Colleges Still Can't Solve AI Cheating as Detectors Split Faculty
A wave of Turnitin false positives and hidden-prompt tricks has professors abandoning writing assignments even as a newer detector, Pangram, gains ground.
What to know
- Turnitin's AI detector, used by about 1,400 North American colleges, misses roughly 15 percent of AI-written text while keeping false positives under 1 percent — a tradeoff that still wrongly flags real students at scale.
- An MIT working group report has urged against relying on AI detectors at all, warning they erode trust between instructors and students, even as a newer tool, Pangram, is being called more accurate.
- Students are adapting faster than the countermeasures: hidden 'trap' prompts that once caught AI use are being stripped out, pushing some professors toward abandoning writing assignments entirely.
- The conflict remains unresolved: colleges have no institutional consensus on whether, or how, to use AI detection.
Tactics like hidden trap-prompts in assignments are unfair or legally risky teaching practices, not a real fix.
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“This is a bad idea, if a teacher tried to force this stuff on me the school compliance department would get a very angry letter from my ADA lawyer. Then the teacher would be forced to stop, or be fired. Throwing curve balls at students in…”
FCCRFP · Reddit ↗
Real solutions require reinvesting in labor-intensive methods like human grading rather than automated detection.
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“Requires human graders. Like all things optimized to run as lean as possible. Going back to simpler proven methods requires investing in labor.”
RickSt3r · Reddit ↗
Optimistic takes about AI's eventual benefits gloss over its documented harm to literacy and critical thinking.
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“this is low effort as fuck and you make zero attempt to explain what mechanism this would be, how it would work, how it would address the things that AI is objectively making worse: literacy, critical thinking, philosophy.”
Timely-Ladder4911 · Reddit ↗
The academic labor crisis (e.g., grad student pay and unionization) is a related structural issue behind the strain.
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“Unionization amongst graduate students has grown pretty quickly in the United States in recent years... More than a third (38%) of graduate student workers are now in a union. There are clearly many grad students who aren't happy with the…”
KAugsburger · Reddit ↗
“comically bad”
Timothy Paustian, Biology professor, UW-Madison · The Atlantic ↗ · Sep 20
Timothy Paustian Biology professor, University of Wisconsin–MadisonMarc Watkins Lecturer, University of Mississippi, studies AI in educationAnnie Chechitelli Chief product officer, TurnitinMIT working group Author of an influential report on AI in educationPangram AI-detection tool maker
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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Story spreads via Techmeme, Reddit and Mastodon prompting debate
The Atlantic article was shared and gift-linked across Techmeme, Mastodon, and Reddit, generating discussion about detector reliability, teaching tactics, and underlying academic labor conditions.
“This is a bad idea, if a teacher tried to force this stuff on me the school compliance department would get a very angry letter from my ADA lawyer.”
— FCCRFP, Reddit commenter · source -
I don't think you're being downvoted for mentioning something "nice" about AI, I think you're getting downvoted because this is low effort as fuck and you make zero attempt to explain what mechanism this would be, how it would work, how it would address the things that AI is objectively making worse: literacy, critical thinking, philosophy. You…
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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Unionization amongst graduate students a has grown pretty quickly in the United States in recent years: In 2012, 64,424 graduate students were unionized, but by 2024, that number had swelled to 150,104, an increase of 133%. More than a third (38%) of graduate student workers are now in a union. There are clearly many grad students who aren't happy…
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This is a bad idea, if a teacher tried to force this stuff on me the school compliance department would get a very angry letter from my ADA lawyer. Then the teacher would be forced to stop, or be fired. Throwing curve balls at students in assignments is a shitty teacher classic.
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The Atlantic publishes account of faculty's AI-detection struggles
Will Oremus's Atlantic piece details Turnitin's roughly 15 percent false-negative and under-1-percent false-positive rates, the MIT report, and professors' conflicted, overwhelmed response to AI detection tools.
“I think most faculty feel entirely overwhelmed by this. It's a mess.”
— Marc Watkins -
first by The Atlantic, 5d ago
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Students learn to strip hidden prompts, undercutting Paustian's method — Students began recognizing and removing the invisible AI-trap prompts, and Paustian's university discourages relying on AI detectors alone, leading him to plan scrapping writing assignments this year.
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Pangram emerges as a more accurate rival to Turnitin's detector — A newer tool called Pangram has become regarded as the most accurate AI detector, even as Turnitin remains the most widely deployed tool in higher education despite its imperfect accuracy.
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MIT working group report cautions against relying on AI detectors — An influential MIT working group on AI in education recommended against depending on AI detectors, warning they risk creating an 'atmosphere of distrust between instructors and students.'
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Paustian catches 60 AI-written essays with hidden prompts and detectors — Biology professor Timothy Paustian combined invisible prompts embedded in assignments with AI detectors to identify 60 AI-generated essays among 350 students in an online microbiology class; nearly all admitted using AI.
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Vanderbilt disables Turnitin's AI checker over false positives — Vanderbilt University turned off Turnitin's AI detection, warning that even a 1 percent false-positive rate could wrongly flag hundreds of the roughly 75,000 papers it processes a year.
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Turnitin releases an AI-detection add-on to its plagiarism checker — Turnitin launched the AI detector, which has since been purchased by roughly 1,400 colleges and universities in North America and now scans a large share of student submissions.
What people are saying 1 voices from 1 site · best of 4 · verbatim
- Sep 21
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Requires human graders. Like all things optimized to run as lean as possible. Going back to simpler proven methods requires investing in labor.