In the spring semester this year my teacher friends said they were getting a lot of student work that was unusually well written compared to the student’s other work, but also contain unnatural typos throughout.

The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.

The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.

Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.

Cheating detection technology will be a cat and mouse game, but a good teacher who knows his students will spot cheating almost immediately (proving it might be more difficult).

The only solution is to evaluate students in ways that they can't cheat. Hand-written exams in class, oral exams, etc. but that is quite time-consuming and most teachers at least in K-12 are already overloaded.