Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

September 3, 2020 05:28 pm

These Students Figured Out Their Tests Were Graded by AI -- and the Easy Way To Cheat

Monica Chin, reporting for The Verge: 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. "He was like, I'm gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this," said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. "He was totally dejected." 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. A teacher couldn't have read his response in that time, Simmons knew -- her son was being graded by an algorithm. Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity's AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students' answers. And she decided to game it. 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. "The questions are things like... 'What was the advantage of Constantinople's location for the power of the Byzantine empire,'" Simmons says. "So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in." "I wanted to game it because I felt like it was an easy way to get a good grade," Lazare told The Verge. He usually digs the keywords out of the article or video the question is based on. 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.

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot