[HN Gopher] Academic "Ghost-Writing": The Cheating Scandal No On...
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Academic "Ghost-Writing": The Cheating Scandal No One Will Discuss
Author : paulpauper
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-03-21 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (logosnews.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (logosnews.tech)
| drummer wrote:
| One more reason why credentials dont mean much. People have to be
| able to demonstrate their skills.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I always cringe when I have to interview someone with a masters
| degree in computer science because in my interview I ask a
| FizzBuzz style question and CS masters people, for whatever
| reason, don't have a good record (for me) with questions like
| that. Plus, it's just more awkward watching someone flub the
| question and thinking about CS education (which I assume from
| my undergrad experience is much more math, algorithms, theory,
| and pseudocode) versus programming in practice which, in our
| case, is much more about "implement this straightforward
| logic".
| nradov wrote:
| What point are you trying to make? Every hiring manager
| should know that a CS Master's degree focuses mainly on
| theory and doesn't necessarily teach much coding. If you just
| need programmers to do simple stuff then you'll obtain better
| results by hiring from trade schools, or finding candidates
| who are self taught.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I was responding to "credentials don't mean much" with my
| experience. People with what some might assume is a
| relevant credential don't seem to be that suitable.
|
| E: Another point - I know people who do more complicated
| things when programming, the thing is, they are also able
| to do simple things. I'd be really uncomfortable about
| hiring someone to do something complicated if they couldn't
| do something simple.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| As someone with a masters in CS from a big name US school,
| the demographics of my cohort were super interesting. With
| the exception of a very small number of folks (<5% of total),
| everyone either had specific outside support (mainly
| government computer security scholarships of some kind) or
| was from outside the US.
|
| I think this is because the cost of getting a masters doesnt
| make sense for someone with a CS undergrad who can easily
| apply to FAANG/etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| I guess I would have assumed that the typical CS masters
| didn't cost the person much (other than the opportunity
| cost). When I got an engineering masters (non-CS) most of
| it was covered via stipend.
|
| Opportunity cost can be significant of course.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| As a counter-point, here are three examples of highly
| successful individuals in the tech industry with an M.S. in
| computer science as their highest degree:
|
| - Soumith Chintala (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumith): Co-
| inventor of PyTorch; Distinguished Engineer at Facebook AI
|
| - Jacob Devlin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-
| devlin-135ab048): Inventor of BERT; SWE at Google AI
|
| - Yuxin Wu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppwwyyxx): Lead
| developer on Detectron2; SWE at Facebook AI
|
| If we include successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, the list
| becomes larger still.
|
| Of course, these examples are cherry-picked, but I'd be
| careful with your assumptions.
|
| Many people who pursue Master's degrees in the U.S. are
| international students who didn't have the luxury to do their
| undergrad in the U.S., a large number of whom have gone on to
| great success in the tech industry. At the high end, M.S. in
| computer science grads represent the best and brightest of
| three groups: international students, PhD dropouts, and those
| curious enough about CS to pursue it at the graduate level.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't think that's a counter point. I'm not saying that
| CS masters people can't be successful employees or
| entrepreneurs, just that in my experience the ones I've
| interviewed tend not to do well on simple "implement this
| function" type questions. I'm not making a broader claim,
| just stating my experience.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Only 1/2 joking:
|
| Finding a good ghostwriter demonstrates a number of useful
| skills.
| zdragnar wrote:
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-
| chi...
|
| My favorite bit of the story is that he had been known as the
| best developer in house, and in a different article I can't
| find anymore there were more quotes from his coworkers about
| how it seemed like he could do anything, no matter the
| technology / programming language.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Too bad it seems impossible to contract to get good academic
| writing done. Otherwise more companies would publish.
| tyoma wrote:
| This is neither new nor related to high costs of college.
|
| My parents told me of very similar setups when they were growing
| up in the 1960s USSR.
|
| A roommate in the mid-2000s did similar work as a side hustle.
|
| The actual practice is surely as old as university credentials.
| finexplained wrote:
| The scale matters when classes are graded on a curve. If a few
| students cheat the score distribution doesn't change too much,
| if a significant fraction of students cheat it _really_ hurts
| those who don 't.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I've seen a case where about half the class was cheating.
| People would pay those who took the test earlier to give the
| exam. Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any
| particular student for cheating.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any
| particular student for cheating.
|
| That's why you have to come down hard on everyone.
| harry8 wrote:
| Only if you come down equally hard on paid academics for
| being so incredibly lazy that they encourage cheating.
| Yes students should resist that temptation but man alive
| what the academics are doing to put that temptation in
| their way is completely unconscionable.
|
| An academic with a cheating problem in their course has a
| problem they need to solve it they are knowingly screwing
| the honest. From a position of power.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Just like a lot of things where the best thing to do for the
| individual only works out if only a tiny minority of
| parasites do it.
|
| e.g. getting a vaccine. You're arguably best off if you're
| part of the 1% of the population who choose not to get one
| but still get protected by herd immunity. But if that 1%
| grows to 10/20/30%, suddenly, not only does the defection
| advantage disappear, but the whole herd starts to suffer.
| Tragedy of the commons.
|
| We're all stuck between a rock and a hard place of
| simultaneously not wanting to restrict individual freedom,
| autonomy, and privacy, but also recognizing that when being a
| parasite is a disproportionately advantageous role for an
| individual to choose, it eventually kills the host.
| murgindrag wrote:
| I had exactly one class in college where cheating was
| rampant. I don't know why, but most of that class cheated on
| exams; the prof reused exams, and frats had bibles. I didn't
| see much cheating in my other classes; it was exceptionally
| rare.
|
| That class was graded on a curve.
|
| I got a 'B', and I would say I was in the 90th percentile for
| understanding the material. It would have been neigh-
| impossible to get an 'A' without cheating.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If universities are not capable to prevent such cheating,
| perhaps they must stop grading on a curve, that's something
| they can do.
| blowski wrote:
| The main character in the film Grease 2 (released in 1982) was
| paid by his fellow students to write their essays. I remember
| because he inspired me to set up a similar business in the 90s.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Most people don't "need" a high level education nor do they
| actually want one, a degree is just another metric about a person
| and when you make something a metric you tend to ruin it.
|
| Most people would benefit from a liberal education, that is the
| literal meaning of liberals to make one free, but most don't
| actually get it at university because it's hard to do and to
| measure (and not many actually care).
| burnished wrote:
| Just wanted to nit pick >No doubt the rise of the Internet - and
| today's "cut and paste" culture -- has cheapened the value of
| "original" work.
|
| I think broad statements like these, that blame a shift in
| culture, do so out of a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary past.
| Isn't it more likely that the effect the author sees is simply
| part of the culture and that changing technology allowed for new
| expressions of it?
| msla wrote:
| There's a trick to it:
|
| Whenever an author says "No doubt" or similar, there _are_
| doubts the author can 't answer. It's a rhetorical sleight-of-
| hand, something to get you looking over _here_ while the hole
| in their logic slips quietly past over _there_. Do it deftly
| enough and you can get people to swallow camels in your
| article, even if they 'd strain at gnats in an article written
| without such devices.
| vvram wrote:
| What's not talked enough is how this is normalized in Saas
| digital marketing today.
| Jan454 wrote:
| Maybe we just should not care? In the end, if someone claims
| sth., she always has to give proof. If da Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr.
| super plus claims sth. without proof, and a pink hair colored
| teenager claims sth. with proof, everyone _should_ believe the
| teen (actually believing the proof, not the person). Sadly thats
| not the case, lots of people still believe "eminence based proof"
| instead of "evidence based proof".
| Bootvis wrote:
| That works nicely for maths but any subject that requires a non
| trivial amount of data gathering needs to be build on a certain
| amount of trust.
| Jan454 wrote:
| which comes from peer-review and other scientists verifying
| it.
|
| .. there are too many Prof. Dr. Dr. that did not "cheat" but
| still claim covid isn't real .. so the title really doesn't
| mean anything at all to me .. also having studied myself
| seeing what kind of idiots also got their exams .. it's maybe
| just a proof they can 'write' and 'read', but even believing
| this would proof 'understanding' is a big overestimation of
| the title itself ..
| Bootvis wrote:
| In addition to the sibling comment, the replication crisis
| shows that this mechanic isn't working as well as you hope
| it would.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Peer review is about relevance, methodology and the
| appriopriateness of your conclusions given your
| observations as you describe them.
|
| Peer review does not even attempt to control for fabricated
| experimental results or other data.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The fact that we haven't seen some massively decline in
| productivity when there started to be rampant "ghost writing"
| means it's probably fairly meaningless.
|
| It reminds me of the fact that when I was five to nine, my school
| assigned loads of academic busywork that was completely
| pointless.
|
| My mum did it for me and let me go out and play. Our class ranks
| were based solely on exam performance, and I was top of every
| class.
|
| University probably has loads of pointless busywork too. Though I
| recall my Masters degree in CS actually being a rather enjoyable
| experience all around with fun assignments.
|
| For CS classes at least, it seems like you're missing out if you
| don't do the work because it's so much fun!
| Aunche wrote:
| Technological productivity has been increasing, but social
| productivity seems to be declining. Compare the 2020
| Presidential debates to JFK vs Nixon's debate, for instance. I
| don't think that ghostwriting is to blame though.
| choeger wrote:
| University is, at least in the classical form, a _scientific_
| institution. And science is communicated _in writing_. So at
| least in principle, exercising the writing of papers and essays
| under time pressure is completely natural.
|
| In practice, though, the writing is often hardly instructive.
| There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of
| Style" seriously. And the subjects are usually quite trivial.
|
| But calling writing per se is as much "busywork" as learning a
| programming language, CAD modeling, or working out mathematical
| proofs by induction.
| chowells wrote:
| > There are very few people that take stuff like "The
| Elements of Style" seriously.
|
| That's because it's garbage. Learning to write is great. But
| that is best done by reading good writing and practicing. A
| list of rules that constantly violates its own advice because
| obeying it would make the text hard to read is not of any
| value.
|
| https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-
| grammar...
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I'd be interested to know if this happens more or less in
| different fields, and whether or not this has an impact on
| people's careers, again by field.
| slyall wrote:
| That site was very hard to read on my browser. Every couple of
| seconds the author's byeline would flicker (too fast for me to
| see what it changed to) and the text would jump up and down.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-button
| breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be
| interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then
| friendly feedback might be helpful._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| I don't mean to pick on you personally--the problem is more
| that these things tend to get upvoted to the top of the thread,
| where they choke out on-topic conversation. This happens
| because the annoyances are real, not because they're unreal. At
| the same time this comes up so often that we have to try to
| avoid the repetition.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I agree in general. In this particular case, though, it was
| jarring. Having the screen jump every few seconds without the
| user interacting at all is a bit extreme.
| bArray wrote:
| It's bad enough that I have to enable JS in a private tab, then
| the force-enabled JS makes it near unreadable.
|
| I ended up using uBlock Origin to select the element and to
| block it, causing whatever crazy JS that is to die.
| sliken wrote:
| Same here, in chrome and firefox, and firefox reading mode
| wouldn't work.
| temp667 wrote:
| does anyone know how AMP seems to avoid this (despite the hate
| here). On AMP sites I rarely get the post paint jumping around
| insanity.
|
| My own metric - non AMP site + clickbait headline = jank and
| constant jumps as dynamic stuff happens (be it ads changing or
| show off or attention grabbers or analytics maybe).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > My own metric
|
| This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you saying that you
| experience jumping content on many blogs.
|
| The way any site avoids this is not being bad.
| zepto wrote:
| This just reveals that colleges simply aren't doing anything that
| can be called _tuition_.
|
| If the college did any amount of meaningful in-person teaching,
| it would be immediately obvious that a student had not written
| their own coursework.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| You're sort of assuming people are paying for A+ quality work.
| But they're not stupid. For many, a B is quite fine.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Colleges are simply doing something called _collecting money_
| so there 's no incentive to fix this problem.
|
| And it is a problem, because it means the output of colleges is
| increasingly just noise.
|
| It will become even more of a problem in the future, because
| you can't run a civilisation packed full of 'qualified' people
| who can't do shit.
|
| Except cheat.
| paulpauper wrote:
| This what happens when professors are too busy to notice/care nd
| everything is outsourced to overworked assistants who are paid
| little
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| This seems to indicate that some careers require a college degree
| without actually requiring the knowledge dispensed at the
| university.
|
| If a job really required university knowledge you would be fired
| pretty quickly if you didn't do the assignments but because
| people keep investing money in paying ghost writers it would
| indicate that it's paying off.
|
| I personally see this on CodeMentor: "I don't care how it works,
| I don't need to understand it, I just need it done in the next 60
| minutes".
| casefields wrote:
| Enterprise Rent-a-car used to have commercials all the time
| about how they're one of the largest employers of college
| grads. Why on earth does someone at a counter handing out car
| rentals even need a college degree?
| al2o3cr wrote:
| This goes out of its way to specifically hyperlink _one_
| particular ghostwriting company twice: smells like thinly-
| disguised SEO spam.
| galkk wrote:
| I think you're right. It's even has interesting formatting in
| one paragraphs, and description that sounds like the ad.
| One of the first and best known academic ghost-writing web
| sites is SITENAME.com based out of Montreal,
| Canada. It's been in business for nearly 20 years, longer than
| most.
| k__ wrote:
| After I worked as a ghostwriter for a few years I saw the world-
| especially the online world-with other eyes.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Please, say more.
| k__ wrote:
| There are many things you get for texts, not just degrees.
| Academic degrees are just the ones that are regulated, so
| it's against the law to get them with the help of a
| ghostwriter.
|
| But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for all
| kinds of publications.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| > But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for
| all kinds of publications.
|
| Yeah, but those are for the low end of the hiring market.
| Personally I mostly just ignore 'awards', unless it's a
| Nobel Prize or something.
|
| In fact, too much award fluff is a big negative weighting
| for me. Same with patents and ECs.
|
| I assume it's similar anywhere that ability actually
| matters. Sure you might get a boring entry-level IB job at
| some meat factory whose mild 'prestige' will impress your
| parents/schoolmates, but who cares in the grand scheme of
| things.
| k__ wrote:
| The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
| tomohawk wrote:
| There are a lot of courses that people are forced to take that
| have nothing to do with what they are trying to do in life. For
| example, nurses being forced to take an algebra (equivalent of HS
| algebra 1, algebra 2, trig, and and some analytic geometry). It
| is a big impediment for those students to pass that class and
| many cannot. So, nurses are selected on a skill they will never
| use or see again.
|
| I can't blame students in that predicament for cheating on those
| kinds of courses.
|
| They are merely jumping through the hoop. A hoop that serves no
| purpose, and is itself unethical.
|
| I've seen many such students cheat on those courses so they can
| focus on their core learning and get on with their lives.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| There is a drastic difference between getting a college degree
| and getting a "good college education"
|
| This article drops that ball right out of the gate, and doesn't
| seem to notice.
| Bodell wrote:
| In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior.
| I'll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my
| be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may
| appreciate the details so I've included them.
|
| I'm currently going back to school and my experience in doing so
| is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes,
| English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not
| at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean
| learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving
| feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a
| full formal essay or test.
|
| In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather
| generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a
| total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before
| putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for
| one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response
| to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its
| effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were
| "evolving" into man/machine "centaurs" such as the super powers
| of "ESP" that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other
| was an article from The Atlantic titled "Is google making us
| stoopid?" (no, I did not misspell "stupid", that was the title).
| The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive.
|
| I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some
| sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people
| losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought
| about by an industry of attention battling (too many
| distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human
| brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the
| portion where the article's author talked to a neurologist.
|
| In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of
| general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one
| note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing
| robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response
| displaying how intelligent robots actually are.
|
| So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were
| persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that
| intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the
| foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay
| explaining that even though computers played chess (a main
| sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything
| near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an
| overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I
| myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state
| championships as a child and currently after not playing for a
| long time have a rating of around 1600-1700).
|
| I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions
| of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time
| to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis
| "side-stepped the entire point of the exercise". I wrote my
| professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my
| thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected.
| The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of
| each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back
| to the "gist". My final essay was scored poorly on the summary
| section for "only capturing the gist". I also pointed out that in
| my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my
| teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in
| any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages
| or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored
| and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks.
|
| He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and
| that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since
| I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I
| was three weeks into our next essay. It's interesting to note
| that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this
| "formal research essay" as well because it contained "too much
| research" and was not "opinionated enough".
|
| The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to
| actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I
| want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to
| doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work:
| better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc.
|
| My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two
| textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well
| as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for
| understanding what you should study for the test. However, you
| are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and
| quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe
| did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from
| this approach to learning.
|
| Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely
| why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am
| not one of those people but the design of the institution, at
| least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and
| further circumvent actual practice and learning.
|
| On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my
| issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my
| generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading
| software. Something I had not before known existed and was
| mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of
| the subject matter my class was concerned with.
|
| Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing
| their jobs.
|
| An example of this software:
| https://elearningindustry.com/artificial-intelligence-new-ro...
| m4lvin wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! I enjoyed your writing and feel sorry
| for the mediocre feedback you get from your teachers.
| lolc wrote:
| An older relative once gave me the hint to bury a question in
| my text to see whether the examiner would address it. I was
| actually surprised to get an answer when I tried that.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I once caught a fellow grad student out on hiring someone to do
| our assignment. I was looking for free-lance work and happened
| upon an ad, which contained a copy of the assignment
| instructions. I felt no compunction at all at reporting to the
| instructor. The assignment was a lot of work.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Universities discuss this all the time. It's incredibly hard to
| prove.
|
| This is one reason we keep exams -- while they have many problems
| (particularly in Computer Science), forcing someone to sit in a
| room and answer questions gives a way of checking the student
| really does understand the course.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| I also personally appreciated the time limits of exams as well.
| They seemed like a good balance to projects whose outcome was
| primarily decided by how much time one could spend (there's a
| clear balance in the real world utility of performing well
| under unstrained time, and time management, etc).
| ghaff wrote:
| Projects are great. But the best ones are time-consuming
| because, as you suggest, you can often iterate one more time.
| This is especially true if the problem space is at least
| somewhat unconstrained even if the result isn't. I probably
| got more out of project-oriented courses undergrad/masters
| (and my Masters thesis) but it doesn't scale to the whole
| curriculum.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| People love to complain about whiteboarding but it's extremely
| effective at assessing knowledge, far more than even most
| exams. Exams are used in an academic context b/c they're less
| resource intensive, though.
| ska wrote:
| This is sort of true.
|
| White-boarding or "oral exams" are effective in proportion to
| the skill of the person giving them. Most people have little
| natural skill in this even (perhaps especially) if they are
| expert in the domain being examined.
| thechao wrote:
| While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading
| rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the
| students to pass _individually_ each of the homework, quiz, and
| exams, separately, to pass the course.
|
| This nipped HW cheating in the bud by the 3rd semester, because
| the students knew that you couldn't game the system by
| maximizing HW grades to bring up exam & quiz grades. Exams &
| quizzes were autogenerated from a set of parametric problems,
| and put in random order on the print out -- made side-by-side
| and answer-sheet cheating basically impossible.
|
| Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades, though.
| Teever wrote:
| What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that
| techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all
| that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff
| that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air
| industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated
| entire classes of error that could result in loss of life
| from flying.
|
| It is especially troubling because post-secondary education
| is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the
| cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the
| material that they need to be better at their jobs influences
| lives just as much as a plane crashing.
|
| The silly part is that post-secondary education is something
| that is far older than the flight industry yet no such
| standardization of controls over testing / grading have been
| implemented.
|
| It seems like it's almost a choice.
|
| > Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades,
| though.
|
| Yeah. it's a choice.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The scientific research that goes on in post secondary
| education is the cornerstone. The academic setting is just
| the way we do it now and can, and I would argue should,
| change. Grad students could just as easily be junior
| employees if the same work were done in the private sector
| and would be financially much better off for it.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > It is especially troubling because post-secondary
| education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human
| endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and
| not learning the material that they need to be better at
| their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane
| crashing.
|
| This is insane. Most people never attend university and do
| plenty of productive work. Most people who do attend
| university never work a day in the field they did their
| degree in. Most people who do work in the field they did
| their degree in never use the large majority of what they
| leaned there. On top of this a large majority of
| professionally relevant material is learned on the job.
|
| The reason that there's no real effort to check people
| aren't cheating is because school isn't primarily about
| learning, it's about ranking and sorting.
| CJefferson wrote:
| I'm suprised people were so opposed to it, that kind of
| system is standard in all UK Universities I've taught in.
| vasco wrote:
| > Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades,
| though.
|
| Maybe focus more on the teaching and less on the testing.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Faculty get jobs at universities to research, not to teach.
| The less time spent on teaching the better.
| Google234 wrote:
| Maybe grade inflation is a thing?
| hn_asker wrote:
| This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was
| one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and
| learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural
| approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the
| push-back on standardized testing is partly because
| students cannot chea-- I mean rely on "social
| collaboration"? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But
| part of it..)
| warlog wrote:
| Collaboration to learn isn't penalized. Just the collab to
| cheat part.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Are there any downsides to removing the potential for
| students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong
| homework and take-home work?
|
| I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the
| University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and
| routinely expressed frustration when first year students
| could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and
| language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to
| homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying
| topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it
| not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of
| the class would have failed. And cynically that homework
| weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a
| problem with their course instruction and they covered up
| presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading...
|
| The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that
| many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but
| because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can
| improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good
| qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively
| affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown?
|
| And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting
| where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song
| and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely
| culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in
| y.
| ska wrote:
| > Are there any downsides to removing the potential for
| students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with
| strong homework and take-home work?
|
| It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible
| to counteract.
|
| The other way around works though, where you work hard to
| make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat
| on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades.
| This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety
| but it does help.
|
| You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the
| result is at least fair.
| hiq wrote:
| > required the students to pass individually each of the
| homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course
|
| How was the final grade determined? min(HW, Quiz, exams)?
| fedorareis wrote:
| Not OP, but it could still be an average (either weighted
| or not) and have a requirement to pass certain things to be
| eligible to pass. One of my core CS classes had the
| requirement that you had to complete at least 1 project,
| complete all daily assignments, and pass at least 4 of the
| 6 lab tests. However the overall grade for the class once
| you met those requirements was just an average like it was
| for my other classes.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history
| professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He
| claimed he stopped when one of his clients was caught.
|
| The unfortunate lesson I got from university is that they were
| very aware of cheating, but not all that enthused about
| penalizing people for it. 11 people in one of my freshmen classes
| got copying an assignment to keep a journal over the semester. In
| theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but
| the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing
| and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.
| [deleted]
| nmca wrote:
| galaxy-brain: a great deal of resources are wasted in the
| university signalling game, by devaluing university these
| cheaters are contributing to societal progress in the long run.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Reposting as a top level comment because it fits:
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi...
|
| Guy outsourced his entire programming job and got away with it
| for quite awhile. I guess the company didn't do much peer
| programming.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I think its fucking fabulous.
|
| At a society level, companies and billionaires are outsourcing
| every goddamn thing they can to anywhere but America and
| Americans, and unfortunately that extends to other Western
| nations as well now.
|
| They only got pissed off because for once, the little guy was
| winning here and outsmarted the greedy sons of bitches.
|
| If you want a powerful Western society, you have to pay Western
| residents Western wages. Now China is on the rise and clearly
| the most dangerous threat not just to the United States, but
| the rest of the Western world, but no one sees it because they
| want their $999 iPhone that would be $1999 if it were actually
| assembled in California by people asking for a measly $15 an
| hour.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they were pissed off because they are a
| "critical infrastructure" company whose employee exfiltrated
| their entire source code. Not to mention, if they were doing
| any government work, they may have inadvertently let in
| foreign actors- not great for "critical infrastructure" since
| management aren't likely to have been the worst hurt had
| anything gone more wrong.
|
| Bear in mind he was getting a 6 figure salary- he was hardly
| the little guy making under $15 an hour.
| hn_asker wrote:
| Big Pharma uses this heavily to bias research in academia for
| their marketing purposes. It used to be that academic research
| was rigorous and objective. An academic title had prestige and
| respect. Now it's so watered down.
| nonpolitic wrote:
| It's going to be interesting when these people figure out GPT-3
| exists. The days of the take-home essay as a useful grading tool
| are definitely numbered, at least in non-science disciplines.
| intended wrote:
| I'm willing to be persuaded differently, but any discussion on
| Academics and Academia is always a jobs/employment discussion
| with extra steps.
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