Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I don't understand most of the comments here.

I couldn't cheat in high school because we couldn't use our phones during class. Not for worksheets nor quizzes and especially not exams whether they be multiple choice, oral, or essays.

Yet the top threads here act like we need a whole refactor of schooling, many people suggesting we rely on viva voce exams and proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a simple classroom scantron test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones?

Did your high school not have any kind of summative homework?

In many places, particularly in the U.S., there are few invigilated exams, and quite a lot of your overall grade will be comprised of coursework. This, combined with the inexorable advance of digitalisation of education has led to where we are now.

Certainly once you get to university level, there are projects which simply take too long to be done in the classroom, such as a dissertation or final report. These projects have always been vulnerable to commissioning rather than plagiarism, and you’d be appalled to realise how common it actually is even in higher prestige places. LLMs have simply lowered that bar to make it even more common.

This is a genuine problem, and people are more sophisticated cheaters than you might initially think.

I've seen hundred of college students successfully cheat with mobile phones in class.

>many people suggesting we rely on... proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a... test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones?

That's what proctoring is.

As a TA, I've seen graduate students succeed with answers blatantly copied from the internet (i.e. screenshots of the answer, rote copied answers, etc), and then I was asked to make a calculation to make sure the points reduction would not impact their final grade.

This was before generative AI became so commonplace, and I got the impression this is super common place. It was a really disillusioning moment for me.

Seeing my fellow grad students cheat, then brag in the public student lounge to multiple people about having the highest score on the exam by “oh I didn’t even understand that question I just copied the answer key and I still got the highest score”, broke something in me.

Our institutions are failing us, and I have never been more disillusioned.

People would also type in their notes into their graphing calculator or even slip something up their sleeve. Phones aren't the only way to cheat, they are arguably harder than other old fashioned ways to use secretly.