How teachers can stop PhotoMath
As every math teacher readily admits, cheating is rampant. The most “resourceful” students have long been able to share answers with classmates or find solutions online (hi, Chegg!), but new camera-based apps like PhotoMath and Mathway have driven cheating to a whole new new level.
With millions of users and glowing reviews, PhotoMath is the #1 most popular education app on Apple’s App Store.
In some ways, it’s like magic: just take a photo of your math problem and, instantly, you are provided with a step-by-step solution that you can pass off as your own. Of course, students love it.
As a review from RainbowUnicornPFU said:
In a desperate search of the internet, I found this app. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It not only gives you the answer, but gives you a clear step-by-step explanation. It can solve ANYTHING! Thinking that this app is simply too good to be true, I was expecting tones of ads and payed special features, but no, this app is ad-less and COMPLETELY FREE!!! WOW!!! Thank you to whoever created this app, you are an angel sent from god himself!
Contrary to popular student belief, math teachers are not evil—and they certainly don’t enjoy spending hours grading assignments. If they assign a lot of homework, it’s because practice is essential for learning new concepts.
By offering students an easy way out, PhotoMath threatens that learning process and undermines the teacher’s entire curriculum. The unfairness of this tool can not be overstated.
How to stop it?
Fortunately, all hope is not lost. There is a solution.
The same advances in technology that enable PhotoMath to help students also enable new tools and counter-measures to help teachers.
Over the summer, my friends and I (former employees at Google, Facebook, and Uber) built a free website called edia.app to help math teachers create and grade digital assignments in less than one minute.
The website is completely free and very easy to use. Just select a select, customize your assignment, and then we’ll generate unique questions for every student and auto-grade their responses.
Step#1: Select a lesson
Step #2: Customize your assignment
Step #3: Auto-grade student responses
We launched edia.app in August and already hundreds of math teachers are using the website for remote learning activities and homework. However, when we learned about PhotoMath and the challenge it presented to teachers, we knew that we had to do something.
So we did.
Last week, we released a powerful anti-cheating mode to thwart PhotoMath. It’s already our most popular feature. Take a look:
WHOA!! How do we do this? What’s happening? Well, I’ll explain :-)
In broad outlines, PhotoMath goes through three steps to turn a picture of a math problem into a step-by-step solution:
- First, it uses a specially modified type of text recognition system to convert a student’s image into text input that a computer can understand.
- Second, it then classifies that text into a math problem—e.g. 5a⁷b³ * 4a²b⁹ is a multiplying monomials question.
- Finally, it uses a math-solver API which finds the complete solution and shows students the steps needed to get there.
Our solution works by thwarting PhotoMath from the start. Edia’s anti-cheating mode adds a special, colored background to problems that makes it hard for PhotoMath to “see” the question. As a result, PhotoMath has no idea what to do.
But that’s not all—we’ve also built questions that are inherently hard for PhotoMath to understand, even if it can read the text. These include word problems and open-ended questions like “Give an example of a line which only passes through two quadrants”.
Resilient students will always find a way to cheat, but we hope that new technologies can help teachers just as much as they seem to be helping students.
The cat and mouse game continues. Your move, PhotoMath!
