Using a cheating tool to defeat cheating

[Anon1787]

In the new course that was assigned to me just 3 weeks before the semester started (thanks, Chair!), I haven't been able to create a large bank of good practice questions for their weekly assignments. Unfortunately, the answers to all of the practice questions in the textbook have been posted at Chegg and the like. So I've been playing around with one of those paraphrasing tools to change the wording of the textbook questions (with some further edits) and assigning the modified questions. It seems to be working.

[Hegemony]

Hahahaha, very clever!

[Caracal]

In the new course that was assigned to me just 3 weeks before the semester started (thanks, Chair!), I haven't been able to create a large bank of good practice questions for their weekly assignments. Unfortunately, the answers to all of the practice questions in the textbook have been posted at Chegg and the like. So I've been playing around with one of those paraphrasing tools to change the wording of the textbook questions (with some further edits) and assigning the modified questions. It seems to be working.

A couple of times I've assigned books which have a title that is a common phrase or expression. I'm always amused by the students who send me response papers cribbed from the plot summary of some random play that has nothing to do with our class. I just assign these things to keep students on track and improve class discussions. The students who just grab something off the internet wouldn't read it anyway and it isn't worth my time to even run it through plagiarism checkers but I sometimes think I should teach classes that are all books with common titles that clueless cheaters will grab.

[downer]

It's a great idea. I plan to use it too.

Have you found which paraphrasers work best for this purpose?

[Anon1787]

It's a great idea. I plan to use it too.

Have you found which paraphrasers work best for this purpose?

I have been using paraphrasing-tool (usually the best free option for my purpose), paraphrase-online, and QuillBot. But I only need to rewrite things that are found in everyday conversation, news articles, and the like (generally no more than a couple of sentences and no technical language).

[Parasaurolophus]

Have you tried used an LLM? They generate pretty decent responses to questions, and even entire essays; I haven't tried tasking them with paraphrasing or generating questions, but I expect they'd do a good job with the former, at least.