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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2983 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

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Is there a new cheating epidemic?

  • Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree

  • High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

I can't speak to academic cheating with confidence, but I can about videogames. First, there are more opportunities as time passes as more and more players get into online games so the whole number is going to go up. This matters b/c these are all potential customers of the next part of the problem. Its never been easier to cheat at online games. Used to be, back on the 00s, it was much harder. You either needed to be a programmer yourself with knowledge of the game engine and build your own hacks, or you needed to know the right people or be part of fairly insular online communities, the Warez scene probably being the most prolific. There was a lot of overlap between the game cracking/piracy scene and the online game cheats scene, both of which were almost never just stumbled upon by normies. Now that much larger numbers of people play these very competitive games, they are large enough to constitute a customer base worth trying to get the attention of. People are also much more comfortable with paying over various apps now, so its much easier to sell to them. Prices are wildly variable with the specific game, but for anywhere from $10 to $200 you can get a download link to a fully contained .exe that you run with the game, there is a relatively user friendly interface, and you money buys not just the download of the exe, but also updates as the sellers of the cheat engines try to stay one step ahead of the game devs and other anti-cheat service providers like VAC. In addition, the people using the engines are much, much sloppier with using them, not even bothering to try to hide it most of the time. To accommodate this the same groups that sell the cheats also sell various ban-evasion packages, helping you make new accounts, teaching you how to use a VPN etc, or in many cases just selling you a pre-made, clean account to get right back at it. A few more infamous ones over the years have also had inside people at the game studio who would just remove the bans for money. Money changed everything with videogame cheating. I don't think any of this applies to online chess, which is its own strange world.

Haha we had an interesting discussion on this two years back., so before LLMs were ubiquitous.

The fishing tournament example stuck in my mind enough that I still remember it from time to time as an example of something that's just absurd to be dishonest about, but they do it anyway.

I might broaden it to it just being an epidemic of demolished social norms and declining efficacy of shame as a behavioral deterrent. Being utterly unrepentant and impervious to most social shaming is in fact an adaptive trait in the current social environment.

I hesitate to say a rise in sociopathy, but perhaps now there's a default assumption that all the rules are just there to hobble you and if you choose to follow them whilst everyone else is 'defecting' you're just a sucker, where the only thing that's really 'wrong' is getting caught. Or, perhaps, getting caught isn't the problem, if you can avoid punishment it'll all still be worth it.

Zoomers have been raised in an environment where every aspect of their performance and social status is tracked, by default. Using EVERY SINGLE advantage, licit or illicit, that you can possibly find and implement is presumably seen as necessary to remaining competitive.

My generalized prognosis is that we're in the throes of transitioning to a low trust society

Quoth Betteridge…

I’d like to see real data rather than relying on (years-old) reports from a notoriously punishing game.

I can’t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either. The dynamic is—or should be?—completely different.

I don’t think it’s possible to find real data about this, because the only way to determine cheating is for a reasonable observer to watch footage (otherwise, the algorithms would quickly catch them). You can’t generalize that across time for obvious reasons, and you can’t trust a cheater to answer a survey for obvious reasons. The next best evidence is to see what high-reputation people in these niches think about the question, and I’d guess most of them across different games would say cheating is out of control.

In CS2, nearly all of the leaderboard: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6GA4AM1Szxc https://youtube.com/watch?v=m8wsCU0NR38

In Trackmania, nearly all of the leaderboard (I think this is the most competitive racing game): https://youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw

Chess . com : https://youtube.com/watch?v=SG5PMVyCi8U (though here it is significantly easier, almost trivial, to find and ban cheaters)

There are also many in the speedrunning niche.

I can’t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either

They are similar from a psychological perspective involving honesty and rewards. You want to win in order to gain status and feel a sense of success. Among males, video game success translates into reputational benefits, bragging rights, plus the basic biological pleasure of defeating an opponent in a bout. This is no different from academic success, except perhaps that the rewards of academic success occur on a longer timeframe, making the rewards of cheating a little less salient.

The anti-cheat services compile quite a bit of data but its generally not released to the public beyond limited disclosures to try to sell their services to game studios. Valve anti cheat is one of the bigger ones. Its expensive, but customers will get access to the "rap sheets" as it were for various online credentials. IPs, UBID, steam installs, accounts related by payment method, hardware IDs etc. You don't get large data sets to just browse, but you can see the history or reports and flags for clients that connect to your game, substantiated or otherwise. You can set up auto-bans for known cheat engines or bad actors.

Hmm. It might be possible to get trendlines for something like CS2. But then, I understand valve has a long history of detection vs ban waves. It’d be very hard to measure.

Perhaps survey companies that sell cheats to try and keep skin in the game? I seem to remember seeing a retrospective from, like WoW gold farmers or something. You might be able to measure revenue vs. player base for a common game.

Intuitively, I doubt that video game cheating is worse today than it was in the mid-2000s era of PC CoD hackers and the like. Or the golden age of Minecraft servers, maybe.

I think the college level cheating stuff is kinda overblown. Kids have always looked for shortcuts up to and including hiring other students to write essays for them. We made college about the degree and get big mad when kids know that’s what matters and min max the system like old school rpg players would minmax Morrowind.

I don’t get cheating at a game.

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

They should also be banned with the Geneva convention. Making students write essays is probably the most wasteful way to use a functioning brains.

Why? Writing essays is the most directly applicable skill I learned in school, moreso than AP Computer Science (java) - and I'm a backend java dev. Concise, precise communication is a critical skill. Design docs are super important. (At least to the promotion committee.)

That said, I'd love if we make the essays be on more useful/interesting/self-selected topics, have more persuasive/technical writing, etc.

That clip from step by step perfectly illustrates my opinion on what essays usually degrade to https://youtube.com/watch?v=l9RPNH7YhtU

And don't get me started on Java. My opinion of the language and the ecosystem is not as high as the one about the essays.

University students should all learn:

  • How to write an email to dispute a claim including supporting evidence
  • How to write an email summarizing action items from a meeting
  • How to write readable, unambiguous instructions for performing some technical process
  • How to write a well-formed request when asking for help

because even senior managers and execs all seem incapable of doing some or all of these.

Cheating with AI in school is trivially solvable on an object level. It’s just that the bureaucracy and or faculty don’t want to.

Whether that’s due to laziness, head in sand, politics, profit, or some sense of “inequity”, or any other misaligned incentive is up for debate.

I assume the inequity part is a decent amount of it. If you start actually forcing measurable accountability, it will take away other subjective safety nets.

This will effect pass rates and almost certainly have some disparate impact.

But the point is that anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could think up a plan to counter AI cheating for any given course or learning objective.

Mass AI cheating would fix the achievement gap and make it so the students who have fallen behind don't look like they have fallen behind. Ubiquitous AI cheating is potentially a massive gift for schools and universities. I guess with universities there is a risk it might destroy the reputation of the university. but this is a problem someone else will have to deal with in 5 years time. The current administrators are free to set fire to the schools reputation and enjoy all the rewards that come with it.

As someone involved with teaching college students, it's even more simple than this: Teaching (and marking even moreso) is a nuisance appreciated by no-one (least of all the students, who often just want their piece of paper and be done with it) at this point, so you just go through the motions of doing the absolute minimum. For one class I work together with literally the most popular professor, who has won multiple student-led prizes for teaching at our university. His assignments and exams? "I have done the same for a decade now, why change anything?" His policy for passing students? "I would pass them during the oral exam anyway, so why should I make myself the work by not letting them pass the written exam?" He is a really nice guy, his classes aren't bad and he is always helpful when you ask him for anything, so I have nothing against him; But if that is the mindset of the best, woe upon the rest!

I once had a professor who knew psychometrics so well, including its history but many ways as well that statistics could be used within methodology, and why, and when, and which types were preferable and which types to avoid and which types revealed nothing, that he seemed eerily erudite. He taught us the ins and outs of SPSS and Winsteps (R was just coming in) and we were eventually doing structural equation modeling. The last of his classes I took was my introduction to Bayesian reasoning. He really was brilliant and made me want to rise to his expectations.

But as a teacher pedagogically he was pretty bad. I didn't really understand his grading. He'd answer questions in such a way that I would become even more lost. But I was probably a better student in his doctoral class than I had been in the entirety of my (years earlier) time as an undergraduate.

I don't envy those whose job it is to evaluate teachers. I suppose a pre post assessment of student ability (at whatever), averaged across a large enough population, might be one way. Just looking at post scores or student evaluations wouldn't be enough.

Of course a school's PR team might likely be more concerned with shiny markers such as popularity with students. That certainly doesn't threaten the school's funding.

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable. It's like, 80% solvable, but you're right that solving it requires work. But it's actually a decent amount of work. I'd hesitate to call it laziness. I think a lot of people underestimate the typical teacher workload. Many teachers would probably do much better work and especially more efficient work if you increased pay by 30%, staffing by 30%, and reduced class sizes by 20%. (Part of this could be offset by slashing the administrative/pseudo-support staffing by 60% or more, but this still might require a net investment). This would give them much more time to plan lessons (instead of rolling out the greatest hits over and over without adapting to the times) and importantly, assign (and create) tests and homework assignments that are AI-resistant, if not AI-proof. It's just that these types of assignments and assessments are much more time-consuming to create and grade, plus as I mentioned the requirements to create them custom-tailored to your class and curricula make for the need to constantly be tweaking them (which again, most teachers don't have sufficient time budget to properly perform).

With that said there are certainly some school districts and even some teachers who are scared to fully grade work, but IMO most of the resistance is more from administration or parents, even, than the teachers themselves. A lot of teachers probably would prefer to hand out bad grades more, not less, current philosophy alleging this is psychologically damaging somehow notwithstanding.

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable...I'd hesitate to call it laziness.

To clear this up, I didn't call it laziness, I just listed that as a possible pragmatic blocker. My point is that it's trivially solvable in technical sense. It's really really easy to think of ways to evaluate students or have them practice learning in scenarios that AI cheating could be mitigated. It's not remotely unsolveable in that sense. But there are, to your point structural and indivdual reasons that make implementing such a solution harder.

I have sympathy for these defenses, but not infinity. If it's something any homeschool parent could solve without any innovation, then the school system needs to be able to react to in order to remain a legitimate concept. We can't just 'oh well...' cheating at scale. It needs to be treated as existential to schooling, if it's really this widespread.

There is no legitimate reason an institution of learning, can remain remotely earnest about it's mission as a concept, and still allow graded, asynchronously written reports.

Now of course many of the blockers to reacting to this are an outgrowth of similar challenges schools have faced for decades: The conflicted, in-tension-with-self mission of schooling in general. as described in the excellent book, Somone Has to Fail. Schools simultaneously trying to be a system of equality and meritocracy will fail at both.

But AI has stopped the buck passing; like so many other things, AI is a forcing funciton of exponential scale. I think if the can gets kicked any further, ever single semester, every single assignment, the entire idea of schooling massively delegitimizes itself.

I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.

If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.

There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them.

A teacher I know says that the kids (except the really smart ones) use Chat GTP for everything and don't give the impression that they even read the output beyond a cursory look to make sure it was in the general ballpark of answering the question, so this shouldn't be too hard.

I used ChatGPT once to do a required writing task that I thought was useless and didn't want to do. I did edit it for some semblance of accuracy, but did not exactly read it, nor do I remember what it said. If I thought it mattered or was a useful thing to do I would have written it myself, I like writing essays, including college essays.

Take-home essays were always a stupid idea; there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing, so they unfairly penalized anybody who was honest and did not have a big budget. All graded assignments should be done in class; AI simply made this clear.

there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing,

Well, nothing besides integrity.

I went to a smaller school that often had take-home essays and even exams (up to the professors, more common in smaller honors classes). While cheating might have happened somewhat, it is possible IMO to instill a culture that expects people to follow the rules even when they aren't being watched closely. But it was occasionally enforced by expelling violators.

Rather, they unfairly enabled the unscrupulous to get ahead. I realize that the two look very similar in terms of outcome, but accurate framing is important.

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