> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted.

But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.

Every kind of examination should be proctored.

> using a calculator

Students who are at a level where they'd be learning to do the computations a calculator does, shouldn't have graded homework. And even at that level, real mathematics is more than just computation.

> getting answers from previous tests

Decades ago, my teachers and professors knew advanced tricks for this, like "not just reusing the test questions from last year". Sometimes they even changed the constants in math questions between sections of the class.

Reading previous tests (including correct answers) was never considered cheating, or even slightly unethical, in my education. In fact, one of our professors had this party trick of working through all the answers for a past-year exam (perhaps multiple of them; I can't recall the details, but certainly much faster than students were expected to work things out under exam conditions) in the space of a single lecture, near the end of the course. Students were meant to see this and learn from it (as well as be impressed).

> resubmitting assignments

Why would you ever not notice this?

We can't, and neither can the machines that people build and/or use for "detection." Everyone in this thread also needs to recognize the entrenched differences between secondary educators, who have wholeheartedly adopted AI products into their teaching workflow, and tertiary educators, who have adopted them only by necessity. "By necessity" in this case means "having to spend a ton of time dealing with, talking about, and learning about this nonsense."

The discourse around "cheating" with these products has always been a mistake. We should have characterized them less as "cheating machines" and more as "expediency machines." Because once you're invested in describing students as having academic dishonesty issues rather than skill issues, you've made it an administrative problem. You never come back from that.

For mine, we lost the issue long ago when accountability culture won. We should never have bothered with the idea that "mechanics, grammar, and proofreading" should be part of a "rubric" that "assessed outcomes" for "good writing." We should have just said "we don't care if you don't think this is worthwhile, because your time is worth nothing." The last two years of student labor certainly suggests this.