating and plagiarism, said it was in many ways a game changer. He said: "It's certainly a major turning point in education where universities have to make big changes."

"However, executives at anti-cheating software maker Turnitin say they've cracked the code. The company, which works with thousands of universities and high schools to help teachers identify plagiarism, said it plans to roll out a service this year that can accurately tell whether ChatGPT has done a student's assignment for them. "

"If students want a verified certificate for their online course, they can pay a fee of $30-90 (approximately £17-54) for the Signature Track service. They will be asked to submit a webcam photo and identification card to check their identity. "

"And so I think this is a crisis. I think the biggest part of the crisis is for teachers. A lot of people suggest teachers go back to Blue Book exams, right? At least then we can make sure that the student is really doing their work. But that's just a huge burden on teachers now to completely reorganize the entire way that they administer education. I couldn't agree more. Kevin Roose of the New York Times recently said, "if students can cheat with ChatGPT then you need to rethink your teaching." Well, I've been working in education for almost two decades, that's exactly what people said when smartphones came around. And now, 10 years later, we've come around to just banning them in school, or trying to anyway. And I wonder if we're going to need to wait a decade before reaching that conclusion in education."

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"Pearson is apparently monitoring social media, to detect signs of cheating during exams. That's insanely creepy, and a horrible violation. "And for those who think "Well, its Twitter, its public", remember this: So is walking down the street. But is it OK for the government to monitor us with street surveillance cameras and send us fines for not crossing with the crosswalk?" via Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here. "

"It's also important to note that codes are intentionally accessible online. Looking up codes is a typical for programmers, and isn't considered foul play. However, there's a difference between using a publicly available code as assistance in solving a problem and using it as the solution to a problem."

"Raza wasn't the only one in her class who felt concerned about new levels of surveillance. Another student in the class, who did not want to be named, said that in addition to privacy worries, they were concerned that they didn't even have enough RAM to run the Proctorio software. Worse, the tool's facial detection algorithm seemed to struggle to recognize them, so they needed to sit in the full light of the window to better expose the contours of their face, in their view an indication that the system might be biased. "

"There's a certain irony that, in fields outside of computer science, plagiarism is a sign that you didn't understand the question. Within computer science, the opposite is true. Not only have you found an acceptable solution, you've understood it enough to use it within the parameters of your own project."

"The firm's software uses machine learning (ML), an advanced form of artificial intelligence, to detect patterns in user behaviour that could indicate attempts to cheat. Its technology can also automatically mark multiple-choice answers and mathematics exams. In addition, it checks each exam-sitter's identity using the webcam, to ensure that no-one else is sitting the test for them. The Better Examinations program also temporarily restricts access to the internet, or certain websites and applications on each person's computer. "

"Universities don't merely face essays or assignments entirely generated by algorithms: they must also adjudicate a myriad of more subtle problems. For instance, AI-powered word processors habitually suggest alternatives to our ungrammatical phrases. But if software can algorithmically rewrite a student's sentence, why shouldn't it do the same with a paragraph - and if a paragraph, why not a page? At what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?"