Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating.

The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating.

As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

The person above you teaches higher ed, and yet cannot articulate what you just did. Cheating isn't the problem, the system is.

Can't or didn't? I had a different message to convey. You can't understand that. Or perhaps, you didn't understand that. Can't or didn't?

I reiterate:

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

I can understand that because you are not the first college professor I've interacted with. You had one chance to say something and yet you left it as an afterthought. That is the proof of your bias as a professional academic. Instead you have made an excuse that somehow your bias is inscrutable and are covering it up with more pedantry. The neoliberalization of academia extends to the attitudes of its people who reproduce its culture and clearly you are behaving consistently with that. Bear in mind, as a professor or instructor you are much more likely to hold these unchallenged biases because people like myself who have been through the process of advanced academia at elite Western universities yet come to reject the system are not likely to be interacting with you within the system any more, so you are literally not receiving certain information.

And rather than reiterate, I shall elaborate on my original remark: you had stated "students are not used to doing the necessary work". You want a "system that prevents cheating" which is again full of backwards presuppositions and implicitly value laden dependency on a narrow-minded perspective. What you don't realize is how loaded such statements are, you had zero problem making those utterances. You might as well be a 60 year old centrist Boomer to say something like that so casually. It is completely oblivious to contemporary social problems. You surely have seen how racists and misogynists behave when they unwittingly say things that reveal their casual bigotry? So, I can know your mind, which is that of a typical professoriate who doesn't stay in their lane when their sociology, education, and related departments actually have something to truthful to offer in understanding this issue--the neoliberalizatiom of academia--while you are just talking out your prejudiced ass.

Finally, that other commenter said it a lot better than you. That's why I was replying to them and not you.