[HN Gopher] My students cheated... a lot
___________________________________________________________________
My students cheated... a lot
Author : benjyhirsch
Score : 1672 points
Date : 2022-05-28 23:04 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (crumplab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (crumplab.com)
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Honestly, why bother joining the chat if you're obligated to put
| in so much effort?
|
| Analysing social media for evidence of violating academic
| integrity isn't some thin you get paid for.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't. Why waste what little time I have left
| each day? Not to mention, whatever grade they get, whether they
| cheated or not doesn't matter, I'd still get paid at the end of
| the day.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So I think the teacher missed the main point of his own essay:
|
| "The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable
| tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The
| essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I
| totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the
| chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn't be there
| for the cheating. Then they rejoined afterward."
|
| So, in order to be competitive in a class where (whether
| explicitly curved or not) the difficulty will be adjusted up or
| down until the "right" portion of students are passing, even a
| student who wanted to not cheat needed to be in the chat. He made
| a course in which it required extraordinary efforts to find a way
| to be able to both pass and not cheat, and then acted surprised
| that so many students cheated.
|
| Any teacher who can fire up R to process the chat group logs,
| could have figured out a better system for quizzes and tests, so
| that it wasn't this hard to be competitive without cheating.
| Also, if he hasn't ever taken a course on game theory, he should;
| if he has, he shouldn't have passed.
| faitswulff wrote:
| He did find a better system, I recommend reading the article in
| depth.
| humbleharbinger wrote:
| As much as the OP claims they take cheating seriously and as an
| opportunity to engage with students and have them learn amongst
| other noble undertakings.
|
| I think they just really enjoy catching people cheat and see
| how far it goes. Sort of masochistic tbh
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I'd like to add, that supposed "superstar" student who read the
| chat to learn the other class info and left to not read the
| cheating... "sent no texts".
|
| As someone who recently graduated, this student is a
| freeloader. Comparable to companies who heavily use OSS but
| never contribute. I expect them to be a terrible coworker.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I don't think your interpretation is supported: it's not that
| the course was "too hard" without cheating, the cheating began
| at the outset.
| chongli wrote:
| Not only was the course not "too hard", the author give
| plenty of indications that the course is actually pretty
| easy. The quizzes everyone was cheating on were open-book. At
| one point, a student in the group chat recommended that
| people look things up in the course textbook:
|
| "The best advice was a student telling everyone they could
| just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in
| the textbook and search for words in the question to find the
| answers. I mean, ya. It's in the textbook."
|
| This does not sound like a difficult course to me. I have
| taken courses where it's rather trivial to ace the online
| quizzes by looking things up in the textbook (I am taking one
| right now, in fact). Students who can't even do this and
| resort to sharing the answers in a group chat must have
| become incredibly jaded about their education. I fully agree
| with the author's decision to both sanction them for cheating
| and give them a second chance to engage with the course
| material. It was very satisfying to see that all of the
| effort paid off in the end.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| From the author:
|
| "The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable
| tools for students taking courses online during the
| pandemic...I totally agreed with this point"
| infinityio wrote:
| I think this meant for social purposes, more than academic
| ones
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Which is one of the most interesting takeaways for me. What
| this guy was dealing with was a cultural problem - a toxic
| culture had developed in the temporary group/space.
|
| His goal is clearly stated: for people to honestly connect
| with the course material. That's hard if a group like this is
| poisoned with cynicism. My thought here is how these types of
| messaging groups spaces have become an incredibly important
| aspect of the educational experience and beyond. I think
| about all the 'toxic' cultures in places I have been in and
| how they usually revolve around people trading information
| and socializing.
| fuball63 wrote:
| I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as
| the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant.
| I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win;
| cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to
| subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming
| legitimate students, which is unacceptable.
|
| What I wish existed was an independent board exam that students
| had to take for employment. Many professions have this, from
| medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and the trades. My
| thought is this would disincentivize cheating and encourage deep
| learning at the university level, while offloading the cost of
| cheat detection and enforcement to a board, whose job is to
| solely evaluate if someone is capable of entering the workforce.
| A separation of concerns.
|
| Another reason for board exams: when I was working, I was asked
| to do a bunch of flimsy engineering to satisfy management. It
| would be nice if I could respond "If I do this, I could lose my
| license, so no." Just like if someone asked a carpenter to build
| a house not up to code, or a dentist told the hygienist to do
| shoddy work to improve throughput.
|
| If anyone knows anything about this, I'd love to chat, because
| its something I've been thinking about for a long time and I hope
| there's a good reason why it doesn't exist.
| nelsondev wrote:
| This solution just moves the problem from colleges/universities
| to a "board", but doesn't solve it.
|
| People would still cheat on the hypothetical licensing exam.
|
| Licensing also would add friction in changing jobs, immigration
| policies, thereby hampering general mobility of workers. More
| paperwork and bureaucracy would develop.
|
| A company's interview process is currently where someone's
| declared skills are put to the test, which although imperfect,
| provides the filtering mechanism you're looking for.
| nmlt wrote:
| That sounds really cool. I'd say the only reason that something
| like that doesn't exist is that nobody has created it yet.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think that software is a form of literacy.
|
| So my axiom takes me to "we can test if you can read or write,
| but beyond that, there are an infinite ways to write about star
| crossed lovers, so just greping for Romeo and Juliet is it
| going to work"
|
| Then again there must be incentive to cheat at bar exams.
| tomohawk wrote:
| An honest person will do the right thing, even if they think
| there is no chance of being caught. A dishonest person only acts
| honestly when they think they will be caught. Since there are not
| too many honest people, our only hope against the corruption of
| dishonesty is to police and punish dishonesty so more people will
| at least act honestly.
|
| But then, there is another thing.
|
| Being able to get a degree has become a gate for many jobs.
| Adding additional courses that are not needed for those jobs may
| sound good, but it really just prevents some people from getting
| jobs they could do, but for the inappropriate gate.
|
| Example: adding a mandatory advanced algebra course to a nursing
| program.
|
| You might argue that a math course helps with abstract reasoning,
| but you'd be wrong. Passing a math course demonstrates an ability
| to do a specific kind of abstract reasoning. There is zero
| benefit for a nurse to be able to do advanced algebra, but many
| schools now require it. The result is that many people who would
| be great nurses cannot be a nurse unless they cheat to pass the
| algebra class. Faced with that decision, do you cheat, or just
| give up on your dream to be a nurse?
|
| It may be hard for many HNers to comprehend this, but an
| inability to do advanced math is a thing. For some people, no
| amount of effort will lead to an understanding of the subject.
| It's just too abstract. These same people have plenty of other
| abilities, and are good at many jobs.
|
| Can you blame a student for cheating on such a course, that
| everyone knows they'll never need to do the job they're going
| for?
| simonsarris wrote:
| > Aside from all the ways that I can be empathetic, there was a
| lot of evidence in the chat that students were blowing off the
| course and making a mockery of the whole thing. But, the brash
| language in the chat could also be covering up difficult issues
| students were facing in their lives that were preventing them
| from committing to their studies.
|
| This author really does not want to confront some plain truths
| about his students and academia as it exists today.
|
| > My understanding is that students who collect multiple faculty
| action reports like baseball cards may cease to be continuing
| students at my institution.
|
| I suspect the institution doesn't give a good goddamn as long as
| the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still
| clear.
|
| > Even the student who sent 15 emails of lies got a second
| chance.
|
| In a strange way, this article is really a character study about
| the author, and not at all about cheating. The author is deeply
| interested in procedure and drama, which makes for amusing
| storytelling, like a detective that's trying to find a murderer
| while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was,
| he didn't really mean it.
|
| It is interesting how often he is attempting to detect cheating
| and plagiarism, even writing his own R scripts, and then says
|
| > TBH, I'm so over trying to deter my students from cheating.
| There are so many ways I could lock down my courses. Not
| interested. If real life was about being monitored by proctoring
| software that spies on you at home and forces you to test under
| duress, it would be a sad real life.
|
| But then continues attempting plagiarism detection for the rest
| of the semester, and the next! Maybe he considers it separate
| from cheating. Slightly baffled by all his behavior. He is quite
| kind, and expending extraordinary effort over students who are
| adamant about expending none at all.
| [deleted]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > this article is really a character study about the author,
| and not at all about cheating
|
| Yeah exactly. Extreme cop energy in the writing those scripts
| and publicly documenting so much of the chat text verbatim. I
| started out sympathetic to the author, and still am abstractly,
| that's a hard spot for a teacher to be in.
|
| But it started to feel like the author expected me to find
| it... titillating? attractively transgressive? Just a gross
| secondhand voyeurism type thing I didn't like it at all.
|
| Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don't
| think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this
| "investigation" should be encouraged.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > I don't think the impulse to invest so much time and
| technique in this "investigation" should be encouraged
|
| It resulted in a large amount of the students finally
| engaging with the material and ultimately caring about the
| course, though. I don't believe it is healthy to expect that
| of a professor, but it seemed to work out here.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| For that one semester, until the cycle repeats itself.
| Smarter students in the future won't allow their professor
| to join the class chats.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Maybe that's true only because the author posted this,
| though. Hopefully the course changes that the author made
| will encourage future students to actually spend time on
| the course. If that's true, does it point towards a
| deeper solution with making courses more engaging? Not
| that students cheating are the professor's fault, of
| course. Nonetheless...
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| >I knew that my students wanted a second chance, I wasn't sure
| how many of them would take it. Part of completing the academic
| integrity assignment was a tacit admission of cheating, and some
| students seemed set on not admitting to anything. So, I was
| thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity
| assignment.
|
| >What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences
| and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and
| pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was
| plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of
| text verbatim copied.
|
| How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on
| a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after
| you've been caught cheating already? How can that be the first
| thing you go for? This is really sad. I seriously don't
| understand the thinking here.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Mental illness, trolling, apathy.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Or habit, it's just your writing process at this point.
| thih9 wrote:
| I could imagine someone seeing this assignment as a formal
| requirement. And googling "integrity assignment", just like one
| might google how to fill out some tax related forms. Or perhaps
| even how people google "birthday wishes".
| adastra22 wrote:
| These people don't know how to do their own work, full stop.
| I've encountered the type before. They literally wouldn't know
| what to do.
| scotty79 wrote:
| What's interesting is those people are not necessarily
| maladapted to their future adult work lives.
|
| In some lines of work finding the correct stuff to use for a
| task is way more important than ability to create it yourself
| from scratch.
|
| Finding the plug that fits the given socket vs building the
| plug from scratch.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| The original cheating, maybe. Cheating, doubling down by
| lying, and then cheating again on the get-out-of-cheating-
| free assignment seems like it's only adapted to a future
| life of white-collar crime.
| spicyusername wrote:
| > How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat
| on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance
| after you've been caught cheating already?
|
| My opinion is that most people only go to college these days
| because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job,
| not because they are terribly interested in the material.
|
| Given that assumption, it's easy for me to understand why
| people would try to minimize the amount of work they have to do
| for something they didn't want in the first place.
|
| They are mostly just there for the "job ticket".
| c3534l wrote:
| I've never understood people's attitudes towards cheating, which
| is perhaps why its so prevalent. People cheat at sports all the
| time and people just sort of accept it. When people cheat in
| school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess
| we'll give you a few warnings first."
|
| If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in
| previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go
| to a doctor who, regardless of if he knows his stuff now, is the
| kind of person who can live with cheating? As I've grown older
| and seen more and more people get away with not a moment of
| weakness, but a deep, unfixable character flaw requiring planning
| and sustained effort to gain an advantage over people foolish
| enough to be doing things fairly, it makes me wonder why anyone
| chooses to tolerate this.
|
| Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and
| willingly passes students who cheat, but just makes them retake
| the course or in this case do what sounds like essentially extra
| credit. But rather than prevent people from participating in
| systems they have demonstrated are not trustworthy enough to
| participate in, we just give them a stern lecture and extra work,
| or an asterisk in their hall of fame record, or make them say
| they're very sorry.
| etataetaet wrote:
| > If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat
| in previous classes, but got away with it?
|
| I could be wrong but I don't think this happens _that_ often.
| If you cheated enough not to understand what was going on in
| calc 1 may god rest your soul as 2 and 3 are going to be
| downright impossible. For those types of classes you need to
| mostly understand the material even have a chance at cheating
| successfully.
| derac wrote:
| The amount of cheating and the industry around writing papers
| for others might surprise you.
| crayboff wrote:
| They're not just talking about prerequisite courses. If
| someone is willing to cheat in a Comp Sci course, they're
| probably willing to cheat on a Literature class.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Most humans have have little to no real integrity. This is why
| I am hopeful about AGI taking over eventually. (Not murdering
| people, I hope, just taking over).
| kadoban wrote:
| AGI will have its own lacks of integrity, or it's not AGI.
| n8ta wrote:
| So you're hoping we'll be able to effectively align an AGI
| with ethics we ourselves don't even possess?
|
| I recommend Robert Miles on YouTube for a few lessons on the
| challenges of creating friendly/aligned AIs. (And why your
| hope here is somewhat ludicrous).
| ilaksh wrote:
| I am very aware of all of the challenges. It was an
| oversimplification of my thoughts.
|
| I feel that working on that kind of AI that emulates
| animals with true autonomy etc. in the short term is a very
| bad idea, and totally unnecessary to get most of the
| benefits of general purpose AI.
|
| However, realistically, most people do not recognize this,
| and even the ones that do, many will pursue this dangerous
| type of ultra humanlike autonomous AGI. So it's going to
| happen.
|
| In the long run it will be better for the evolution of
| intelligent life. In the short run it will probably be a
| disaster for humans.
| klodolph wrote:
| My attitude towards cheating is that college students have
| underdeveloped prefontal cortexes, may have come from high
| schools where the teachers didn't care or weren't able to catch
| cheaters, may have come from an environment with rampant
| cheating, etc.
|
| If a student believes that they can get away with cheating, and
| isn't going to get a good grade otherwise, it's completely
| logical to cheat, from the perspective of self-interest.
|
| If a teacher believes that they can put a cheater on the right
| course, and convince them to stop cheating, it's completely
| logical to take the opportunity to do that.
|
| Meanwhile, the academic integrity policies for a college are
| designed to catch cheaters that would otherwise slip through
| the cracks, while still giving people a chance to change their
| ways. If you expel people for cheating once, you put the burden
| on each single professor--you're making them the judge, jury,
| and executioner, so to speak. That makes their job more
| difficult, because they have to weigh much more serious
| consequences for cheaters in their class. So you give
| individual professors discretion, but collect their findings
| for review by an academic integrity board.
|
| This seems like an effective system.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| > When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah,
| kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first."
|
| I guess it differs. Here a student caught cheating is expelled
| for 6 months and have their student grants withdrawn.
| tgv wrote:
| > how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes
|
| You can safely assume many did, because every time teachers
| check for cheating and plagiarism, they find a lot, and they
| rarely look for it.
|
| > Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly
| and willingly passes students who cheat
|
| Anyone who considers it a necessary step in life, and doesn't
| care about the consequences.
|
| It's totally shitty, and it's the consequence of letting so
| many people in, while at the same time incentivizing schools
| for throughput and making life hard for the staff. Then you get
| at a point where nobody cares anymore, and everything gets
| smothered under a layer of understanding.
|
| The article demonstrates it. The author of the article is also
| making the right noises: "I learn more from my students than
| they learn from me", and similar bullshit. He also doesn't
| teach a hard course: it seems to be a cogsci intro. Yet he's
| under pressure not to flunk everyone, and offers some of the
| easiest ways out: writing a single multiple choice question.
| And since that didn't make them pass either, they had to
| rewrite some blathering statement about academic integrity.
| It's really about letting them pass, under the guise of caring
| for students, and teaching.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It is probably like the police attitude toward smaller level
| theft and mugging. Try getting cops to meaningfully respond to
| a theft or someone mugging you. You will not.
|
| There is just so much bad behaviour in society that we have
| come to accept it.
| derac wrote:
| This is why there should be zero tolerance for cheating.
| Immediate expulsion imo.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| > People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of
| accept it.
|
| In pro bodybuilding, steroids are nominally illegal, but
| essentially every pro bodybuilder uses them, the physique
| necessary to be competitive in pro contests is not achievable
| without them, and the people running bodybuilding shows
| deliberately make no effort to enforce this rule.
|
| In that kind of context it's hard for me to say the "cheaters"
| are doing anything wrong in any practical sense. Nobody
| involved actually believes in the rule they're breaking.
|
| I think cheaters in other arenas can rationalize away to
| themselves that their context is equivalent to the bodybuilding
| context I described above.
| kqr wrote:
| You're making a good point. We have to remember that rules
| about cheating are effectively social agreements within a
| group of people. If the majority of the people within that
| group don't (anymore) agree with the rule, for all intents
| and purposes it's no longer a rule -- even if it might
| nominally be stated somewhere as one.
|
| Culture and social arrangements evolve implicitly at first,
| and are only later encoded. Of course, the modern homo
| bureaucraticus might do well to be reminded of this.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Way too soft. I went through all of college without participating
| in anything like that, and you know why? I'm not a scumbag
| parasite. These rotten apples should have been filtered out of
| the system long ago. Their place in society is shoveling manure,
| not wasting valuable space in higher education.
| efitz wrote:
| I wish we would replace our current post-secondary education
| system with apprenticeships.
|
| Apprenticeships could combine some classroom instruction with
| some actual doing.
|
| Now you remove most of the incentive for cheating- the classroom
| stuff is directly relevant to you because you're going to have to
| use it shortly, maybe today. It's no longer the grade that's
| important; it's the knowledge.
|
| The benefit of actually learning the material becomes immediate
| and concrete. Tthere won't be any opportunity for cheating when
| you're in front of people actually expecting you to do the thing;
| you either can or you can't. And your livelihood now depends on
| it.
|
| The university system is hopelessly busted in so many ways. There
| is no way to fix it. But there are other ways to get
| knowledgeable, productive professionals.
| bckr wrote:
| For me, attending university was useful. I studied biochemistry
| but ended up in software engineering. That is a direct result
| of having met people and explored different options available
| to me in university. On top of that, my science and general
| education requirements helped me to think more broadly and
| deeply about the world.
|
| I think the apprenticeship model is awesome, and also available
| through bootcamps + internships.
| awsrocks wrote:
| zb1plus wrote:
| I have never understood why college professors / college classes
| are so uninnovative and have such an antagonistic approach to
| teaching/education. The entire grade culture at universities
| should be abolished in lieu of an evaluation system that is more
| reflective of the traits and skills that matter in industry and
| research environments. In CS programs geared towards helping
| graduates careers in industry, we should be rewarding students
| who help other succeed and in research oriented programs, we
| should have students conduct supervised research project oriented
| around their personal interests that require written and oral
| explanations of the work and why they choose the approach and
| what are the implications. There are so many easy ways to ensure
| cheating cannot occur that would also benefit students more than
| the current means of evaluation commonly used in higher
| education. On a semi related topic, if anyone is aware of
| research into experimental pedagogical approaches that move
| beyond traditional methods of evaluation and use concepts like
| mastery based learning in CS, I'd love to find a research group
| to work with on some ideas I have to improve instruction in CS
| and language learning.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You are completely right, the testing /score system is a
| terrible proxy for understanding and knowledge.
|
| It's also completely unfixable because the solutions you
| propose (which are obvious) don't scale.
|
| To understand this you only have to look at education through
| history. A long time ago college education was for a very tiny
| (well connected) section of society. Conceptually think of it
| as the aristocracy keeping themselves on top. Teaching staff
| ratio is high - small classes, lots of attention.
|
| Naturally education slowly opens to the masses. (GI Bill etc).
| So now there's a scaling problem. Much lower staff ratio, and a
| need to improve productivity. Think multiple choice, not
| essays. Lecturers don't know the names (never mind abilities)
| of Individual students.
|
| Your suggestion is both good, but impractical. There aren't
| enough people qualified to teach the way you have in mind, and
| even if there were the student could not afford them.
|
| We can offer a college education for the masses, we can give
| every college student an indepth real "education", but we can't
| do both.
|
| Although interestingly the _student_ who approaches a course
| with zeal, and engages teachers in every possible opportunity,
| will get the most out of the experience. In other words today
| the quality of the education rests on the student, not the
| teacher.
| necovek wrote:
| Quite a read, indeed.
|
| As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was
| always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I
| always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about
| comparing against others.
|
| Perhaps that's why I didn't care?
|
| Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes
| the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with
| high GPA, I let them be.
|
| There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade
| without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to
| study just to pass), which in the end result is not much
| different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging
| in the material) -- while the main difference is in fairness,
| that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability
| to teach adult students -- so I don't see why bother.
|
| The main question I have for the author is if they would have
| offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they
| had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was
| the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment
| in reworking the course?
|
| Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in
| promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one
| should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in
| risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is
| sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling -- and
| helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).
| Scramblejams wrote:
| _I always felt that my score was my own, and didn 't care about
| comparing against others._
|
| Tough to do when you're sharing a curve with a bunch of
| cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.
|
| I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few
| who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam
| copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people
| who copied each others' homework. It was frustrating to be on a
| curve with them.
|
| I had a few professors who didn't use curves. It was wonderful.
|
| I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and
| feel they're a sign that a professor hasn't done the hard work
| to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is
| expected to master.
|
| Open to counterarguments.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating,
| and feel they're a sign that a professor hasn't done the hard
| work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student
| is expected to master.
|
| I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students
| should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's
| inherently relative to what the typical student at that
| institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A
| is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it
| strongly implies that more material could have been covered.
|
| if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the
| original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a
| 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous
| school.
|
| ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good
| distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for
| people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty
| hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of
| making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright
| student will really shine, and you have enough signal to
| compress the range into the expected letters at the end.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| _there 's no objective criteria for what students should be
| "expected to master" in a particular course_
|
| Not exactly, but depending on the course you can get pretty
| close. In my engineering statics and solids classes, it
| mapped well with what you'd be expected to do when working
| as a stress engineer (which is what I worked in after
| school). In my heat transfer course, it mapped well with
| the responsibilities of a thermal engineer.
|
| _ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a
| good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs
| for people who didn 't try or understand at all. but it's
| pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the
| side of making things a little too hard. then the
| occasional bright student will really shine, and you have
| enough signal to compress the range into the expected
| letters at the end._
|
| And that's exactly what my professors who didn't curve
| managed to do. It was clear they worked very hard at
| prioritizing the important material, teaching it well, and
| testing it fairly. It was a breath of fresh air.
|
| But when the average score on an exam in one of my other
| classes was 22% -- and they weren't looking for the next
| Einstein, it was just another upper division engineering
| class, presumably the geniuses would have revealed
| themselves by that point -- it was clear that the professor
| wasn't even trying. Throw a bunch of crap on the test and
| let the curve sort it out, so the professor could get back
| to what they really wanted to spend their time on:
| research.
| [deleted]
| ftyers wrote:
| Research also happens to be what they are evaluated on
| for tenure/promotion etc. Teaching evaluations are
| generally a tiny part of that equation.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks
| a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.
|
| I've never heard of this interpretation before, it seems
| this is a difference in whether the GPA should represent a
| student's actual grade on assignments, or the student's
| overall achievement relative to their piers. It seems the
| curve exists for the latter ideology - you can't expect
| every FAANG recruiter to say "well they got 2.9 from
| Georgia Tech, that's better than this 3.4 from Duke", if
| they did, you'd probably have pretty arbitrary hirings
| (although, if it became policy, I can see some Googler
| making an internal tool to 'normalize' school GPAs);
| although it seems MIT has a "no curves" policy and
| graduates still manage top-tier GPAs.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I can't speak to what goes on in FAANG recruiting, but I
| was involved in hiring for a smaller company that
| recruited heavily from regional schools. we absolutely
| knew which schools were harder, as most of the younger
| engineers had graduated recently from that same set of
| schools. obviously GPA doesn't tell the whole story, and
| we preferred to decide based on work experience. but for
| junior hires and especially interns, there's not always a
| lot of signal to decide on. all things being equal, we
| would prefer someone with a 3.0 (or even lower, with a
| good explanation) from the rigorous stem school over
| someone with a 4.0 from the well-known party school.
| which is too bad, I'm sure there were some very bright
| people who went to the "party school", but their grading
| policy made it very difficult to distinguish them from
| their peers who barely had a pulse.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Tough to do when you're sharing a curve with a bunch of
| cheaters
|
| Are curves still that common these days? In my time at
| university, the only classes that got curved were a couple
| math classes that were curved in the students' favor.
| jefftk wrote:
| Cheating still a fairness issue even if the curve is "in
| your favor". The higher the scores of your classmates, the
| lower your post-curve score will be.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Sometimes a "curve" can be a test that isn't norm-
| referenced, but instead just curved up on a straight
| static curve. For example, 10*sqrt(n) on a very difficult
| final can provide a grade boost to lower grades. It might
| be easier to just raise grades than to modify the test,
| if you see students that you feel should have passed,
| fail.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, fair.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| over a decade ago, the only curved class I took was a
| calculus class entirely full of kids who went to college at
| 16, and the guy teaching it seemed to have no issue
| declaring that this class should contain the same
| proportion of C's as all his others, regardless of how well
| we learned calculus :)
| Sirened wrote:
| Curves are extremely common in STEM classes today at
| Berkeley. I think I've only had a handful of upper division
| classes that were not curved. A lot of the internal
| discussion on curving vs not curving is based on the fact
| that building an exam which generates a good distribution
| is _really_ hard, especially for classes where the
| understanding is very stratified due to differing
| backgrounds in the area.
| mrep wrote:
| I think it highly depends on the school and degree. All my
| math classes and most of my CS classes at Purdue were
| curved.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I agree with your opinion on curves (which aren't even a
| thing where I'm from), but cheating matters even in the
| absence of curves.
|
| If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions,
| grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying
| extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then
| someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically
| "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _grades matter for your future_
|
| Here's the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are
| cheating---they aren't doing their own homework.
| adolph wrote:
| "and the grades matter for your future"
|
| There's the key problem.
|
| _A vitality curve is a performance management practice that
| calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their
| coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking,
| and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE 's Jack Welch in the
| 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies
| practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
| ameister14 wrote:
| It's my opinion that Jack Welch was extremely bad for
| America. He did everything Deming pointed out didn't work
| long term and focused on profit above all, and got
| extremely lucky in the financial sector. As soon as the
| economy soured, his vaunted techniques failed miserably.
| Worst of all, he trained hundreds of future leaders to
| follow that model.
| adolph wrote:
| I'd agree that a zero-sum weakness-focused approach is
| maladaptive.
|
| Trying to consider the other hand reminds me of question
| I had at an all-hands last year: "If the only raises are
| annual review based, does the inflation rate mean that
| everyone else takes an effective pay cut?" The response
| hedged on HR doing market adjustments. Maybe Welch was
| just being realistic? Maybe encouraging folks to change
| employment until they are in a position in which they
| excel is the better option long term?
|
| I don't know. There's a saying "it's cruel to be kind"
| and maybe I'm too soft to survive.
| ameister14 wrote:
| It's not only that, though - if you reward the top 10% of
| performers and fire the bottom 10%, say, but don't
| actually make sure that said performance is due to skill
| and not a degree of randomness you may not improve at
| all.
|
| You also create an attitude of fear which is not
| conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in
| the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but
| it's not a good principle.
|
| Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management
| is better than passive with guiderails like prodding
| reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review
| nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have
| you?
|
| The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and
| become less productive as it nears, it takes time that
| would be better spent on other things and it's not
| personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If
| done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially
| doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize
| the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right
| after it happens, people associate the behavior with the
| reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can
| intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to
| mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on
| arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold
| everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate
| if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of
| them.
|
| Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of
| improving their work because the work improvement has
| less impact on their remuneration.
|
| All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good
| tool.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > sharing a curve
|
| It's beyond me why is this even allowed.
|
| Are you grading results of your educational effort or are you
| organizing a beauty pageant?
|
| Not grading on a curve should be part of academic integrity
| standards.
| bckr wrote:
| In my experience it's to help more people pass. If the
| natural distribution has 70% as the average, no curve is
| applied. Above-average outliers (the occasional 100%
| scores) would be removed from the calculation.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I always share the exams I set (and the solutions) with my
| students. Inhace necer understood the idea that keeping them
| "secret" is somehow useful.
|
| Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my
| students learning my style rather yhan not.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Any professor who has to grade on a curve is a professor who
| shouldn't be allowed to make tests or assignments.
| necovek wrote:
| How do you know if grades matter for your future? In my first
| uni year, I had no idea I'd get a job before my studies were
| over.
|
| If there's an actual correspondence (eg you get next year
| scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above
| X), that's an incentive to cheat, so there is one issue.
|
| And while curves do suck, it also sucks to be compared with
| someone having photographic memory in most exams where that
| is a very useful skill (even though the exam is not
| sttempting to favout photographic memory). Or some lazy bag
| who is more talented at something so it took you 10x more
| effort to get the same understanding. Basically, you are
| stacked against so much, that cheating is just a small part
| of all of that.
|
| In short, it sucks being compared to people using everything
| they can to their advantage. But then again, that's what
| happens past university too, so it's just real life.
| Spivak wrote:
| Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they
| would be useless, there's always that one kid) so unless
| everyone except you is cheating you're usually fine.
|
| There are two cases, usually, where curves make sense.
|
| * When the professor doesn't actually know how hard the exam
| is because it's a new test. And since people save tests
| that's most classes.
|
| * When the professor is actually trying to find that one kid.
| This is super common in theoretical maths. The exams are
| incredibly hard with the expectation that you won't finish it
| and graded on a curve or some other measure like "the test is
| out 100 points but there are 200 possible." But when someone
| gets a perfect score you direct them to the phd program.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| _Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they
| would be useless, there's always that one kid) so unless
| everyone except you is cheating you're usually fine_
|
| There's a big range between "that one kid" and "everyone".
| In some of my courses it'd be easy to believe 15% were
| cheating in some way. Another comment in this thread put
| the share at 50%. How's a curve going to deal with that?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from
| prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied
| each others' homework
|
| I feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on
| drugs did put in the work and the effort, after all.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Okay, then I'm going up against people who are willing to
| risk their health to gain an advantage. Should I be
| penalized because I'm trying to make sure my equipment's
| going to last as long as I need it?
|
| I suppose we accept that in sports -- even without doping,
| if somebody's gonna sacrifice their body to make a play
| then that's their call -- but in academia, too?
| necovek wrote:
| That's what people do all the time.
|
| In academia, pulling all-nighters to meet unreasonable
| demands, psychological toll of political games, jerk
| mentors and professors...
|
| In sports, I know of no-one participating even
| recreationally who does not have a lingering sports
| injury (me included).
|
| Basically, if you want "your equipment to last", you
| would not participate in any high level sports at all.
| necovek wrote:
| For what it's worth, I feel similar to you, including for
| sports. Basically, life threatening things should be
| prohibited, but everything else is free-for-all.
|
| This would eliminate a lot of cheating, and a lot of
| advantages for those in a good position (better access to
| new drugs and nutrition, better recovery programs, better
| training programs -- aren't they all unfair at some
| level?)...
|
| The ultimate goal is to get us to experience the top level
| combination of talent and effort, both in science/work and
| otherwise. Getting there is _never_ going to be completely
| fair (hey, you scored better on it even though you prepared
| for 3 days and I took 30: tough luck for me, I guess, but
| the fact you are more talented for that _exam_ is not
| something I can do anything about).
|
| I've also seen non-cheating people who are excellent at
| exam taking (great scores) without ever taking anything
| from the actual material (zero learnings). I've never felt
| threatened by them either, though maybe I would have if I
| wanted to pursue an academic career.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I would pay money to have a "open rules" olympics kind of
| event. Drugs? Cybernetics? Let's do it.
| Sirened wrote:
| For both academics and the olympics though, this ends up
| being an arms race that ends up just hurting those who
| participate. You wouldn't want an all natural, 90th
| percentile athlete to feel like the only way they can get
| ahead (or, worse, even just stay where they are) is by
| taking drugs with dangerous side effects. Similarly, we
| surely don't want students who are already doing just
| alright to feel like they _need_ to get an off-script
| bottle of adderall in order to not fall behind their
| peers.
| necovek wrote:
| A 90th percentile athlete today is likely anything but
| all natural today.
|
| By the same measure, pain killers, kinesio tapes,
| surgeries, ice baths: they are routine stuff for common
| athletes over-exerting themselves.
|
| I've never seen anyone naturally grow a kinesio tape, yet
| I think 90% of people in pro sports wear them. :)
|
| It always was and remains a question of where we draw the
| line?
|
| I think that the rule should be the same for the entire
| population -- if we are aware of the adverse effects,
| prescription required.
| apocolyps6 wrote:
| There's a big grey area between the life threatening
| stuff, and the stuff that will slowly mess you up for
| life. Simple example, but the drugs people take for pain
| increase your odds of a heart attack if taken habitually.
| It feels deeply unethical to have "take drugs that will
| ruin you once your career is over" be the minimum
| requirement for a career in sports.
| necovek wrote:
| Sure, that big grey area also includes paracetamol,
| alcohol, smoking, even caffeine... -- all allowed for
| both students and athletes even though we know of harm
| they can produce.
|
| Many sports are life-ruinous by nature (check out those
| NFL head injury studies), yet we incentivise people to
| take part in them (by paying a lot for the games).
|
| I always cringe when I hear from pro sportspeople how
| engaging in sports is promoting a healthy lifestyle: I
| mean, sure, unless overdone like all pro sports do.
| ameister14 wrote:
| I don't. Steroids are banned from competitive sports for a
| reason.
| raegis wrote:
| > As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I
| was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it:
| I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about
| comparing against others.
|
| Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about
| cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of
| missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and
| brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more
| aggressively ever since.
|
| In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2
| or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting
| the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the
| prior semester.
|
| This stuff really matters.
| necovek wrote:
| Oh, it sure does matter. Like it matters to most every
| student (teenage or college) how they are perceived by their
| most popular peers. I.e. it's a human trait to care about
| things that should not really bother us.
|
| What I am saying is that it shouldn't.
| pvg wrote:
| _Another thing is that college is voluntary_
|
| You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules.
| If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a
| different institution with different rules and standards. The
| goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating
| undermines that.
| necovek wrote:
| If you _are_ doing that, why do you care about others not
| doing it?
|
| I went there for learning, and I never felt that was
| undermined by others' cheating.
|
| How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in
| college?
|
| I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or
| scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve
| graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning
| -- which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but
| as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can
| either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting
| that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which
| pushes many into cheating as well).
|
| Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought
| up by the author in the article.
| pvg wrote:
| _If you are doing that, why do you care about others not
| doing it?_
|
| Because there is no way to measure whether the teaching and
| learning is effective if you just make stuff up. There is
| no way to do research if you just make stuff up. There is
| no way to advance human knowledge if you just make stuff
| up. It's not some convoluted thing, a lot of systems,
| probably most you encounter in adult life in an
| industrialized society, depend on essentially voluntary
| cooperation.
|
| That's not to say the way universities work is somehow
| optimal but again, as you point out yourself, you don't
| have participate if you think their methods are too poor to
| bother with.
| necovek wrote:
| I am not sure what type of making stuff up are you
| referring to? How does that flow from my claim that
| cheating won't affect learning for those who don't cheat?
| xpe wrote:
| Well said. To use the economics terminology, there are
| negative externalities resulting from others cheating.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| The goal of college is to receive a degree to unlock job
| postings.
|
| I did not go to college to "learn", and I'm not sure I know
| anyone who did.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| From a purely depressingly pragmatic perspective, yes you
| are correct. But for me it was an opportunity to be
| immersed in a world of abstract knowledge and the exchange
| of ideas - an experience that I would not trade for
| anything.
|
| It is depressing when I hear from people otherwise, I can't
| imagine missing out on the joy of learning.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| It can be both. You can learn and earn those credentials.
| ameister14 wrote:
| I did. I didn't graduate with a great GPA but I learned a
| heck of a lot and got that same degree, unlocking job
| postings.
| xpe wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that. Care to share a bit of your story?
| Spivak wrote:
| Yea but the pointscoring is literally all that matters, if
| you change the incentives you'll see the behavior change with
| it.
|
| If you take away the aspect of college as "a place to get a
| credential" you'll see the cheating stop. Instead for those
| credentials just hold exams like the AP, ACT, SAT, RHCSE, or
| the 7 Actuarial exams. No college required. Whatever you do
| to pass them is fine.
|
| Then make college totally ungraded except as a mechanism for
| student feedback. Have tracks for people that just want the
| credentials (just like the APs) that terminate at the exams.
| All other courses are just for people who are genuinely
| interested and confer no status or praise.
|
| Now the incentives are aligned. Outside of the testing areas
| there is literally zero reason for anyone to cheat, and non-
| credential classes have to actually be interring, engaging,
| and useful to students for anyone to take them.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >If you take away the aspect of college as "a place to get
| a credential" you'll see the cheating stop.
|
| No, you won't. People will cheat because it is perceived to
| be easier than doing the work generally, even if they don't
| have the external incentive of the score meaning something.
|
| People cheat at casual games of "Call of Duty;" not even
| ranked.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| college is voluntary like taxes are voluntary
| cleandreams wrote:
| As a non-cheater I thought this was hilarious. It could be on tv.
| I thought the prof handled it very well. Recently I was invited
| to a discord for a calculus class. I didn't join. I wonder if
| cheating was going on.
| anjc wrote:
| Very disappointed at the cynicism in this thread. It seems that
| many people believe cheating is acceptable, or even necessary.
|
| There is another aspect to cheating that I don't see mentioned.
| When lazy students become accustomed to cutting corners, they
| later become a legal liability as postgrads and employees, in
| terms of, for example, unethical research practices, copyright
| theft, and so on. I've seen this in my professional career from
| people who should know better, and I wish they were reprimanded
| as students rather than causing issues for the organisations that
| they're a part of.
|
| There are pedagogical reasons to stop students from cheating
| early on, but it should be prevented for practical real-world
| reasons also.
| yunohn wrote:
| The amount of effort that this person put into the cheating
| analysis, and this blog post, is honestly super concerning.
|
| I don't understand the perspective of an educator who doesn't
| expect cheating, and then instead of shutting down the chat
| immediately, keeps it open the whole semester in some fucked up
| moralistic detective game.
|
| I truly feel like this was probably a boring class and the
| opposite of engaging. A very one sided view, we don't see the
| student's perspective at all, outside of the cheating.
| [deleted]
| erikerikson wrote:
| When you cheat in school...
|
| ...you cheat yourself out of an education - the opportunity to
| learn from and join a community of true experts.
|
| ...you cheat the society in which you live that created and
| supported you then provided you an educational opportunity.
|
| ...it's a pretty big middle finger to every student who didn't
| get the spot you did.
|
| Probably the solution is to avoid the gatekeeping role degrees
| have played. Perhaps even to recognize and harness the positive
| aspects of the collaborative and knowledge sharing behaviors that
| can also serve you and the society you live in.
| grahamm wrote:
| Probably get burnt for this but too many animated gifs.
| c-fe wrote:
| I had the same problem, I really struggled to focus on the
| article with all the gifs. They reminded me of the ads that im
| not seeing because of my adblocker. I wish I could easily block
| gifs in Safari
| 130e13a wrote:
| agree with you, i hid them all with a simple ublock origin
| filter: `.gif|$domain=crumplab.com,image`
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I've heard a lot of the same from the professors I'm close to,
| even when taking significant measures to prevent or reduce the
| incentive to cheat (like making the exam less important, making
| it open internet but no communication or using that annoyingly
| intrusive lockdown browser). Even when having the ability to look
| things up on the internet, there were cases of it being
| relatively obvious when people were communicating (not that I
| know how).
|
| Many of them just ended up cancelling the results for those exams
| outright.
| panda888888 wrote:
| To play devil's advocate here, was it clear that the students
| knew they were cheating and that their behavior was unacceptable?
|
| If a teacher told me that the work was open book, open notes,
| open internet, I might legitimately believe that I could openly
| talk to people about it. Probably not for an exam, but for a low-
| stakes, "check your knowledge" type of take-home quiz? Maybe.
|
| I'm not sure if this is a generational divide or if the author's
| description of the rules was unclear, but I wonder if some
| students legitimately didn't realize they were cheating.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Here's what the article said:
|
| > Also, by the way, I should say that the quizzes were entirely
| open book and open note. All of the course material was online
| and freely available to the students. The quizzes were
| individual assignments, and students were not supposed to help
| each other by sharing questions or answers.
|
| That seems clear enough, so assuming the syllabus said
| something similar, I'm fairly confident that the students did
| know they weren't supposed to be doing what they were doing.
| Also, if they thought they weren't doing anything wrong, then
| they wouldn't have been so worried about a snitch.
| electrondood wrote:
| Really enjoyed reading this. Well written.
| phamilton wrote:
| In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a
| fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and
| Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on
| opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate.
|
| The cultures could not have been any more different. The
| engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion.
| The professors would sometimes find out a student copied some
| code and would simply ask "Well, do you understand it?".
|
| The computer science labs were dead quiet. Strict policies around
| code plagiarism were posted at every door (instant fail and a 1
| year ban from any CS class). People were terrified of helping
| each other and so everyone just worked in isolation.
|
| I learned more in the engineering labs and made deeper
| connections with people. The coursework was frankly harder, we
| built more complex things completely from scratch, but because of
| the collaborative culture I was able to learn from my peers,
| tackle hard problems, and retain the information.
| EduardLev wrote:
| Was looking for this! I'm a Chemical Engineering grad who's in
| a Computer Science masters program currently. Comparing the
| two, the collaboration in my engineering classes far surpasses
| anything that's occurred in my CS classes. Almost everything we
| did in Engineering would have been considered "cheating" in CS.
| In retrospect, I definitely learned more than I would have from
| the collaboration and environment in undergrad.
| scottlamb wrote:
| I took for-majors Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science
| classes, 20 years ago. Here's what I saw:
|
| In freshman engineering courses [*], students would gather and
| do the assignments. They would divide and conquer questions,
| sharing answers. This was definitely cheating. (I didn't
| participate. But I didn't seriously consider reporting it
| either; I wanted to have friends...) The assignments were
| repetitive and stupid, so this was a rational if dishonest
| coping strategy. TAs certainly knew this happened. I had a bad
| habit of skipping dumb assignments. One TA actually emailed me
| something along the lines of "why don't you just cheat like
| everyone else".
|
| In physics classes, students would gather and do the
| assignments. They would each do all the work. When someone got
| stuck, others would suggest techniques, help them where they
| were stuck, etc. Collaborative and honest. The assignments had
| far fewer problems, each unique and involved, done from first
| principles. Homework was graded on showing (extensive) work as
| well as the answers. If folks had skipped/copied problems, they
| would have missed out on great learning opportunities and
| likely flunked the exams even if they weren't caught.
|
| In computer science classes, I don't recall students gathering
| to do the assignments. Maybe I just wasn't part of the group.
| (Many of my friends were in engineering, and most of my
| academic time was spent in the physics building.) Maybe they
| just didn't work together, similar to what you observed. What I
| do know is that a lot of students had very little
| understanding, and I was surprised they got degrees.
|
| Of course, I prefer the physics approach. It's probably not a
| discipline-wide thing though as much as that my school had a
| great physics department and a lousy CS department. More
| similarities than I expected in your story, though, despite
| presumably different schools and times.
|
| [*] I dropped my electrical/computer engineering major after
| freshman year. I graduated with a comp sci major + physics
| minor. Maybe later engineering courses were different.
| nynx wrote:
| This is a small part of why I majored in engineering
| (Engineering Science/Physics) instead of comp sci. It seemed
| like a very oppressive environment to learn in, especially when
| I already had years of experience with programming.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think American teacher often don't appreciate faculty vs
| student dynamics. They think they are there to help each of
| their students achieve academic success.
|
| Education mostly doesn't work like that for most people in most
| places.
|
| Teachers are not allies of students. They are the enemy, they
| are the problem. Students are rarely interested in learning.
| They are interested for this whole thing to be over and with a
| decent result.
|
| This adversity pushes students to cooperate against the
| faculty. That's a strong motivator to connect and support each
| other in the face of common enemy. And they are learning a lot
| from each other, both in terms of knowledge and cooperation.
| There are also freeloaders in that cooperation that come just
| for the answers. But when the answer is not as easy as picking
| a letter, for example the answer is a way of solving a class of
| problems even those cheaters learn from this coopeartion. And
| they learn more than they could learn from their teachers.
|
| By exploiting adversarial dynamics, having good materials
| available and technically ensuring it's hard to cheat trachers
| can basically have half of their teaching work done by the
| students as they teach each other. This benefits everybody.
| [deleted]
| krupan wrote:
| Sounds like you and I were at the same college! Us CompE's
| would usually raise a ruckus in the computer science labs too
| though. Good times.
| vegadw wrote:
| Odd, I'm also a Comp Eng grad and my experience was exactly the
| same - including the cross campus bit. I went to University of
| Nebraska - Lincoln.
|
| There was still definitely a fair amount of real cheating
| though. Especially during the online classes of COVID.
|
| Most of the cheating I saw was from classes that had clearly
| had difficulty creep up year after year due to un-caught
| cheating though, and had truly awful professors. Chegg, I
| think, has really inflated the difficulty for the hosest
| people.
|
| I think the most common cheating i actually saw in engineering
| was group work where only 1 person did anything. Hell, I have
| an example on my GitHub where my partner made one commit with
| one line of code which I then had to redo anyway.
| native_samples wrote:
| Group work is often set up specifically to force this kind of
| "cheating". My course used it as a way to disguise the fact
| that students weren't learning programming. They tested
| everyone at the very start of the course to locate people who
| already were self taught, then assigned each group one self
| taught person who ended up doing all the work. The rest ride
| for free, everyone passes and the scam continues.
|
| I've tasted university education very little ever since.
| Academia is just flooded with intellectual fraud of all
| kinds. The students sense the lack of seriousness and
| accountability and realize that no matter what is said,
| that'll get away with it because the profs don't really care
| and in fact depend on cheating to survive.
| kqr wrote:
| That collaboration and cooperation often counts as cheating in
| our education system is a stupid relic from some hundred years
| ago.
|
| If you want to mould a Taylorist's dream of obedient, quiet
| factory workers who spend their lives making the left side of
| the head of a pin then yeah, go ahead and discourage
| cooperation.
|
| For anything else? Especially the creative work that will be
| expected of current students in the future? Cooperation should
| be a major goal of education.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > For example, in this course I ran short multiple choice quizzes
| each week. Students could take the quiz as many times as they
| wanted during the week. The quiz questions changed each time
| (pulled randomly from a pool), and students always got their most
| recent quiz grade. The quizzes were low stakes. I also told
| students that taking the quizzes would help them study for the
| midterms, which would contain questions from the quizzes.
|
| So... your students were... studying? This isn't cheating.
| There's more in the article that clearly frames these quizzes as
| learning reinforcement and permissive in how the students take
| them. The students were doing what was intended: studying the
| material and preparing for the exam that matters. Good for them.
| Shame it got missed in the zealous pursuit of a pervasive
| cheating racket.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| And yet low-stakes cheating on these quizzes escalated to
| blatant cheating on the midterms, which the cheaters bombed
| once that was thwarted. Classifying this as "studying" is far
| too generous given the objective evidence of performance.
| Sirened wrote:
| Yeah I caught that too. Overall very good article, but I did
| find it bizarre that they were made that students were
| collecting past quizzes into reference material. This seems
| like one of the few legitimate uses of these sorts of class
| groups
| vehementi wrote:
| Correct, that is not the cheating OP is talking about. Take
| another read.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Have so far read up to part III (not inclusive)
|
| I've read the story of a failing teacher, who set up his class in
| a way which normal sharing of experience and information among
| classmates would fall under the technical definition of
| "cheating". In order to "not cheat", students had to artificially
| isolate themselves, alienate themselves from their classmates.
| For a person of an earlier generation, who did not take online
| examples when also being in a group chat on their phone, that may
| seem like not much of a requirement (and even then I'm not sure.)
|
| The responsibility for this debacle lies squarely on the
| teacher's shoulders - perhaps with some responsibility on the
| department/faculty for lack of oversight and guidance regarding
| expected dynamics for different ways of evaluating student
| achievements.
|
| Rule of thumb: When most people fail, the failure is systematic.
|
| One must also wonder about the maturity of these students. I'm
| wondering if, over the past couple of decades, a more childish
| attitude and behavior is not presented as acceptable for a longer
| period of time. Suddenly these, well, judging by the chat
| messages, children, come up against the wall of having to obey a
| semi-arbitrary rule, or else. It seems like they have not been
| directed along a path where they could take gradual steps to
| scale this wall. This is perhaps less of the teacher's
| responsibility, but he must still realize that's the kind of
| student cohort he is facing.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I think there is a fundamental error in the teacher behaviour. If
| a student cheat in a physical class, would they wait until the
| end of the examn/semester or call it out unmediately? Why did he
| let it go on and on? With the change of paradigm with remote
| learning it has been a lot of grey areas, and students principles
| have been tested. On the teachers side they seem to focus too
| much in <<how clever>> they are they can spot the cheating, but
| did tjey set up the boundaries clearly?
| pchangr wrote:
| I think the primary goal of a teacher is for their students to
| learn. The teacher understood this and look for way to
| discourage the cheating as a second priority and went on the
| "engaging material" creation first. Removing the behavior by
| removing the incentive.
|
| As my HS profesor used to say.. "Locks were created to prevent
| honest people from stealing, thieves will just break whatever
| lock they find."
|
| The goal is not to discourage cheating by punishment but rather
| to understand the incentives and address them.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| I greatly respect that you were empathetic with the students. The
| world needs more professors like you. Truly my favorite read on
| Hacker News so far.
| frob wrote:
| I've had to deal with cheating in multiple classes I've taught.
| The second worst was when someone took their friend's code and
| just change the name in the header comment. They tried to claim
| they didn't copy but I had timestamps.
|
| The worst was when a student turned my own solutions back into me
| with a few variable names changed.
| spacecadet_ wrote:
| Haven't read the entire post yet, but must say that this was the
| page that finally made me look into how a webpage works so I
| could hide the gifs to read the actual content in peace. Why
| would anyone, much less a cognitive psychologist, think it's a
| good idea to take a fairly long piece of text and then liberally
| shower it with attention-grabbing moving images? Must be Twitter
| brain.
| DeWilde wrote:
| I don't see a point in blaming students for cheating, or trying
| to give them a guilty conscious about how they are impacting
| students in curve grading scenarios.
|
| The moral indignation that I'm seeing in the comments about this
| issue is just silly as the students are just acting the way
| humans act. Especially given the fact that most students are in
| their late teens or early 20's.
|
| Cheating is just human nature, especially that some people see a
| degree a gateway to success or even as survival (no degree no
| job, no job no food). And as survival machines, like all beings,
| people will do whatever it takes to get a degree, including
| cheating least of all.
|
| While college is an academic institution that is supposed to be
| about acquiring knowledge, the fact that almost every well paying
| job requires a degree perverses the incentives leading it to be a
| place where you get a diploma so you can move on with your life.
|
| So should we just tolerate cheating, with all this in mind? No, I
| think the burden of preventing cheating should be on the schools
| themselves to design testing in a way that makes cheating harder
| than actually learning the subject and to make learning more
| engaging even for those who are there just to get a diploma. This
| is hard of course.
|
| An even better solution would be to fix our current system that
| creates these perverse incentives. But that is even harder and I
| can't even phantom how that would be done.
| frellus wrote:
| "In at least 150 words, demonstrate your understanding of what it
| means to behave according to a high standard of personal and
| academic integrity" -- should have made that 2000 words, minimum.
|
| Great write-up, more than fair teacher who wants only what's best
| for their students.
| MBCook wrote:
| Honestly if they couldn't do 150 without plagiarizing it,
| what's the chance they could do 2000?
| xpe wrote:
| > Honestly if they couldn't do 150 without plagiarizing it,
| what's the chance they could do 2000?
|
| You've lumped too many people together in your use of "they".
|
| In the author's own words:
|
| > The semester from hell ended. Some students still failed.
| Some did some more plagiarism and failed. But, most of them
| got decent grades and engaged substantially with the course
| material. A small win for me and them.
| xpe wrote:
| I think a poster above suggested 2000 words because it would
| require more thought and reflection than only 150.
|
| Whatever the word count, the instructor seems motivated to
| discover plagiarism.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Now that's some stunning sadism Mr. Crump. Watching them run to
| their doom, letting them collect further violations, investing
| absurd amounts of time into punishing them. Has R ever been used
| for something more nefarious?
|
| If a class can be passed by this kind of cheating, it's a shit
| class, simple as that.
|
| Classes need to be designed with the knowledge in mind, that the
| modern student is a highly social, cooperative creature that grew
| up with cheating being completely normal.
|
| I designed classes by 80% of credit being given for big, final
| projects and the verbal, live ,,defensio style" explanation they
| had to do for their projects, with me asking class general and
| project specific questions that made detecting fraud and grading
| very easy.
|
| Your saving grace might be that you actually managed to create a
| somewhat more engaging and useful class after all. But besides
| that, your behavior was sadistic and frankly, inhumane.
| user8139471 wrote:
| bad bot
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220529083727/https://news.ycom...
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Content has been reviewed by a human and deemed appropriate.
| Voting engagement has been high and score is currently +1.
|
| This response has been generated by GPT3.
| hit8run wrote:
| The whole capitalist system is broken. Not only the teaching
| part. Our world is ridiculously fucked up and we can count the
| days till it will collapse.
| mastermedo wrote:
| I suggest adding an estimated reading time by the title. It took
| me ~45min, and I loved every other minute of it. The fillers were
| not so fun, but I enjoyed the way the promises pull the reader
| back into the story.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| At the very end of the day, none of the economic consequences
| really matter, but the honest student gets to feel good about
| themselves for having integrity, the remorseful dishonest student
| feels remorse, and the amoral dishonest student was lost from the
| start.
| rsecora wrote:
| Paralelisms with deep learning.
|
| He mixed training data (pool of quiz) with test data.
|
| By the second midterm, he changed the approach to catch the
| cheaters.
| twodave wrote:
| Software engineering in general does not test well. It is, like
| many trades, best learned by modeling. This isn't really
| conducive to large classrooms/numbers of students. In the end
| copying is perhaps exactly the best way to learn good programming
| practices.
|
| What do we do to train our more junior coworkers? Tell them to
| figure it out? Sink or swim? No, we write mountains of
| documentation, examples, pair program, etc. We actually value
| consistency and predictability between engineers. We like doing
| all these things universities tend not to do.
| realitysballs wrote:
| I hate to be a cynic here but I feel like education should be
| engineered in a manner that either :
|
| (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and create
| curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in mind.
|
| (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if someone
| is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or knowledge
| gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
| memling wrote:
| > (B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if
| someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or
| knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest.
|
| When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if
| you failed the final, you failed the course.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Strongly agree with (A). As a current college student, the most
| interesting assignments are the hardest to cheat on.
|
| That is, I'd strongly prefer an exam where I can write an essay
| to show my understanding of a topic to a series of multiple
| choice questions where I just regurgitate the lectures.
|
| Unfortunately, most of my professors reuse old content verbatim
| (usually content they didn't even write themselves in the first
| place) and put it in the easiest to grade format possible
| (multiple choice/auto graded math). My CS classes are
| concerningly light on actually writing code.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Vivid memories of my high school literature teacher reading
| Cliff's Notes and ensuring her tests covered things not
| discussed in the notes...
| acwan93 wrote:
| I like A) simply because sometime during college I became a
| terrible test taker. I realized that I'm very good at projects
| and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn't
| articulate that in the traditional exam or problem sets.
|
| When it came time to anything that involved presentations or
| demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the
| topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more
| engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe
| cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it
| actually give a damn.
| nr2x wrote:
| (C) don't use exams, period.
| realitysballs wrote:
| You might call (C) and extension of (A) . Avoiding all
| pedagogical tools that can be systematically cheated on , is
| an effective way to reduce cheating.
| nr2x wrote:
| It's the only way.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Give exams in a room, proctored, on paper, at a scheduled
| time. Open book/open note -- like real life. Everyone
| takes it at the same time. If you aren't there (without a
| good reason) you fail.
| Sirened wrote:
| that just makes it harder. Students have been cheating on
| in person exams since the dawn of time. You get people
| texting in the exam, people going to the bathroom and
| looking up answers, students paying other students to
| take the exam for them, and on and on and on. There is no
| exam that can't be cheated on. I'm sure that if I weren't
| so good at school and had significantly fewer morals, I
| would have been _great_ at cheating on exams
| nr2x wrote:
| The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for
| actual learning to start with. The fact is profs by and
| large don't give a shit about teaching quality, let alone
| learning, and most want to toss up an exam on the
| learning platform, get grades submitted before the
| deadline, and move on.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The deeper point is an exam is a very poor proxy for
| actual learning to start with.
|
| It's far from perfect, but it's better than the
| alternatives, and various organizations and people and
| powers-that-be reasonably want some kind of measure of
| whether someone actually learned something in a
| class/degree.
| jdshaffer wrote:
| A lot of professors would prefer to skip exams that
| become a part of your grade. However, we (I teach at a
| college) are REQUIRED to at least give a final exam and
| are REQUIRED to have that as a part of their grade.
| _sigh_
|
| I'd much rather teach and talk and enjoy with my
| students, but, alas, the design of most universities box
| us in at different levels (and let's not even get started
| on the "must publish research" side of teaching).
|
| Just my $0.02.
| nr2x wrote:
| I used to teach myself, but thank god I didn't have that
| level of meddling.
| t-3 wrote:
| Exams should be fine as a condition of entry, advancing grade
| rank, or graduating, but teachers need to be spending the
| majority of their working time teaching, not ranking and
| scoring and having to deal with all the overhead of grading.
| Evaluating whether or not a student has bothered to learn can
| wait until they attempt to claim a diploma or certification.
| nr2x wrote:
| Which is why credentialism and learning are very different
| things.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > (A) assumes cheating will take place whenever possible and
| create curriculum , assignments, quizzes and exams with this in
| mind.
|
| If college degrees themselves held no real value, and the
| purpose of a college education in terms of career was to
| prepare you for a comprehensive exam, I think you'd see
| radically different behavior. Grades would no longer matter, or
| even exist, so cheating your way through a class would seem
| pointless.
|
| Creating a comprehensive exam that meaningfully tests a college
| degree's worth of education seems like it'd be near impossible
| though.
| cgriswald wrote:
| There are two problems with (B). The first is that however you
| disincentivize it at the local level, the greater society
| incentivizes it by pairing earning a degree (as opposed to
| gaining knowledge) with greater earnings. The second is that
| people will still get away with cheating.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Universities shouldn't be credential factories.
|
| Get rid of grading and nobody cheats.
|
| Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation
| more like PhD defense.
| alar44 wrote:
| I'd argue that's exactly what they're for.
|
| If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades,
| it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Some people learn better when instructed, classes bring
| structure needed by all but the most self motivated, and
| some things are very difficult to learn without engaging
| with instructors and fellow students.
|
| The thing university seems to do the most these days is
| weed out people that don't have the resources or ability to
| navigate the game put together which doesn't have that much
| to do any more with education. A liberal education was by
| definition intended to make one free, now university is
| quite a lot about initiating people into wage slavery by
| putting them in serious debt and only graduating people who
| are good enough at following rules in complicated somewhat
| pointless exercises. It is unclear if this process is
| shaping or shaped by our economy.
| alar44 wrote:
| Can we drop the wage slavery and crazy college debt
| garbage? You can get a fine education at any number of
| state schools that won't put you $250k in debt.
|
| I really don't feel sorry for people who attend Ivy
| league schools and rack up debt like that. They know
| exactly what they're getting into.
|
| I didn't complete college and am making more than many of
| my peers who did and are still paying off debt 20 years
| later.
|
| If you can't navigate college hand holding, you'll be
| fucked in the real world.
|
| I believe college is currently serving it's function.
| Elof wrote:
| If you went to college 20 years (or more) ago, things
| have changed a bit. Everything is more expensive and
| income hasn't risen to catch up.
| https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-
| for-co...
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Your personal anecdote is just that. It doesn't make for
| very strong evidence.
| caoilte wrote:
| Academically universities are to teach you how to think and
| do self-directed learning. They also socialise you for the
| knowledge workforce by widening your horizons.
|
| Testing is a distraction from their core values. And a
| crutch for handling the poor student to teacher ratio.
| tkgally wrote:
| I agree.
|
| When undergraduate education goes well, the students will
| be interested in the material and motivated to learn it,
| both on their own and through working on collaborative
| projects with other students. Then testing and grading,
| while not necessarily eliminated, become less important
| in the students' minds and cheating becomes only a minor
| problem.
|
| Creating an environment conducive to that kind of
| learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with
| large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and
| curricula that are perceived as requiring passive
| knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and
| exploration.
|
| I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen
| years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has
| sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the
| classes of a large first-year writing program I used to
| manage. But because the classes were mostly project-
| based, with students writing and revising in stages over
| the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with
| each other in class, and because the average class size
| has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has
| been small and manageable. I've been lucky.
| tgv wrote:
| Which one is it: the idealized version where universities
| "teach you how to think" or the murky one that
| "socialise[s] you"? They're rather different.
|
| > Testing is a distraction from their core values.
|
| That's all fine, but nobody cares about your diploma if
| it was issued by a school that didn't test you.
|
| So either we accept the modern role of the university,
| and fund them properly so they can do their task (and
| restrict the number of students), or reject it and go
| back to the old ways: you studied philosophy, congrats,
| but your father was a mason, here's your trowel.
| alar44 wrote:
| Yeah, I mean that's the idealistic view of what college
| is. I think this is an outdated view as we have the
| internet now and knowledge is incredibly easy to find if
| you can be bothered. Can't be bothered? The world needs
| ditch diggers too. If you can make it through college,
| you're cut out for non-ditch digging jobs.
| tgv wrote:
| How? Do you have any realistic proposal how to achieve this?
| Or would it require a minor revolution?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Just do it? Offer classes, don't record grades, at the end
| have an optional oral defense that results in a
| certificate.
|
| The only people who actually care about your college grades
| are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that's
| it.
| tgv wrote:
| Sorry, that's not realistic. Students commonly start
| studying the day before the exam. How will that work if
| you're cramming 4 yours into a single exam? It won't.
| It'll only lead to lowering the bar even more. Much more.
|
| > The only people who actually care about your college
| grades are HR reading resumes for your first job,
| literally that's it.
|
| It's not about grades, it's about passing the
| requirements for a diploma. And the fact that only HR
| cares about it (in your rather corporate view of the
| labor market) is because everybody else assumes that the
| hurdle has been taken. They don't care about the diploma
| per se, just that you have a bunch of useful skills.
| Either HR tests you thoroughly (and they don't have a
| clue, so that's out of the question), or they rely on a
| system like the current one. Or do you think that a
| sociology degree qualifies you as a carpenter?
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Kinda agree though B seems impossible.
|
| I used to study at an "elite" uni going for ~40% failed on the
| important exams to filter students and you bet everyone I knew
| was studying exclusively from previous exams and cheating when
| possible. This led to us being able to solve exam questions
| extremely quickly and cleanly but we often had no idea what the
| solution actually meant.
|
| Some people were studying "normally" at first but they'd then
| get shafted in the exam because they'd have spent lots of time
| on material that's not graded in the end and would inevitably
| switch to the meta approach since understanding the material
| better doesn't mean much if you're barely surviving.
| [deleted]
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _(B) disincentivize cheating. This is tough to do but if
| someone is motivated not by a grade but by the experience or
| knowledge gain itself cheating is no longer of interest._
|
| It's easy to do--don't issue any credentials. It's just that
| the very lucrative businesses don't want to do that because
| they know exactly what they are selling and it ain't education.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The honest students actually value being told if they
| understood correctly. I guess the most inveterate cheaters
| wouldn't care, but most students are at least somewhat
| hopeful they've actually learned, and the summative
| assessment process is feedback for those students.
|
| It so happens that looking after the mechanics of (computer
| based) university examination is part of my current role. We
| do have some mechanisms in place that are intended to make it
| harder to cheat, but ultimately some students _will_ cheat
| and one of the interesting things is watching the reaction of
| a young colleague who went from those exams (a year ago) to
| his current job, at this same university.
|
| For example there are signs outside every exam room
| prominently warning students that the university owns video
| cameras and they are being watched while doing exams. It's
| true, but of course the main reason we're watching isn't to
| catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room's
| invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to
| see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she's
| written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if
| the Fitbit on that guy's wrist has been modified to display
| relayed multiple choice answers? No, we're watching because
| the room has 85 green "OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics"
| screens and one orange "Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE" screen
| and in a minute the retired administrator herding students
| into the room is going to remember that we said Orange = Bad
| during training and call us about it, by the time they do we
| want to know _why_ it has an orange screen, _whether_ that
| room is actually booked for 86 students so that they can 't
| just leave the machine unused, and _where_ else on campus we
| can put one extra student if we need to move them pronto. We
| aren 't trying to actually fix it, because that's likely to
| take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds.
|
| One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn't
| actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or
| not, at the end of the day if there's one PC which stubbornly
| claims to still be doing an exam, is it really? If the room
| is empty, maybe even dark, then the answer is that despite
| instructions to students and invigilators they left a machine
| logged in, running an exam, and just walked out of the room.
| On the other hand, if there's still people stood in the room
| looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out
| why the hell they aren't finished.
| maxloh wrote:
| I grew up in East Asia and (B) just isn't possible here.
|
| Since we were little, we were requested by our parents to get a
| good grade in examinations in order to, eventually, get into a
| good college.
|
| We were told that graduating from a good college brings
| ourselves/the family a better quality of life, but the
| "benefits" part stops here. People don't care about those
| knowledges that are not likely to make us money one day. Most
| of us just study for a better paying jobs.
|
| The society doesn't care about the process, but the outcome,
| evaluated by the momey in our bank account.
| chii wrote:
| if cheating to get the piece-of-paper-with-your-name-on-it
| gets you a better job, without the actual requirement of
| knowledge, then the blame goes to the employers who solely
| use a piece of paper for credentials and not
| knowledge/capability tests.
| paulmd wrote:
| Sure, we just have to restructure a significant portion of
| our educational pipeline and employment/hiring process and
| figure out what to do about a trillion or two of debt to do
| this, piece of cake.
|
| This is not really an issue that affects anyone outside a
| handful of individuals getting their first job - once you
| have an employment history, the fact that someone was
| willing to pay you money for a couple years is a pretty
| solid signal that you were doing at least an OK job, and
| you'll have coworkers with similar reputational signals who
| can also attest to this.
|
| (although tbh I think references as a hiring signal are
| going away - referrals _to an open position within the
| referrer 's company_ are still a golden ticket but nobody
| cares that you have three friends at some unrelated company
| who will say that you're not a total shitbird, they can
| already tell that from the fact that you worked there 2
| years and weren't fired and it's trivial for someone to
| "forge" a reference if it's not. References, like suits in
| the office, were a boomer thing and in the latter years
| were a symptom of a highly employer-favored labor market.
| Skilled workers can now write their own ticket and even in
| the broader labor market nobody cares about references when
| employers can't hire enough employees to keep product on
| the shelf. A whole lot of stupid, artificial barriers that
| _never should have existed_ are coming down, and references
| are one of them.)
|
| Anyway, this is a lot like the "it's unjust that under-21s
| can volunteer or be drafted to die for their country but
| can't drink!!!" argument - yup, it's true, that's unfair as
| hell, but nobody who's over the age of 21 gives a single
| shit about remedying it, since it doesn't affect them. In
| "agile" terms, it's a ticket where there is definitely
| improvement that is possible in this area, but no business
| case to upend everything and do the improvement. Once you
| have that first job under your belt... nothing that came
| before really matters. When was the last time an
| interviewer asked a senior engineer about a GPA? Unless
| it's an ivy-tier they frankly don't even care where you
| went, Bumfuck State University is just as good as Podunk
| State University. Nor does the Widget Factory care about
| whether you had a degree in English or Basketweaving when
| they are considering you for the position of forklift
| operator. It's an issue that _solely_ matters to the people
| getting their first job, and once you 're hazed, you're "in
| the club" and it stops mattering, unless you're such a
| complete and utter fuckup that you're getting fired
| repeatedly.
|
| They do care a lot that you worked at a big name company,
| or that you made large contributions or substantially
| matured your skills/experience at a smaller company. They
| do care a lot that you appear knowledgeable around the role
| they're trying to hire you into. They do care a lot that
| you can problem-solve and learn the parts you don't know.
| References, degrees, and universities mostly stop mattering
| after a couple years and definitely stop mattering by the
| 10-year mark.
|
| Again, I'm not saying you're wrong at all - and actually
| the whole system of making people go tens of thousands of
| dollars into debt for something that is basically only used
| to get you your first job and never matters again, is
| obviously problematic. But once again there's not really a
| way to remedy that, even if you banned asking about degrees
| entirely, employers are still going to find some similar
| signal, and it's going to hugely piss off all the people
| who are now $50k in debt for something they can't even use
| in an interview process.
|
| Which is guaranteed, 100%, the reason that 99.9% of people
| went to get a degree. Yeah, education makes you a more
| well-rounded person, and it should be somewhere between
| "absolutely minimal costs subsidized hugely by the public"
| and "actually giving people a stipend to attend" (as in
| many european countries), because in the long term they are
| more than going to pay that back in taxes anyway, and we
| all benefit from having an intellectual workforce that can
| think critically and is less susceptible to misinformation
| campaigns/etc. But the reality is right now most people who
| go to college do so because it's a necessary gatekeeper to
| pass for you to get a good job.
|
| We need some kind of reform though, this trajectory just
| doesn't seem sustainable. People have been pushing "trade
| school"/"coding bootcamp" approaches for years and it just
| hasn't stuck, there needs to be reform of the college
| system itself. But that's not remotely politically possible
| given the broad dysfunction of the american system.
|
| Of course, there is certainly some "foundational" education
| around core computer-science and software-engineering
| concepts, and breadth of exposure to people with at least
| minimal competence in their fields (it's not always great,
| but neither is the broader job market) around various
| technologies and concepts that would need at least a multi-
| year "trade school" approach and not just a "coding boot
| camp" to replicate. It's not all bad either. But I think at
| this point everyone acknowledges we have a big problem and
| a bad trajectory.
| barrysteve wrote:
| The guiding principle behind B evaporated. People don't go to
| university for higher universal meaning anymore. They go to get
| knowledge they can trade for a better living.
|
| A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin
| Chargaff.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...
| gbronner wrote:
| Clearly he needs a punishment that costs the students a lot of
| time. Maybe submit a 12 hour video of you doing every single
| problem in all the problem sets
| alanlammiman wrote:
| This is actually brilliant. Quizzes are ideally used to get
| people putting in the effort: studying during the semester and
| nudge them away from procrastinating/crunching at the end (thus
| are low stakes). But even with low stakes they nudge people to
| cheat. It was technically hard previously to verify the effort
| directly, so a quiz result is a noisy proxy. But with current
| tech you could just record the effort itself. If you are going
| to do problem sets, no extra effort in recording it.
| nr2x wrote:
| Exams are the mark of a lazy instructor who doesn't want to
| design appropriately challenging assignments, as the author says:
| "I hadn't fully prepped the class".
| bpodgursky wrote:
| When I see statements like this I know they are by people who
| have never actually tried to teach a class.
|
| What you are describing in an incredibly labor-intensive
| process. If you want to restructure education so no teacher
| ever has more than 8 students and 2 classes a semester (and
| tuition is $100k/yr)... maybe you can make this work.
|
| In the real world, where a teacher has 3 sections of 30
| students, "just make exciting and engaging material!" is
| honestly an asinine statement. You can't spend 2 hours
| evaluating each student's homework assignment.
| pugets wrote:
| What appropriately challenging cheat-proof calculus assignment
| could you give to a classroom of 100 undergrads?
|
| As soon as those questions leave the classroom, they will be
| passed around in group chats. That's why exams remain relevant.
| If a student averages 95% on their assignments, but shows up to
| the exam and can't solve [?]sin x dx like they had supposedly
| done a hundred times on their own, then they're probably
| cheating.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| For one of my physics classes, it was like 10% HW, 10% class
| participation quizzes, 30% lab, 50% exams. The HW was
| optional (and your exam scores would replace your HW scores
| if you so chose) but the HW pretty closely followed the exam.
| The class participation quiz points were fully awarded as
| long as you showed up every day to lecture. The labs weren't
| skippable or cheatable because everyone had different
| measurements and you had to document every step of the way.
| The exams were personalized 1-10 such that you'd never be
| sitting next to anyone who had your same exam (and the
| questions were never recycled). Two pages of notes allowed on
| every exam.
|
| Apart from some high-tech cheating, I'd say it was a
| reasonably cheat-proof class. I don't know how applicable
| that model is to calculus though.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| We don't even have math assignments anymore. All we do is
| write an exam at the end of the semester, and the people who
| didn't learn will just not pass.
|
| The math exam which I wrote was also very demanding and had a
| very tight time limit. There wasn't any time to compare
| results with a group chat or use tools like wolfram alpha.
| Either you knew how to solve the exercises or you didn't and
| failed.
| gravypod wrote:
| If you are teaching something you're probably teaching it for
| >10 years. If every year you create 20 multi-part questions
| ("We have a factory producing boxes, what's the optimal size
| of box for X when Y"). You can then distribute a random
| question to every student in a similar bin of grade
| distribution. If a group of people are cheating they'll
| likely be in the same grade bin so this makes sure each
| cheater doesn't see the questions everyone else does.
|
| You repeat this process every year for 10 years and now you
| have 200 questions. The next professor comes in and does the
| same but now also has 200 questions + answer guides.
|
| With some basic programming you could make it automatically
| change the numbers (to "friendly" numbers that break up into
| round numbers) and have an infinite pool of challenging quiz,
| midterm, and final questions. If everyone gets different
| questions they cannot cheat by sharing answers. Only by
| sharing approach.
| user8139471 wrote:
| Our physics department did that with no success. All
| questions and answers were collaboratively collected by
| students in a shared Dropbox folder.
| adolph wrote:
| Sounds like a proof of work system is needed. Let's say every
| answer included a something unique to the test taker, time,
| place and question. These values would be inserted early in
| the computational process, like maybe as a coefficient to
| sin, such that the process is easy to grade but difficult to
| cheat since the values of each downstream step are unique.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| This.
|
| Putting a multiple choice test online and expecting students to
| not take advantage of this examination method is very naive.
| lesam wrote:
| And in most courses will just reward cheaters who succeed in
| not being caught.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| IIRC, in European universities, university courses tend to be
| much more heavily exam-weighted than American ones. I've heard
| of classes whose grades were nothing _but_ exams.
| bowsamic wrote:
| When I did Physics in the UK, all of my non-labs modules were
| 100% exam
| Abroszka wrote:
| If I understand correctly, they had an online async test and they
| shared screenshots of the answers. Is that even cheating? It
| wouldn't even register as cheating for me... When I was at the
| university (not US) we had these online "tests" too, but it was a
| different category than the real tests. Nobody really cared what
| you do. Sometimes we sat down together and did it one by one
| (especially if it was some random generated math problem), other
| times we just shared the answers (when the test was too lame...)
| Dinux wrote:
| Most of the comments seems to be about the impact of cheating on
| the class or how the system is broken and how it should be fixed.
| Fact of the matter is, most cheating pays off. In my experience a
| prof or teacher will rarely go so far as been described in this
| story.
|
| I took a massive gamble on my high school finals to not only
| cheat but to steal thousands of tests and exams via malware that
| I wrote over the course of a year. Its been 10 years since that
| happened, and reading this I might do a story of how I stole 1
| terabyte of data in my final year, and passed all my exams.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Sounds like a good story.
| sharikous wrote:
| A good answer for this problem is just to produce the sort of
| questions that are fit to open book exams (I.e. resistant to
| access to materials) and give a different question to each
| student.
|
| It can be done by varying a bit the parameters of the question
| for each student and I am sure AI based solutions for producing a
| lot of questions are possible
| bradlys wrote:
| As someone who "cheated" - it was a requirement to pass classes.
| "Professors" (researchers and post-docs who hated lecturing) were
| in a constant arms race against the students. We were assigned
| problems routinely that we would ask the professor to solve in
| class - they could not do it. They would fail it themselves. This
| happened in multiple subjects.
|
| Many classes also had students not showing up if it was clear
| that they were not going to need to be in class to know the
| subject material. If you could read it from the book and the
| professor was straight forward with their testing - students
| wouldn't show. It was a waste of time to go to the lectures
| because often these professors were _absolutely terrible_. You
| were just better off reading the book because you'd be less
| confused by that.
|
| Tbh - college is a giant scam in the way many people think of it
| as a way of "learning". For myself and many of my peers - it was
| purely a transactional procedure. We needed the credentials and
| we needed good grades in those credentials. Everything else was
| secondary.
|
| Optimizing for "learning" is such a joke in our capitalistic
| winner takes all economy. Give me a break. I'm not a Rothschild
| ffs.
| vehementi wrote:
| Nah this is a situation like someone else pointed out where you
| were an underpeformer and surrounded yourself with other
| underperformers/cheaters, and then assumed everyone else was
| like you, but in actuality you were in the minority.
| j7ake wrote:
| This was a great read. I wonder if it's actually more time-
| efficient at some point to just do an oral exam rather than these
| paper exams.
|
| In oral exams, it's obvious whether you know the material or not.
|
| It may appear more time-consuming, but considering there is no
| need to grade or worry about cheating, you may come out ahead.
| urthor wrote:
| I did that for one class. It was both extremely time efficient
| and effective.
|
| The downside to oral examinations however is you can't really
| grade curve them.
|
| Which is a beautiful thing, but also not what the faculty
| wants.
|
| The faculty grades mostly because they want to cull the chaff
| from the hardest working grad student candidates.
|
| They aren't after pure comprehension, they want hard workers.
| j7ake wrote:
| My most memorable exam experience as a student was an oral
| exam in thermodynamics or heat transfer.
|
| They gave a randomly selected question to me and I had 30
| minutes to prepare a solution (alone in back of classroom). I
| provide solution which took 10 minutes then 20 minutes was
| additional theory questions.
|
| For each student, it took the professor 30 minutes. So for
| 100 students you can do it in 5 hours.
|
| I believe the professor was John Thome.
| bo1024 wrote:
| *50 hours
| mjfl wrote:
| How dumb do you have to be to cheat on a chat app hosted by your
| professor?
|
| Did they even know they were cheating? Maybe they thought it was
| okay?
| lastdong wrote:
| What a great read, thank you, this could prob end up being a
| book! :)
|
| Memories come to mind, from students sharing same day exam
| questions to parents trying to help their son organise the prints
| of a final assignment he clearly didn't write (I overheard 'we
| need to call him, we paid good money'). Several levels, criminal
| even, of cheating.
|
| In the end, for most of us, the gc was the group studies and
| discussing last assignments after results were out. Learning with
| each other and cooperation is so fundamental.
|
| What I loved most about the story if most people are shown the
| way, they won't cheat, and will thrive. makes you wonder if most
| cheaters just don't know any better
| sdk16420 wrote:
| >Too bad you used the same phone number that you have on file
| with the university.
|
| Regardless of the legitimate discussion on cheating, why would a
| lecturer have access to student phone numbers, either directly or
| after asking the student affairs office to link them to names?
| The further I got in the article, the more it seemed like Reddit-
| style creative writing.
| obscura wrote:
| The animated GIFs are really distracting and detract from the
| writing. I eventually deleted them from the parts I hadn't yet
| read.
|
| I have to say that Crump was incredibly forgiving and put in a
| lot of extra effort. I don't think anyone I've been taught by
| would have gone to this much trouble.
| moogly wrote:
| I had to do the same. Infuriating practice. What happened to
| Firefox stopping playback of .gifs when you press Esc?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| This is a widespread problem. The inevitable outcome is that
| university education loses more and more prestige.
|
| Maybe this is the way it has to be. Self-taught people with
| impressive portfolios start becoming more and more attractive
| while well-qualified people become less and less attractive - or
| even suspect.
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| This is just partially true.
|
| University education has lost a lot of its appeal, that's
| correct, some sort of tragedy of the commons. But that part of
| "Self-taught people with impressive portfolios " is hilarious,
| navel gazing to the max. Nobody would deal with a self-taught
| cardiologist or structural engineer.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| Why not? I think a big part of it would be evaluating whether
| a job candidate has the skills to do the job, not how they
| attained their knowledge. I'd be fine with my cardiologist
| testing out of the USMLE steps to get a job.
| MrMan wrote:
| I respect anyone who does heart surgery on themselves
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I guess we have to draw the distinction between
| "qualification preferred" and "qualification required".
|
| IIRC in many jurisdictions you can sit the exam to become a
| lawyer without having a degree or anything. The degree more
| acts as a series of preparation classes for the very very
| difficult process of passing the bar.
|
| In this situation, cheating in mid terms becomes a bit
| pointless. As long as the final exam is done with strict
| security (easier for a one off event), the qualification
| means something.
|
| So maybe that's what we want for cardiologists and structural
| engineers.
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| You still have to work under a licensed lawyer as an
| apprentice as a requisite for the test.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Since a plurality of the population has higher education
| degrees and since that segment of society enjoys greater
| respect and privilege, I'd wager that instead those with higher
| education will use their positions and voting power towards the
| passage of laws and regulations to keep the self taught out of
| the workplace.
|
| You can see the start of that here sometimes. It is sometimes
| suggested programmers become like "real engineers" by
| increasing regulation and requiring a certain level of
| education.
|
| I mean the fact that we are having a serious discussion about
| forgiving trillions of dollars of debt for this statistically
| already quite privileged population shows they have to power to
| pull it off.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I think there's going to be an element of this, but how
| pervasive will it be?
|
| A plurality of that plurality has a higher education degree
| from an institution that isn't world famous - including
| myself. I don't feel at all threatened by self taught people,
| honestly I was not a great student and consider myself
| partially self taught anyway.
| willcipriano wrote:
| How pervasive it is depends on how scare resources are.
| From my experience as resources get scarce humans group up
| together by a one or more of the common properties they
| share.
|
| Race, religion, county of origin, urban or rural,
| sexuality, union or scab, favorite sports team, etc
|
| I don't see why educational attainment is any different.
| The only part that is missing in the software industry is a
| scarcity of resources and the shift described in the
| grandparent comment and those behaviors will happen at
| scale.
| CalRobert wrote:
| My former boss was an utter buffoon who knew nothing whatsoever
| about his field but managed to make $3 million as a "director" in
| the couple years before he was finally fired. Cheating seems to
| work well.
| JoaoCostaIFG wrote:
| I guess I can share a similar story, being a student and all.
| Last year, even though we were in lock down, most courses delayed
| the final exams, so they could be taken in person. The exception
| was a machine learning course, where we were allowed to do the
| exams online.
|
| When students heard about this, they got really excited, because
| cheating would be easier. So, the day of the exam comes, and I
| hear multiple say they didn't even study, and that it is going to
| be the easiest exam ever. Almost everybody I knew cheated on that
| exam, and the teachers found out. The funny thing is that there
| were no sanctions, because everyone used the excuse of "we are so
| stressed with the pandemic situation", and the teachers bought
| it. Needless to say that it was all lies. Almost no one was
| suffering with the pandemic. As a matter of fact, I still haven't
| met someone that didn't love being home playing games and talking
| with friends while in class.
| zelienople wrote:
| Cheating... I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
|
| Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the
| course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me.
| So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done
| cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an
| assignment then I think I cheated on everything.
|
| And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments were my own,
| but, often, I collaborated with other students to understand the
| questions, or to develop an idea of how to approach finding the
| solutions, or to clarify issues that were unclear.
|
| And, always, to make sure I got the right answer. Because if I
| didn't, it meant that I did not understand something and I needed
| to go back over the material to work out what that was. Any other
| approach would have rendered school valueless.
|
| This is the normal process of education. You can tell that I did
| not cheat because my work and my answers were unique. If I
| submitted an image of someone else's work, that would be obvious.
|
| Ah, but wait! I think I see. If the answers are multiple choice,
| that doesn't work.
|
| But why are they multiple choice? To make it easier and cheaper
| for the school. Your inflation of the profit margin on my
| education makes me a cheater because you can't tell if I did the
| work myself? That sounds about right.
|
| I think academic integrity is eroded more by the profit motive
| than by the Jesuitical definition of cheating in the article.
|
| Even though I went to what are considered some the best schools,
| the greatest insult to academic integrity was always the faculty,
| because most of them didn't know the subject they were teaching,
| faked it, and didn't care.
|
| And when I see many of the students who didn't cheat coming out
| of school not knowing shit from Shinola, I have to wonder why it
| matters? You get out what you put in, so who cares if people
| violate an arcane rule that says, "this, this here is an
| assignment; but that over there, that thing that looks identical
| to this in every way, that's a quiz, so don't talk to your
| friends about it or we'll nip your promising young academic
| career in the bud. Understand?"
|
| The only lesson here is that you need to cheat better.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Come on now, if you're sharing screenshots of the test and
| asking other students for answers, you know, they know,
| everyone knows: you're cheating.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Not surprised. Just about everyone performs some amount or
| cheating in high school and college. Really if anything these
| places are teaching you not to get caught.
|
| To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid.
| Colleges administrators are living in a pretend world that
| doesn't exist where they think the kids are there because they
| care and dont just want the piece of paper they are paying 200K
| for so they can go get a job in the real world and start paying
| down their debt.
|
| Im so incredibly past giving a shit about cheating in college.
| epakai wrote:
| No, a subgroup of students surround themselves with cheaters
| and believe everyone else is cheating. There are plenty of
| students who are quite satisfied learning the subject matter
| and receiving a grade for their performance. They just aren't
| part of the study/social groups that devolve into cheating.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > No, a subgroup of students surround themselves with
| cheaters and believe everyone else is cheating.
|
| It's exactly this. I didn't cheat in college, I've always
| hated cheaters, plus obviously I didn't want the risk of
| potentially being caught. People I was friends with in my CS
| degree, to my knowledge, didn't cheat either. Maybe they were
| cheating and I just didn't notice or something, but I think
| it's unlikely.
|
| When I was an undergrad TA for our intro CS class, we did
| have to deal with some cheaters, but not that many. Either
| it's because it's BYU, where the level of honesty is higher
| (I'd lose stuff all the time, and even laptops would show up
| at the lost and found), or we just sucked at finding the
| cheaters.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Do you mean that you're incredibly past careing about arbitrary
| constraints on someone's ability to solve a problem?
|
| If there is a policeman, the onus of enforcement lies on the
| policeman. The teacher plays this role by giving a grade. Any
| teacher that allows cheating is encouraging it.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Im tired of the overtop concern about it and the heavy-handed
| punishment I have seen for it mostly. Im also just not a fan
| of the entire academic system which puts people in massive
| debt (often because of parent/social pressure) that has
| surprised pikachu face when they cheat so they can pay off
| that debt.
|
| The system is absolutely fucked.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| They could avoid falling behind by actually learning the
| material, and you know, pass exams and assignments. They
| don't need to cheat. If they're under such duress most
| institutions will alter degree plans or have other
| accommodations; no need to cheat.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| > Just about everyone performs some amount or cheating in high
| school and college
|
| That's awful and not my experience.
|
| > To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid
|
| What's the point of waiting four years to give cheaters a
| degree? If they're not going to learn anything it's a complete
| waste, just hand it to them when they pay the lump sum.
| a1371 wrote:
| This... was hard to read for me. I am not the type who jumps on
| the bandwagon of "schools are dead" but I had to pause here:
|
| > This was the first time when 75% of the class was cheating way
| beyond the pale for half a semester
|
| I know people who are on school for immigration reasons.
| Specially with computer science, there is so much nonsense that
| sometimes people must work through. This doesn't mean they don't
| have integrity.
|
| The author says they sympathize with students. But do they
| really? Making the students write a humiliating "academic
| integrity essay" is not engagement. It's forcing someone to smile
| and then boasting that they have a good time.
|
| I am forever grateful for my bachelor's. Not because they thought
| us a lot, actually the opposite. I happened to be in a unique
| situation in which course work was practically non-existent.
|
| It was marvelous! As a 19 year old I was just learning to have
| adult social experiences and the school really allowed me to do
| that. The classes were not about pass or fail. They were about
| being in an environment and finding what's interesting within it.
| I know it sounds like this sort of thing will create terrible
| candidates for FAANG, and maybe so (not in our case), but perhaps
| it could also avoid the need to question the integrity of a
| teenager.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character
| growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should
| have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case
| against them. There is no moral or practical justification for
| tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and
| the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society
| into which they're released with a stamp of approval they have
| stolen rather than earned. They deserve only failure and
| humiliation, and if they consistently received it there would be
| far fewer of them.
|
| We must assume they don't care about learning, so if we want to
| cram some knowledge into them anyway, hit them the only place
| they apparently care about: their transcript. Either they'll
| shape up or be rightfully denied the (ever more scant) honor of a
| degree. The heroics of the author here cannot be scaled, and we
| shouldn't be asking anyone to go to that extent. Just fail the
| bastards. You're only recording what's already true.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Your moralizing and virtue signalling is missing the point.
|
| Cheating, or academic integrity, or "over collaboration" is not
| a binary action that evil students take, and good student
| don't.
|
| Instead, cheating is a culture, and institution. And looking at
| it, in this way, provides a much more helpful framework for
| solving it, than overmoralizing it, and simply calling cheaters
| bad.
|
| The reality is, that how much students work together, or are
| allowed to work together, is a culture that is vastly different
| on a class by class basis. There are some classes, where the
| professors explicitly encourage collaboration among students,
| to the point where the profesor straight up expects that
| everyone is copying everyone else's homework, and that is OK
| and encouraged, officially.
|
| And then there are other classes, where talking to anyone else,
| or asking a single question about homework, is automatically
| cheating.
|
| And then there are further complications, where there is no
| official policy on collaboration, and everyone just guesses
| about what is allowed.
|
| This vast difference between classes and collaboration culture,
| means that regular people, who would otherwise not cheat at
| all, will often do so, due to problems with the culture and
| expectation of the class.
|
| And the way to solve this, is not to engage in extreme
| moralization, instead it is to set clear guidelines, and
| address problems as they come up, so things don't get out of
| control.
|
| Or, in other words, if everyone is doing something, then other
| people will start to think that it isn't even against the rules
| and also do it themselves, and the blame is more on the culture
| and system, than it is on the individuals.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| "Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here. They
| were directly copying answers from each other. There is no
| chance anyone honestly thought this was ok. That goes triple
| for the ones plagiarizing their apology letters.
|
| And as I said in my other reply, letting "culture" grow up is
| part of the problem that lack of punishment creates, and was
| never a true excuse at all. _They knew_.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > "Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here.
| They were directly copying answers from each other.
|
| And I am telling you that students directly copying answers
| from others can and is sometimes directly encouraged by the
| professors in a class.
|
| As in yes, literally copying other's work, is something
| that the professors explicitly allow and encourage in some
| classes.
| oxguy3 wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, but I tend to lean more towards
| the teacher's approach. The big problem in this class was that
| there was a culture of cheating -- it was the norm, and anyone
| who joined the WhatsApp group was automatically pulled into it.
| I imagine many of the students who did cheat would not have
| done so if it didn't fall into their lap like that.
|
| That's not to say that it's justified or right. Of course they
| shouldn't even cheated, even though it was popular and easy.
| But it's a much more understandable mistake to make, when doing
| the wrong thing is so popular and easy. When 5% of a class
| cheats, that indicates a serious moral failing on those
| students' parts. But when 70% of a class cheats, it's harder to
| believe that they're all so morally bankrupt.
|
| Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I'm a strong believer in
| giving people second chances and encouraging them to learn from
| their mistakes instead of immediately jumping to punishment.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| How long do you think a "culture of cheating" will survive if
| it's punished severely? Not very long. That's part of the
| point.
|
| Ed: not that "it was easy" is anywhere near an excuse. Not
| letting yourself be pulled into something you 100% know is
| wrong is one of the most basic forms of moral self-restraint.
| If you can't handle that in its most black-and-white form, to
| say nothing of the gray areas you'll encounter anywhere less
| sheltered than a college classroom, you can still take the
| consequences right in the face and no one should feel the
| slightest pity, much less make excuses.
| carls wrote:
| I think the situation is more complex than just "we must assume
| they don't care about learning ... just fail the bastards." I
| think it's more important to first understand what were the
| social, environmental, cultural (and otherwise) causes of this
| behavior.
|
| Specifically, different systems of incentives and
| permissiveness will produce different behavior. I taught high
| school computer science for 4 years, and I can attest that
| cheating occurred in the classes I taught. I've also been
| enrolled part-time in Stanford's MS in CS, and have taken a
| number of the core undergraduate curriculum for CS majors.
|
| I also went to a hypercompetitive US public high school with a
| number of brilliant classmates, many of whom also cheated.
|
| My experiences have showed me that there is a wide spectrum of
| "cheating", ranging from students sharing things like, "I was
| at office hours and heard from the TA heard from the professor
| that topic X is going to be really emphasized on the exam, so
| you better study for it!" to outright blatant copying of
| other's code or answers.
|
| What I've noticed as qualities of a learning environment that
| seems to increase the likelihood of cheating are:
|
| 1. The technological ease of which it is to cheat: it's easier
| to cheat on an asynchronous online exam than when you're taking
| it synchronously in a large classroom.
|
| 2. How "high stakes" the course is for students: for students
| at institutions like Stanford, where they be used to a certain
| level of academic success, failing a course isn't just a blow
| to their transcript -- it's a psychological blow to their
| identity as a "smart student." They may find it easier to cheat
| and maintain their self-image (and projected image to their
| family/friends) as a great student than to take the honest hit
| to their GPA, and have to give up their identity.
|
| 3. How "legitimate" the course feels: classes where the
| instructor is widely perceived as "unfair" or "incompetent"
| seem to have more cheating. Students feel disrespected ("How
| could she put X on the exam? We barely covered it!") or
| unvalued ("He doesn't even bother giving clear instructions on
| the homework assignments. Why should we respect his test?") may
| try to 'retaliate' by cheating.
|
| 4. How permissive the academic culture is around cheating: if
| there is widely perceived to be little-to-no consequences to
| cheating, or if cheating is seen as, "well everyone does it",
| then you will have a lot more cheating.
|
| I'm sure the above is not an exhaustive list. My broader point
| is that in order to address the issues around cheating, we need
| to be more encompassing than simply punishing the cheaters. If
| the stakes are high enough, and the incentives strong enough,
| cheaters will still exist even if they are aware of the
| severity of the punishment.
| hrunt wrote:
| > 1. The technological ease of which it is to cheat: it's
| easier to cheat on an asynchronous online exam than when
| you're taking it synchronously in a large classroom.
|
| I went to school pre-2000, so the Internet existed, but was
| not as prevalent as it is today. What struck me most in the
| article is how easy it is today to cheat today. Real-time
| group chats, easy sharing of screenshots and quizzes, the
| volume of easily-copied content off the Internet, and tools
| available 100% of the time simply put fraternity list of
| historical quizzes and copied texts in the library to shame.
| The ease of cheating today is one less barrier that people
| have to cross to compromise their morals.
|
| I think if a goal of post-secondary education is to prepare
| their populations for professional success, then you're
| right, simply punishing cheaters does not achieve that goal.
| But our world today is full of examples where it's easy to
| take the less moral or ethical road and suffer little to no
| consequences. Hopefully, schools will not succumb to that too
| much.
| Havoc wrote:
| >I messaged the student that they had plagiarized the assignment
| from a website. I sent the link. They immediately wrote back and
| said I had the wrong link and that they copied it from a
| different website.
|
| Plagerizing an ethics violation apology letter...to a lecturer
| who is clearly on a mission. At that stage just fail them.
|
| Clearly they have neither ethics nor intelligence going for them
| so that spot in higher education is best taken up by a more
| deserving member of society.
| richbell wrote:
| I kinda agree; I feel like they probably walked away thinking
| "I got away with it" and not "I need to seriously reassess my
| priorities".
| Ameo wrote:
| This post really turned my stomach, but not because of the
| cheating. Yeah, obviously the cheating is wrong and students who
| cheated should be held accountable according to university
| policy. Yeah, it's nice that the professor was able to get
| something of a "happy ending" for at least some of the students
| at the end.
|
| But the whole meat of this enormous post is the professor having
| a massive power trip while toying around with the students,
| reading every message they post without them knowing.
|
| He knew this cheating was happening pretty early on. He was
| writing R scripts to cross-reference all the group chat
| participants to the individuals involved. He wrote up all those
| reports and then still goes ahead with the second midterm. He
| obviously took pleasure in examining how they were acting; he has
| dozens and dozens of individual chat messages pasted into that
| post complete with his snarky little comments about them:
|
| > "nah i aint cheat i took that exam at 7 and did it alone still
| failed" (hmmm, let me cross reference this claim with your texts
| in the chat at 7...)
|
| > "if i find out who snitched we got a problem fr" (I had to
| report this student to judicial affairs)
|
| There are more and more. The professor is clearly relishing each
| of these little pieces of evidence, filling out all of those
| forms, and watching the students squirm and panic as he tells
| them he knows they're cheating:
|
| > There was no way I was going to keep a straight face, plus I
| wanted to see what happened on the chat, so I video muted myself
| (bad internet connection day).
|
| It's borderline sadistic. He could have ended the whole debacle
| at any point, be he chose to spend dozens of hours poring over
| this chat and examining the students' reactions to what he was
| doing. Especially given the conclusion where he put in options
| for all or most of the students who cheated to redeem themselves
| - at least partially.
|
| The only constructive piece of this entire post is the end where
| for the second asynchronous version of the course, he adjusts its
| design and content to be more engaging and conducive to online
| learning. The rest is just an obsessive power trip.
| vehementi wrote:
| Nah the students are the sadistic ones who coudl have ended it
| at any point by saying "let's all stop cheating".
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| Completely agree, this professor is clearly an asshole.
| [deleted]
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I see cheating more as a symptom for the inability to plan.
| People get a week, and start 5 hours before delivery time. At
| that point, only cheating or cramming is goung to save you. He
| might have shifted the balance, but the underlying problem is
| still there.
|
| So there is a failure in at least the rich, western world:. We
| can't teach enough children to plan for a week or more. Anyone an
| idea how to deal with this?
| imtringued wrote:
| Create accurate online calenders with deadlines ahead of time.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| The thing that stands out to me is that the professor is
| bewildered about all of the cheating happening. As a student,
| this story is very common and almost "normal"
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Use a question generator- unique questions for everyone, every
| time.
| navane wrote:
| These students are ready to enter the workforce. Result driven,
| team players, pro-active, tech savvy. They are displaying all
| qualities required to be a productive employee. To them, and in
| practice, education is merely a hurdle. Just graduate them
| already.
| eruci wrote:
| OK. This is a long slog, but I skimmed and got the gist.
|
| There must be a technical solution to the cheating problem.
|
| Many years ago I taught an intro to programming course. For the
| grading I built a randomized online test - students would have
| one hour to answer a number of programming questions using a
| terminal in the computer lab, and would get their grade as the
| test progressed with the final grade after the last question. It
| worked both at freeing up my time for grading, and eliminating
| cheating.
|
| Automated randomized testing in all types of classes (not just an
| intro class where this task is much simpler) would go a long way
| towards solving the cheating problem.
|
| There, a problem for all you to solve.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Heh, I wonder if the quizzes just shuffled the questions
| between students, how many would get it wrong because their
| option A) was other people's option B)
| eruci wrote:
| No. It wasn't like that. I built software that would generate
| unique completely random test questions. The software would
| eval() the students response and would give 100% if correct,
| 0 if not.
| jonstewart wrote:
| My employer hires a batch of new college grads every year, and
| they spend time in their first year on different rotations. I
| spent some time recently with one, going over some advanced CS
| topics -- and started by talking school coursework.
|
| It was eye-opening. I had a miserable pandemic, juggling
| childcare and online school for my kids with my own job. But this
| colleague had gotten interested in CS somewhat late in college
| and had only had a few in-person CS classes before the switch to
| online. In the colleague's words, "quality declined a lot then."
|
| There's a new cohort of college students who've been given a
| terrible education, and have a lot of loans to pay off. I don't
| condone the cheating in TFA, but the professor seems to have a
| formalist rigidity to academic honesty while teaching a course
| online in a way that's almost designed for cheating. And rather
| than admonishing students when he became aware of what was
| happening he spent time (days? weeks?) analyzing the chat while
| the behavior continued.
|
| I empathize a lot with students who've just been through a
| terrible educational experience. The effort this prof has put
| into plagiarism detection could arguably have been better spent
| on improving course materials and grading mechanisms to render
| cheating rare/ineffectual.
| radford-neal wrote:
| I agree that while the professor seemed to be responding well
| in a lot of ways, his failure to quickly address the situation
| was terrible. He could have given his lecture on academic
| honesty immediately after realizing the extent of the problem,
| even if he needed more time to create all the individualized
| reports. I have a hard time seeing how that wouldn't have
| improved the situation, perhaps in ways that he doesn't realize
| even now. (For example, how much student time was wasted on all
| this drama, which could have been much reduced by earlier
| action, with a consequent effect on their performance in other
| courses?)
| cornel_io wrote:
| > I had been avoiding grading weekly writing assignments because
| I had many students and no teaching assistant to help me with the
| grading
|
| Bruh. During the remote-only pandemic? Sounds like you were a
| lazy professor. I get that it's hard to do work, but this is
| obvious stuff. Give your students easily cheatable assignments
| and it's no surprise that they cheat.
| cornel_io wrote:
| Not surprising I'm getting hate for this take. Academic douches
| tend to be lazy and abdicate responsibility. Weak sauce.
| baalimago wrote:
| Seems like the students spent more time into getting their
| cheating scheme to work than actually studying the material
| [deleted]
| Hasz wrote:
| Lol, you cheat, you fail. Why is this complicated? Prof is far,
| far too nice.
|
| However, I think students having an obligation to report cheating
| to the university is ridiculous. Find the cheaters yourself, or
| give me a bonus to do it for you.
| jmull wrote:
| I honestly don't get widespread cheating like this...
|
| You're paying _so_ much money for these courses -- probably a
| ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup -- ... so _at
| least_ get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up
| in the first place?
|
| Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in
| your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly
| attenuate from "sometimes" to "never" as time passes.) You might
| as well strive, get the most you can out of the course, and let
| the grade fall where it may.
|
| Here's an idea: if you're cool with cheating, _after school is
| over_ , just lie when anyone asks your gpa. You can get all the
| A's, in one single, easy, low-risk cheat. Many won't check and
| there's little consequence for those that do (maybe you wasted
| some time at a job interview). This "frees" you to just do the
| best you can when you're actually taking the courses -- to get
| the most out of them you can -- no risk, all gain.
| paulpauper wrote:
| if you are going to dispense with all morals and ethics, dont
| even bother with college or a job. Just do crypto livestreams
| impersonating musk and saylor. ppl making so much $ with those.
| jseliger wrote:
| _I honestly don't get widespread cheating like this..._
|
| Bryan Caplan's book concerns precisely this subject:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
| p1necone wrote:
| Most people who go to University for the first time aren't
| doing it because they /want/ to. It's just an extension of the
| regular primary/middle/highschool education they were doing
| previously, none of which was optional.
|
| They're also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either
| they've taken out loans that they haven't really considered the
| long term impact of, or their parents are covering some/all of
| it.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>I honestly don't get widespread cheating like this...
|
| Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people
| are all about this.
|
| Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle
| and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get
| promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then
| pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to
| hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to
| send out a message to their friends and family they are rich.
| People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to
| be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be
| something they'd rather pretend to be.
|
| Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending
| to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort
| of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and
| so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a
| while, it will come to you naturally.
|
| >>You're paying so much money for these courses -- probably a
| ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup -- ... so at
| least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up
| in the first place?
|
| Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go
| post selfies, or buying books and not reading them.
|
| >>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got
| in your courses.
|
| Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you
| might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In
| these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth,
| who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other
| person at all.
|
| In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself.
| Make genuine progress.
|
| Do not get high on the very dope you are selling.
| wormer wrote:
| I feel like people who say that "it's so much money, so try and
| get something out of it" are people who have never had the
| experience of being a "bad student" and have an immense passion
| for learning. I really can't say the same.
|
| I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do
| not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no
| passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to
| make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good
| job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA
| to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA
| or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.
|
| I pay a fuckton of money of classes that I'm forced to take on
| subjects that I learned in the freshman year of my highschool
| that I really do not care about (and aren't related to my
| major) and yet I'm supposed to feel incredibly enthralled
| showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I'm
| just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don't care about
| the subject at all, I just care about the GPA that I get at the
| end of the semester.
|
| And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from
| older people who have been in the industry before computerized
| background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and
| bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry
| level. They just type in your credentials into a database and
| have your info, and universities are part of that database.
| It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA,
| but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't
| actually good to begin with?
| paulpauper wrote:
| _And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from
| older people who have been in the industry before
| computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your
| resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn 't fly
| anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials
| into a database and have your info, and universities are part
| of that database. It's true that after your first job no one
| looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first
| job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?_
|
| Yup...this is not the 80s or the 90s. Employers got burned
| enough times, and now check that shit closely..lot's of
| screening.
|
| _I 'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and
| I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have
| no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up
| excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because
| it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to
| get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about
| how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I
| just want money._
|
| Agree..ppl just want that certificate which acts as a ticket
| to the middle class lifestyle. they don't care about
| knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get
| a masters or doctorate.
| jmull wrote:
| > I do it because it's a good job and I want money
|
| I wonder what you think will happen after you get that job?
|
| (Either go in a different direction now, or else you might as
| well start learning how to keep your head above water in your
| EE career now.)
|
| edit: I should add: I posted the comment you're replying to
| and in regard to this:
|
| > ...are people who have never had the experience of being a
| "bad student"
|
| Nah... I've been a bad student -- just based on averages,
| likely worse than you. My only "special" skill is that after
| multiple crushing failures I realized, "hey.. maybe I should
| think more than zero steps ahead" when considering my many
| pressing life problems. In retrospect, I've found it's like a
| superpower because it seems like almost no one bothers to do
| it, so you can get ahead in almost any circumstance.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| When I was in school, I inadvertently realized that the
| biggest cheat code was not cheating. Professors will open
| doors wide open for you if you are honest with them and
| engage with them, and it's actually usually easier than going
| to all that effort to cheat and not get caught.
|
| During college, I focused on learning a ton from the few
| courses that I found interesting (and where I learned new
| material), and I passed the rest with a B- average. As a
| result, I got to work with several professors on research and
| as a TA, and that totally overshadowed my low-3's GPA in the
| job market. "Research courses" with no requirements other
| than work I found interesting let me pad my GPA. I graduated
| in the bottom 30% of the class having done two years of
| research and taught a course (as the instructor, not a TA). I
| left for a position with the highest salary of anyone in my
| class, and I had a company literally begging for me to
| interview after I turned them down for asking about my GPA.
|
| These are opportunities which you cannot get if you do not
| engage honestly with the material you are learning.
| Professors usually know when you are cheating, and professors
| talk - they may know that you are a cheater the moment you
| step foot in their classroom. They don't want to report it,
| though, because it's a lot of work to gather evidence and go
| through the process.
|
| Some professors of required courses are happy to help you if
| you are honestly not very engaged with the material in their
| course. Some have egos that are too big for that, but a lot
| of them don't. They understand that the course is required,
| so you're going to get a B or a C if you don't cheat and you
| want to focus on other things. All they want is for you to
| learn something from them, and you will still learn a thing
| or two by doing half their homework honestly.
|
| The back door in the job market is a lot bigger than the
| front door - a lot of people get jobs from referrals rather
| than the traditional application process, and most of the
| really great jobs are found that way. Cheating at school
| almost completely shuts the back door in the entry level job
| market, since your professors and fellow students will know
| you are doing it. Don't underestimate what you're giving up.
| glowingly wrote:
| My boss was gleeful at getting someone with a 3.9 GPA
| recently. It counts for something, I can say that much.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yeah, well, in my experience the ones with the high GPAs
| were better at designing circuits, too. They'd use math to
| derive the optimal values for the components. The ones with
| low GPAs would spend a great deal of time randomly trying
| different component values until the circuit kinda sorta
| almost worked.
| wincy wrote:
| I don't know what to tell you, except that I just read some
| guides on how to code on the internet and make 6 figures now.
| I'm a high school dropout. This seems like a profound waste
| of your time and money, and people are lying to you about
| what you need to get a good, easy job. I doubt some stranger
| on the internet is going to persuade you of anything, but
| there are definitely other ways to make money if that's all
| you care about.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My experience was the complete opposite. I loved learning
| that stuff. It was like somebody turned the lights on. Like I
| was handed the keys to the universe. In my mind I could _see_
| the electrons flowing. With the math I could figure out how
| and why.
|
| I am sad for you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make
| money. But there are endless ways to make money, pick
| something you actually like.
|
| I've counseled many kids: Draw two circles, one around what
| you like, the other around what makes money. Do the things in
| the intersection.
| [deleted]
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| My EE experience was like yours. Especially the day I
| learned Laplace transforms. I felt like I'd found a magic
| wand.
|
| Except I never thought about money until I graduated. "Holy
| hell!" I realized. "They want to pay me a ton of money for
| this? I'd do it for free!"
|
| Fortunately I was smart enough not to say that last part
| out loud.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Reminds me of many accounts by fighter pilots in WW2. "I
| can't believe they _pay_ me to fly these things! "
|
| Can you imagine flying a P-51? I splurged and bought a 30
| minute ride in the back seat. Sigh. Holy Crap! Pure
| heaven! I was smiling for the next week.
| imtringued wrote:
| The German Bundeswehr solved that problem by not letting
| their pilots fly and instead promote them to some
| managerial office jobs. That is still cheaper than paying
| for real flight hours.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Did you actually learn how they work or how to just use
| them out of a table?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I learned them. They changed nasty* differential
| equations into simple algebra problems. Oh boy did I
| learn them.
|
| *Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I
| learned about nonlinear differential equations, where
| Laplace transforms don't help.
| Sirened wrote:
| > They want to pay me a ton of money for this? I'd do it
| for free!
|
| Happy to see that other's found this too :) This was my
| experience with CS--I always loved it and I am, to this
| day, still surprised that they pay me so much because I
| used to do this exact same stuff at home for fun. I feel
| like I got exceptionally lucky that my passion just so
| happens to be something exceptionally profitable because
| I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.
| [deleted]
| wormer wrote:
| It's so frustrating for me to read things like "I am sad
| for you". I don't have the option to do what I want;
| someone has to pay to feed the children and keep the lights
| on at my village back home. Another commenter said
| something like "I would do this for free!". Great, you did
| it for the love of doing it and had the privilege of coming
| from a background where you can go through college without
| thinking of money, but I can't, and being talked down to
| condescendingly about it is infuriating.
| grog454 wrote:
| > someone has to pay to feed the children and keep the
| lights on at my village back home.
|
| Why are you solely responsible for this?
| wormer wrote:
| Because I have access to education and wealth
| opportunities that they don't.
| strken wrote:
| What do you want to do? If I put together a list of
| things it'd be hundreds of lines long and at least some
| of them would be profitable.
|
| I think people aren't baffled by you choosing a high-
| paying career, but by you not having anything that's both
| high-paying and interesting. Why electrical engineering
| and not CS or nuclear or something? Is there nothing at
| all that both interests you and pays well?
| wormer wrote:
| This _is_ the thing that I have the most passion for. I
| like computers and electronics. But it 's dwarfed by
| other passions that I have that I would much rather be
| doing. No bills are being paid by me wanting to bike or
| write in my journal.
|
| And I know it's a sentiment that isn't unique to me,
| since a lot of my friends from similar backgrounds share
| this feeling. You choose the major that you can tolerate
| and also pays well.
| WalterBright wrote:
| So you _do_ like it. That is unlike the poster I was
| responding to.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| The poster you are responding to here and the one you
| responded to first are the same person.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're right, I missed that. I assumed they weren't
| because they were contradictory.
| [deleted]
| honkler wrote:
| you are absolutely right, and I understand you
| completely.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I don't have the option to do what I want
|
| I was replying to a college student. Someone going to
| college _does_ have the option of which major.
|
| I am also referring to people in America. I understand
| that Americans have a lot more opportunities than people
| in other countries.
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| You're trapping yourself into a 30-40 year career that
| you clearly can't make yourself care before you've even
| started. What exactly do you think is going to happen to
| you 10-20 years into your career? Growth and advancement
| are continually expected for an engineer over the course
| of their career. And the engineering professions aren't
| large communities; get a reputation as "that mediocre guy
| that doesn't care about his profession" and it's game
| over.
|
| And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself.
| You won't have anyone else to blame for it.
| bumby wrote:
| > _I 'm just going to cheat to save time and effort._
|
| I totally understand the pressure, and the idea that these
| choices are a means to an end. And this isn't meant to sound
| condescending so please don't take it that way, but please
| PLEASE do not take this attitude into industry. Especially
| into a safety-critical industry. Believe it or not, it's more
| prevalent than you may think and humans are always good at
| rationalizing taking the easy way out.
|
| I know the knee-jerk reaction will be "yeah, I won't do it
| when it matters" but these types of choices tend to become
| habits, and as the saying goes, habits become one's character
| and character becomes one's fate.
| Sirened wrote:
| This might be a dumb question, but what does this even look
| like in industry? I'm honestly not sure how I could "cheat"
| my way through my job. I have to design features, argue why
| they're good/worthwhile tradeoffs, and then implement them.
| Sure, I can steal features from competitors but I can't lie
| about their impact or fake implementing them because people
| will surely notice when the feature ships and simply
| doesn't work. Like, you can't cheat at design verification
| of a chip. If the chip ships and doesn't work, your ass is
| getting canned so fast.
| bumby wrote:
| There are all kinds of ways to cheat verification and
| validation. In my personal experience, it usually comes
| down to "cheating" to avoid missing a schedule milestone.
| It usually comes down to misrepresenting a system. One
| example that comes to mind was a programmer who created
| an artificial flag to avoid static analysis tools
| reporting some errors; passing static analysis was a
| requirement for their system to be cleared for use. When
| confronted, the team's reply said they did so because if
| the report identified issues, they'd be forced to fix
| them and they needed to meet schedule. I have lots of
| other examples, some more egregious, some less. Sometimes
| they border on being silly, such as when a team said they
| didn't need to validate their software because, since the
| system operation required a human to turn it on, it
| wasn't considered "software" in their definition of the
| word.
|
| For context, these were a safety-critical systems. A lot
| of times when something went wrong on a research effort,
| people can cover their tracks by calling it an "anomaly"
| and avoid further digging to press forward. But a lot of
| the "anomalies" can be traced back to avoiding
| requirements or equivalently lying about test outcomes,
| most of the time due to schedule pressure or just a
| simple lack of expertise. And because many safety issues
| are low probability events, people can get lulled into
| complacency where this behavior becomes normal since it's
| still rare for something bad to happen.
|
| Another example further down in the discussion was VW's
| cheating of emission tests by changing their vehicles
| operation when it was connected to a test stand.
| afarrell wrote:
| > I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a
| PCB.
|
| How on earth would an electrical engineering degree help you
| get a good job?
| Sirened wrote:
| eh, for digital circuits/RTL it's largely been my
| experience that they will simply not look at you unless you
| have an EE/CompE degree It's bizarre but not exactly a
| novel problem
| afarrell wrote:
| Right, but why would getting hired to do work you hate
| result in having a good job?
| bumby wrote:
| Because some people look at a job as merely a means to an
| end. That end being a paycheck. Their quality of work
| often reflects this value system.
| grog454 wrote:
| >I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB.
| I do it because it's a good job and I want money,
|
| I see this a lot in computer science / SWE too. I realize you
| don't have the life experience to answer these questions well
| so maybe they're just rhetorical: do you think you will be
| successful when you get a job laying out PCBs and designing
| schematics? What will your competence level be given that you
| cheated your way through the relevant schooling? How long
| until you burn out?
|
| Part of the reason colleges force you to take a lot of
| courses irrelevant to your major is so the students like you
| have a slightly higher chance of finding something they ARE
| passionate about.
| syntheweave wrote:
| From everything I've seen in having spent about as many years
| out of school as in it, it's way more likely that you make it
| a few years in and then burn out without fully paying off the
| debts. Is your plan really to spend the next 30+ years hating
| your workday, then bringing the bad mood to the dinner table?
|
| I say that having also been the cheater who hated the
| material and got the grade. Why did I do that? Parents wanted
| me in a "good career," same as everyone else. They saw a
| script and they kept pushing in that direction. So I
| convinced myself into it, at least for a while. It was phony
| baloney given that in my actual career the majority of my
| money has been made by crypto speculation and miscellaneous
| random opportunities, not anything that ever needed a
| credential. Fortunately I pushed myself onto a path that
| actually worked for me along the way and graduated right when
| I was actually starting to appreciate the coursework. Some
| people make it all the way through medical or law school and
| then immediately quit the field.
|
| My advice is this, basically - don't try to win at your
| career, just try to survive; winning is a temporary thing
| that you can get by pushing harder for a short period, but
| surviving is a matter of doing _everything_ at a viable
| level, forever. If you really think this is the best shot you
| have under the circumstances to achieve a decent life for
| everyone concerned, then sure, by all means. But aim to exit
| towards something that actually fits you as soon as possible,
| even if it 's a "simple" move like going from IC into
| management.
| CrendKing wrote:
| One thing I want to tell you is that, if you don't like what
| you do every day for decades, the extra money you make by
| taking that job won't make you happy. I have friend who took
| EE and CS major in college, got job in SV, making 300k
| annually, and feels depressed every day because he needs to
| work on things he has absolutely no interest in. You might
| think 300k/yr is good, but it's SV so the cost is also high.
| Many times he regrets that he should have chosen photography
| and film making when he had the chance. Unfortunately we are
| not longer young, so there is no easy way back.
|
| I'm not sure how many young people made the choice to study
| what they study in college by themselves. But if you did, ask
| yourself if you are willing to make the sacrifice.
| seunosewa wrote:
| He can pursue photography and film-making as a hobby. Lots
| of people work to get paid and spend their spare time
| pursuing hobbies which might not be profitable.
| imtringued wrote:
| I designed my own PCB and I must tell you, analog electronics
| are brain melting. Software development is literally baby
| shit. You better learn as much as you can because theory
| actually matters here unlike in computer science which is
| just a math degree and is supposed to have no relation to any
| physical world you have experience with.
| powersnail wrote:
| "... so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise,
| why sign up in the first place?"
|
| I've been a TA, and I've talked to some students who cheated or
| considered cheating.
|
| The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind
| cheating. Students don't actively make a decision that "I'm
| just gonna apply to a university and cheat". That's not what
| happens in their minds.
|
| They do think they can get through uni on their own when they
| first started. Then, they make bad decisions, usually small
| ones, like skipping a class, or something, but it grows into a
| habit, even an addiction. Before they know it, half of the
| course is over, and they learned nothing. When the exam comes,
| it is too late. There is no time to decide to "get everything
| out of it anymore". So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the
| bad grade (which they should).
| furyofantares wrote:
| Grades are meaningful during school for all sorts of reason, of
| course not failing is the most meaningful, but so is not losing
| financial aid/scholarships, or your parents are paying for it
| and care, or you want to get into certain programs. If they
| aren't meaningful after school then they are revealed as a
| farce. So why not cheat. And they're made even more farcical if
| other students are cheating.
|
| And then, culturally, we don't tell you that you need actual
| skills to get an actual job out of school. We do tell you that
| you need a degree. And even if you believe a degree is
| necessary but not sufficient, it may not be at all clear to you
| that the skills you need are the same as what you're learning
| in school.
|
| I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is
| learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You're
| paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what
| you're paying for.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > You're paying so much money for these courses -- probably a
| ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup -- ... so at
| least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up
| in the first place?
|
| In some cases you're paying for second rate material, so this
| holds little sway. Why worry about squandering the learning
| opportunity when the best learning resource is free on the
| internet. I'll try to save time in the class and reapply that
| time to better learning resources (my morals won't let me do
| this by cheating, but I understand why some do).
|
| My current classes are light on technical merit and heavy on
| APA style citation requirements. This during a time where many
| very powerful people can't reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2
| sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions
| aren't providing real learning opportunity. I will get my piece
| of paper though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Maybe they aren't paying for those courses. They're almost
| always spending someone else's money (loans feel like free
| money to kids). So they do not value it.
|
| I bet if someone compared cheaters to students who were working
| and their wages went into tuition, there'd not be a strong
| correlation.
|
| Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is
| somewhere in the basement, I've never displayed it and nobody
| ever asked about it. I attended graduation only to please my
| parents, who came out for the occasion. I didn't want to buy
| the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift.
|
| I didn't care about the diploma. I only cared about the
| education. If I only wanted a diploma, I'd have gone to a much
| easier university.
| bluishgreen wrote:
| Offering a different view from another vantage point. My GPA
| was tied to my scholarship which was tied to my visa. Slipping
| below 3.75/4 can get me deported. Looks pretty incentivized to
| me.
| bitwize wrote:
| And let me tell you, the difference between Cs and As as an
| undergrad is the difference between getting a job in the
| industry and getting a job making $200k or more at FAANG
| straight out of college, that will put you in touch with the
| smart and/or moneyed people who are going to make you a
| multimillionaire. And you want to be a multimillionaire because
| this is the USA and that is the only path to being able to
| afford the medical care you may very well need especially in
| later life.
|
| Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades
| up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).
| beambot wrote:
| The college system serves three purposes: (1) Education, (2)
| Credentialing, (3) Networking.
|
| The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly
| there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the
| traditional classroom setting.
| radford-neal wrote:
| Actually, it's main purpose is to provide a socially-
| acceptable way for young people to not devote their time to
| productive work. Some of these people use the time this makes
| available to them to learn wonderful things.
| hibikir wrote:
| I agree with you in many cases, but note that different
| institutions, in different countries, teach differently, and
| grade differently. While cheating in a core class that builds
| important knowledge in your major seems like a horrible idea,
| that's not all there is. For instance, anyone studying computer
| science in my state school in Spain, a few decades ago, had to
| take a deadly physics class in their first year. It contained,
| easily, the material of three physics classes in a sensible
| American university. There's no such thing as TAs, and time
| with the instructor outside of class is just not a thing. The
| pass rate was under 20%, and that's on purpose: failing people
| was part of the objective, as it served as a way to keep people
| enrolled, but unable to access later classes, which don't
| really need any advanced physics. This kind of cribbing was
| (and it might still be?) popular in that state university. The
| goal for the students is not to get the best grades: It's just
| to pass at all, so that they can get on to the classes that
| might teach something they are interested on.
|
| In an American university, I've seen people being quite
| motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on
| a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when
| you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your
| first midterm didn't look good...
|
| So sure, most people in an American university, in most
| circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an
| option. But systems and circumstances can be different for
| others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already
| tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and
| they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to
| cheat are strong.
| Salgat wrote:
| Grades get you internships and internships look extremely good
| on a resume. It's that simple.
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| One theory of education is that you are there to learn and
| learn how to learn.
|
| The other theory is that school is an arbitrary experience
| designed to separate out high skilled from low skilled workers
| into a separating equilibrium (or, replace skilled with wealthy
| and you're probably closer to the truth).
| nikitaga wrote:
| In addition to what everyone else said - consider that cheating
| does not stop being a viable short term[1] solution after you
| graduate. You can cheat your way through work just like you can
| cheat your way through school. Not always and not everywhere,
| but certainly a doable lifestyle for many people.
| Unfortunately.
|
| [1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short
| term?
| afarrell wrote:
| Sounds like a path to escalating amounts of social anxiety
| and loneliness.
|
| If you cheat your way through life, what do you do when
| you're 40 and no longer cute & full of potential? You don't
| trust anybody and nobody trusts you.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The students aren't paying for the courses though, they're
| paying for the degree. Most students are at university to get a
| job and expand their network, education is a sidebar, a nice to
| have.
|
| > if you're cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie
| when anyone asks your gpa
|
| Tons of employers require transcripts, especially for new
| grads.
| beebmam wrote:
| I totally agree with you. It is a cliche, but truly, they are
| only cheating themselves.
|
| Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my
| observations, only the students who were committed to
| understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with
| maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-
| mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all
| together.
|
| I have a concern for the future of our society when the
| majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating,
| though.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > they are only cheating themselves.
|
| I disagree. They are undermining the value of the
| qualification other have earned.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > only the students who were committed to understanding the
| material went on to have superb careers
|
| For STEM, sure. This guy is a psych professor though. I
| suspect that most of their jobs will have absolutely nothing
| to do with this class. Obviously being truly successful
| instead of cheating will help in their careers, but I doubt
| anything they learn in this class would.
| paulpauper wrote:
| if a good job pays 100-300k/year, does it matter if you
| eventually get filtered out if you already made good $ and
| keep expenses low.
| Sirened wrote:
| I've always wondered about that lol. Surely there are
| people who do this? If you dedicate your life to becoming
| very good at interviewing and bullshitting, you can almost
| certainly get high paying jobs that you are entirely
| unqualified for and cannot perform even the basic duties
| of. Despite this, you should be able to anyways since
| getting fired from a large company for "gross incompetence"
| is a _long_ process, especially when you 're a new hire and
| they're liable to assume you're just adjusting to new
| tools. Pocket those 3-6 months of pay, keep interviewing,
| and just keep hopping jobs and finding new places to scam
| without ever actually doing anything useful at all.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > I have a concern for the future of our society when the
| majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating,
| though.
|
| The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more.
| It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to
| get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm
| overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not
| go to college), but there were already clear trends that are
| definitely going to be exacerbated.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating
| themselves.
|
| > Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters.
|
| Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture
| class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and
| Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of
| time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got
| the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order
| to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied
| that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good
| career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned
| in that course. I also cheated a little in american history
| and poli sci.
|
| I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have
| gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of
| those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not
| one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career.
|
| Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But
| your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning
| course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of
| college, in terms of social experience, credentials,
| professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| If I go to school for computer science, but have to take
| chemistry, statistics, etc. And get stuck with a bad professor
| who spends half the class time ranting about irrelevant topics,
| cheating makes sense so I can spend my time focused on the
| classes that matter to me.
| latency-guy wrote:
| I agree. I hated bad professors all throughout my college
| career. They were the bane of my existence. Especially for
| the same courses you list and even more for the ones my
| degree focused on.
|
| These bad professors would take forever to grade, if not that
| then they would do what you describe and give us irrelevant
| information and odd spiels about whatever thing was bugging
| them in the politics world, or maybe even something their dog
| or cat did the week before that totally delayed them getting
| us our grades or assignments. I remember in my statistics
| course the guy spilled coffee all over our written mid terms!
| How careless.
|
| I, not much unlike yourself would try and find any easy way
| to get ahead of the curve. Now, a common theme among these
| bad professors is definitely giving irrelevant information,
| being lazy, or even completely disorganized to no hope. With
| all these mistakes, they end up making huge mistakes in their
| own syllabus. You have no idea how many terrible things these
| people would do in their own work!
|
| A neat little thing I found that nearly all bad professors do
| is list the exact material they would cover throughout the
| course, maybe not always week by week but an overview of the
| material we would touch on. How silly of them.
|
| That's not even the kicker, these bad professors would even
| list the exact place where they took things from. Hilarious
| indeed. It was usually under some strange section called
| 'Required Course Materials' or 'Recommended for Review'.
| These suckers couldn't be any worse at their job, practically
| giving us the answers.
|
| When I figured this out, I started going all in with the
| cheating. After getting the syllabus I would get this thing
| and read it from the beginning to the end, trying to cover as
| much material going topic by topic to be covered in the
| schedule. I could finish the course in practically 2 weeks,
| didn't even have to wait for these lectures that were pretty
| much a waste of time after going through it. By the 3rd bi-
| weekly lecture, I would have learned the entire course. Those
| fools never knew what hit them either, I would ace their
| assignments and finish exams before anyone else. I would even
| stop showing up to class with how adept I was at cheating. No
| one even suspected that I was cheating.
|
| I would try and get others to follow my path. They would
| always ask how I did it, how did I, who really wasn't all
| that special, or smart, get so many A's. Even in spite of the
| quality of instruction.
|
| The answer was always the same - read the textbook!
| jen20 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how learning a published syllabus
| could be qualified as cheating?
| paulpauper wrote:
| it's not. reading ahead is never cheating.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| It's a joke.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| None of what you describe is cheating. At all.
|
| You literally just studied and worked ahead. That is not
| cheating...
| cwillu wrote:
| ...that's the joke.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that if the professors have plagiarized their
| course materials, then they shouldn't be disappointed about
| the students doing the same...
|
| By the way, I don't think you really cheated (in an
| academic integrity sense), you thoroughly read the course
| material to get these grades. You deserve to get these
| grades since you already know how to study on your own.
| glitchc wrote:
| ... pretty sure OP is sarcasm.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| Except for professors who didn't list everything out and
| had lecture specific material. It's hard for me to believe
| no one had professors like this when I have friends from
| places like Stanford and MIT (schools some people would
| think is filled with all great professors) who can attest
| to some of their own experiences being like this.
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| WalterBright wrote:
| Lots of students switch majors after taking classes in other
| subjects. Besides, if you laser focus on one specialty, you
| lose all the serendipity that comes from knowing multiple
| fields.
|
| I was trained as a mechanical engineer. Yet I write
| compilers. And yeah, a lot of things I learned from ME have
| made it into the seemingly utterly different compilers. I see
| a lot of mistakes SE's make because they are completely
| unaware of other fields.
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| > a lot of things I learned from ME have made it into the
| seemingly utterly different compilers.
|
| Do you mind elaborating on this or providing a link if
| you've discussed this before?
| WalterBright wrote:
| A couple articles I wrote years ago:
|
| https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html
|
| https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html
|
| And one about its influence on compilers:
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386323
| paulpauper wrote:
| agree. composition and anthropology were such a waste of
| time. the composition class was harder than the stem classes
| though because the teacher was pretty meticulous about
| writing.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Composition can be _incredible._ It 's a blank canvas type
| course that can be about _anything the professor wants_ as
| long as they 're teaching you to write. My composition
| class was a passionate introduction to western philosophy.
| Incredible class. Pedagogical laziness, overly prescriptive
| syllabi, or lack of creativity make classes like
| composition bad-- not the subject itself.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Writing is good for your career as a software engineer.
|
| Writing is how you promote yourself through articles,
| presentations, etc.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Not at all. Writing entails some creative freedom. It was
| more like "read this essay and make sure your opinion
| does not depart too far from the professor's"
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't bother reading articles by people who can't form
| a complete sentence. In my experience, there's a strong
| correlation between bad writing and having nothing
| perceptive to say.
| bumby wrote:
| There are exceptions, but in general, an ability to
| communicate clearly correlates to an ability to think
| clearly.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I expected saying that would be unpopular. But I'm hardly
| alone in this attitude, and so it pays to learn how to
| write.
| Avicebron wrote:
| statistics is pretty useful in computer science...and as
| someone has has worked in biotech on the software
| side...chemistry can be as well. Heck even anthropology and
| philosophy were pretty relevant when I took my courses on NLP
| years ago.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| The amount of programming jobs (out of all possible
| programming positions available) that require proper
| statistics or chemistry for that matter are so low that it
| doesn't make sense to learn those subjects (in the context
| of computer science) preemptively. Even if people who take
| and succeed in subjects like Chemistry who _do_ end up in a
| job that may use it down the line probably won 't remember
| what they learned anyway.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The jobs don't require it, but the people who are not
| aware of statistics or chemistry are unable to recognize
| when it _would_ help them. I.e. it becomes a self-
| fulfilling prophecy.
|
| (It has nothing to do with "in the context of computer
| science").
| derangedHorse wrote:
| I imagine they'd either have coworkers who are more
| involved in those domains (if actually needed for the
| job) who can guide them on the right path or can just
| google their problems and end up on a path of self-
| discovery that leads them to those subjects. Prematurely
| surveying other subjects not pertinent to the job one is
| going to university in the first place for seems silly in
| that regard. I'm sure many would rather focus their time
| on learning more of the things that are shared in the
| majority of the job market (or at least more things that
| _actually_ interest them).
| WalterBright wrote:
| You'd imagine wrong. (In my experience.)
|
| For example, in mechanical engineering, I know how to
| make reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Software
| engineering is still focused on a hopeless quest to make
| software perfect. How to do it assuming unreliability has
| been slowly seeping into software engineering the hard
| way, bit by bit, over my entire career.
|
| One example: running the brake software on the same
| computer that is connected wirelessly to the internet.
| the_biot wrote:
| I have to disagree with that. One obvious example is
| Google, who made a fabulously reliable and fast machine
| out of cobbled-together ultra cheap commodity hardware,
| and conquered the world with it. That was in the 90s, and
| their way of doing things took over completely. It's why
| companies like Sun went out of business -- they had the
| super-reliable (and overpriced) systems, but nobody
| wanted them anymore.
|
| What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply
| incompetence.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're right about how companies managed to scale their
| internet server farms. But that was late (1990s) and
| still has not seeped into the rest of the industry.
|
| > What you're describing (the brake system) is just
| simply incompetence.
|
| I regularly discuss this with people who are _convinced_
| they can make such a system secure.
|
| For another example, I frequently advocate on HN for
| embedded systems to have physical write-enable switches
| for reprogramming the system memory. This makes it a
| physical impossibility for malware to infect that memory.
| Nobody agrees with me. They all think they can write
| bulletproof code.
|
| I can't buy disk drives with physical write-enable
| switches, either, not since the 1990s. This is necessary
| so if you try to restore from a backup drive, you can't
| make a mistake and overwrite the backup, and the
| ransomware on your system cannot write to it. This is a
| regression in the industry.
|
| And yet nobody on HN thinks this is a good idea, because
| it's inconvenient. Or they'll suggest a _software_
| switch, which of course is inherently corruptible.
|
| BTW, the aviation industry gets this right. The
| stabilizer trim has a physical cutoff switch on all their
| airplanes, including the 737MAX. Unfortunately, in the 3
| incidents of MCAS runaway, only one use the switch
| properly (and you never hear about that incident). The
| second never used the switch at all, and the third crew
| decided to disable the trim system when the airplane was
| in a non-recoverable dive without using trim. (The
| electric trim switches also are physical and override the
| software.)
| urthor wrote:
| The number of programming jobs that require statistics is
| huge though?
|
| The MLE job market is booming.
| analog31 wrote:
| For that matter the number of programming jobs that
| require computer science is pretty low.
|
| For a programming job that requires knowledge of
| chemistry, it's easier to find a chemist who can program.
| Likewise physics, math, statistics, electronics, etc.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| As someone with 10 years as a software engineer I haven't
| needed it.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| I'm sure there are 10y SWEs (and 1 yr) that use it every
| day.
|
| Obviously it's going to be irrelevant to compilers or
| something, but not to heuristic approaches or anything
| with some quantifiable (and actively quantified)
| nondeterminism.
| kolbusa wrote:
| It will be very relevant in any field that does
| performance testing. And that includes compilers.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| I don't think you need a statistics class to do
| performance testing.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| You change an optimizer pass. Looks good on a
| microbenchmark. But then you try it out on some samples
| of real code. Turns out, it probably makes some real code
| a little bit faster. No difference on other real code,
| but the data are noisy, so it's hard to tell. And on one
| piece of code, it seems to actually cause a regression -
| but again, the data from multiple runs are noisy.
|
| Should you enable the optimizer change by default, or
| not? Or do you still need to collect more data? How much
| more data? What data - more runs or more different code
| samples? How confident do you want to be, and how
| confident can you be?
|
| These are questions you will face in your real day to day
| work, and a few statistics courses will be incredibly
| helpful to you in answering them.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| I knew someone would say something like that, but I've
| never seen that sort of thing done personally and I
| really doubt lack of statistical knowledge is even close
| to the biggest obstacle to writing faster software. For
| micro-optimizations so subtle you need fancy techniques
| to even tell they work, non-quantitative factors (code
| impact, will it enable other optimizations, etc.) are
| more likely to be decisive. Techniques to reduce noise
| are either non-statistical (warming up caches) or
| unsophisticated (average many trials, best of three).
| justbaker wrote:
| I'd say psychology is a good a thing to know as well.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| Many don't pay money for the courses themselves, they're paying
| for a degree. Why do people want a degree? To pursue high
| paying careers because it's difficult for many (at least here
| in America) to find any decent paying job (that allows for the
| "American Dream") without one. Now it would be nice if every
| student was passionate about all the subjects required for
| their degree of choice and/or if every professor had both
| passion and clarity in their lecturing but that's not the world
| we live in.
|
| Students aren't always passionate about the required subjects
| for their degree , potentially because these subjects won't
| always have a direct correlation in meeting job requirements or
| improving job performance, and even the students who are
| passionate may never get the education they desire (picture a
| lousy lecturer on tenure who's forced to give lectures as part
| of the job).
|
| Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who comes from a
| long history of generational poverty who was able to scrape by
| enough money to save up for a degree so that they can get a 6
| figure job at Morgan Stanley (or the like) as a business
| analyst. The job will probably only require them to put some
| numbers into spreadsheets and make graphs. The qualifications
| to do that will require them to get a degree made more
| expensive through gen-ed requirements and a whole lot of
| classes they don't need.
|
| Now in that situation would _you_ forfeit your goal for the
| threat of passing a difficult, irrelevant science class
| requirement when a better alternative exists that will also
| free up time to spend more on the classes that will actually be
| relevant to the job? Even if _you_ wouldn 't, it shouldn't be
| hard to imagine why someone would.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| A lot of the students (and people in general) have a low-level
| cleverness obsession which handily blocks out high-level
| perception like that.
|
| Then the blocked out part becomes neglected so it turns kind of
| on/off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful
| information.
|
| So as a result, it's not that you don't see the big picture.
| It's that your inadvertent feedback loop converted high level
| thinking into a huge scary monster of high-level disasters that
| will seemingly result if you aren't as clever as can be.
|
| This also explains the cleverness in the face of everything
| else. Caught? Email back and be clever. Etc. Don't ever stop
| being clever, caught or no. It is your only (seeming) chance.
|
| But did you also catch the high level thinking student who was
| feeling stuck and potentially screwed, in their honesty? They
| realize the system might just as easily punish them. They are
| also lucky the professor had a considerate perspective rather
| than a blanket-projection attitude that many have. They are
| also lucky they weren't randomly selected by the cleverness
| cabal...
|
| (Also notice that really good professors make for reliable
| bridges between high and low level perspectives, with
| expectations of the former but also multi-dimensional empathy
| for those living the low-level system. This professor is indeed
| a very clever person on their own. So for them this is
| situation is probably less likely to result in massive
| disillusionment as it would for pure high-level folks.)
| Brybry wrote:
| Not everyone is paying a lot for courses.
|
| My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state
| scholarship program.
|
| Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA,
| so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. Most of my
| friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.
|
| (For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice,
| for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I feel a strong need to debunk some falsehoods here.
|
| First, to be clear. DO NOT CHEAT.
|
| Ok. Grades DO matter. When I graduated, there were several
| companies that wouldn't interview me because I didn't have the
| grades. I had a 3.2 ish. That meant I had to get a job slightly
| outside of my degree - which impacted my entire career (12
| years amd counting).
|
| Also, you can't lie about your grades - they will ask for your
| transcripts. The job I got out of college asked for mine after
| 6 months
| cortesoft wrote:
| What field are you in?
|
| This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but
| professionally I work in software development.
|
| I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code
| I wrote for my side project, since I didn't have a degree in
| the field of any professional experience. Every job since
| then has been because I was recruited by previous co-workers.
|
| My college degree was never an issue, and certainly not my
| grades. Many of my coworkers are surprised when I tell them I
| have no degree, but it is always just a "huh" and then move
| on.
|
| I am now a director and have hired a lot of people, and
| unless they have zero professional experience, I pretty much
| never look at their degree when I am evaluating candidates. I
| have worked at very large companies, and have never had an
| issue trying to hire people without a degree.
|
| I am sure there are places where it would matter, but I just
| can't imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I have a BS Electrical Engineering. I wanted to design
| antennas and work with radio transmission SO BAD. I ended
| up getting a job as an analyst with a bunch of other people
| that "were good at math and thinking about numbers", then I
| moved I to data, now Cloud stuff.
|
| It took me a long time to give up on my dream of being an
| EE - but I like what I do now. Also, to your point, I
| ignore college credentials and I don't look at GPA.
| paulpauper wrote:
| agree. I never cheated college although I did in high school
| a bit . The profs are pretty good at picking up on cheating,
| and I saw some of my classmates get busted. But I can def.
| understand why some would cheat.
| dehrmann wrote:
| How old are you? I doubt the average 19-year-old is thinking
| about it in terms of getting everything they can for their
| money. In 10 years, they'll probably be horrified of how little
| they got for the $2000 the class cost.
| mightybyte wrote:
| I completely agree with this view. However, I think it's worth
| trying hard to give the students the benefit of the doubt and
| ask how cheating might be rational. In other words, flip the
| assumptions and ask why we would require them to study
| something that they are just going to cheat at.
|
| Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just
| don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less
| experience with life on this planet with other human beings.
| But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?
|
| The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking
| is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study
| just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for
| life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is
| actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that
| are pretty important. What if the structure of our education
| system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer
| ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter
| here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about
| _when_ you choose to get particular bits of education?
| ww520 wrote:
| The cynic would say the money they paid for school are just
| easy student loans that will be forgiven. What's their skin in
| the game?
| [deleted]
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| In my grad algo class I have a strong hunch there was a massive
| amount of cheating. It was an incredibly difficult course and i
| think people were scared of not failing. A lot of them were
| foreign students as well so there was a significant amount on
| the line for them
| rbongers wrote:
| The reason I think a lot of people cheat is because they just
| don't appreciate the value of a good education, they don't even
| know what they really want to do with their lives, they don't
| know the value of money, and are just going because their
| parents just want them to.
|
| I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think
| I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I
| worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told
| me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary,
| but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do,
| and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I
| did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could
| have dreamed of in highschool.
|
| At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out
| of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money.
| I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more
| firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my
| parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most
| common answers.
|
| People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be
| ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness.
| Some people need some life experience, some people will never
| gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be
| clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one
| I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to
| take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and
| young adults.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _, they don 't know the value of money, and are just going
| because their parents just want them to._
|
| how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not
| wasting money, you would do everything, including even
| cheating, to pass.
|
| _they don 't even know what they really want to do with
| their lives_
|
| or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a
| waste of time to get there.
| barsonme wrote:
| Because most of the cheating is born out of laziness, not
| from a desire to pass at all costs.
| paulpauper wrote:
| "all cost" not include cheating as well?
| rbongers wrote:
| >if you care about not wasting money, you would do
| everything, including even cheating, to pass.
|
| If you care about not wasting money, why risk everything
| you've spent and not even gain the education that you've
| purchased while you're at it?
|
| >or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a
| waste of time to get there.
|
| If they truly already have the skills they need to skip to
| their life of choice - why cheat? If they don't have this
| capability, their feeling that they should just be able to
| skip over education is wrong.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| See I came out of college learning the exact opposite lesson.
| I optimized for learning as much as possible, and didn't care
| at all about grades.
|
| Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste
| and GPA matters quite a bit.
|
| There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your
| first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost
| out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least
| from having a bad GPA.
| tester756 wrote:
| >And your first job determines your second one
|
| what. the. hell.
|
| I hate that mindset with passion.
|
| Folks, just skew the odds.
| apetresc wrote:
| Huh? I legitimately can't tell what mindset you're
| railing against, or what "skew the odds" means in this
| context?
| tester756 wrote:
| >I legitimately can't tell what mindset you're railing
| against
|
| Basically that there's some "chain" of dependencies,
| impossible to overcome when it comes to career
|
| like previously quoted statement for me sounds like
|
| good gpa -> good first job -> fast path to high tc jobs
|
| mediocre gpa -> mediocre job -> a lot of other not fancy
| jobs -> high tc job after a lot of years
|
| What I'm saying is that "And your first job determines
| your second one" is not true (except edge cases like govt
| jobs).
|
| You can start your career at the most unknown company in
| country and still manage to jump to the top companies
|
| >or what "skew the odds" means in this context?
|
| Just because the odds are not favoring you, it's still
| doable
| JamesBarney wrote:
| It's not impossible to overcome, but it does take time.
| Time your earning less money than you would be.
|
| Time to build up a competitive resume so you get an
| interview despite a lower GPA, and time to study so that
| when you do get the interview you leave a better
| impression to make up for the poor GPA.
| tester756 wrote:
| Generally the whole "GPA" importance concept is crazy to
| me, because in my country I've never heard anyone ever
| being asked about it
|
| I don't even remember my GPA because I've seen it maybe
| twice - once when I received diploma and second time when
| I've been going thru my documents and just wanted to
| check out of curiosity
|
| It's so flawed metrics that I'd never even consider it as
| reasonable when interviewing people
| JamesBarney wrote:
| In my early career I've had several recruiters who were
| very interested in me based on my resume, had several
| conversations and then when they found out my GPA said
| they couldn't place me.
|
| Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain
| GPA even 5-10 years into my career.
| rbongers wrote:
| There are lots of different perspectives on education in
| this thread, yours included, and I respect that. It's a
| complicated issue, and no two people have the same
| experience. This is why I always tell people not to just
| blindly follow my path because it worked for me, that's the
| same as just taking the path your parents want or worse.
|
| I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't
| necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into
| College, and that something clearly needs to change.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| This relates to one of the weird effect of going abroad:
| nobody cares, except if you're from an elite world renown
| school.
|
| For some visa application the criteria was to have
| graduated from college, and a printed paper saying "this
| student graduated in 20xx" was enough. No job cared to ask
| what school it was, how it's ranked or what grades, as it
| was out of their social ranking and they wouldn't be able
| to pin it in the hierarchy. It was a good school and I
| enjoyed the curriculum, but really nobody cares.
| bumby wrote:
| To your point, college is a path to education for some and a
| signal for others (and, probably more accurately, some
| mixture of both). I think the issue is when both groups
| (those that cheat and those that do not) both get the same
| credential. That means the credential has lost its "signal
| value".
|
| To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its
| educational value, maybe that doesn't matter. But to many,
| especially HR, the degree is valuable for its signaling
| capability and watering that down has real and lasting
| consequences.
| eek2121 wrote:
| My dude, I make a quarter million a year. I found out how
| useless college was after I accrued $2,944 in student loans
| (I attended college after 2001). The value to me was, and
| continues to be zero. College is not for everyone, and this
| applies even in countries where higher education is free.
|
| The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a
| college education.
| guggleet wrote:
| many make that because of massive information asymmetry.
| they are players in a giant con game that is engulfing the
| world. to some, there is more to life than bartering.
| paulpauper wrote:
| how many employers req. 'critical thinking' instead of a
| degree.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Far too few.
|
| Were it possible; employers might screen candidates on
| the results of a test of critical thinking, as opposed to
| a degree. However, this has been illegal since Griggs vs.
| Duke.
| bumby wrote:
| Wasn't the intent of Griggs v. Duke that the testing
| needed to apropos to the job? Meaning that "critical
| thinking" tests could be part of the job filter as long
| as they related to the job at hand?
| t-3 wrote:
| Well, some places do leetcode... and then they ask if you
| have a degree.
| rbongers wrote:
| I agree completely.
| strken wrote:
| I went to university to get the mandatory piece of paper.
| Sometimes I had enough time between courses to actually learn
| how to program, amid the UML and ethics in CS.
|
| I still don't appreciate the value of a good education. You
| could have replaced mine with pre-recorded Stanford lectures,
| set coursework, work placements, and Saturday morning coffee
| with a senior engineer to go over the week with our laptops
| out. It would have been 10% of the cost or less and it would
| have taught me more.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > You're paying so much money for these courses
|
| I think that's the central point.
|
| - It's not _their_ money, it's their parents' either "hard
| earned" money, but they're too inexperienced to understand its
| meaning, or "not so hard earned" money and they're just going
| through it like their parents do.
|
| - the goal is also money on the other end of the pipe. The
| statistics that get repeated is how much more you earn with a
| college degree vs without one. There's no catchy clickbait
| title about how _learning more_ makes your life better. It only
| makes sense for them to go for the fastest route to having a
| degree, if possession is the only thing that has been pitched
| to them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I.e. any car can perform like a Ferrari just by painting it
| red and putting on some badges.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| To follow your analogy, media will only report on the car
| colors on the podium, and job interviews will require the
| badges to get a foot in the door.
|
| For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to
| that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd
| argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when
| they could really work that road race with a red painted
| Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ferrari backed it up by winning Grand Prix races year
| after year. I don't know much about the ones since Enzo
| died, but the older ones were frequently race cars that
| were softened up a bit so they could be driven on the
| street.
|
| It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap
| about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced
| into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance
| of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell
| Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate.
| Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)
| hinkley wrote:
| I can say from the other side of this that I was employed in
| the industry while I was still in school, and so by the time I
| was a junior I was becoming an Informed Consumer, and let me
| tell you, the realm in which professors are expert is quite a
| bit narrower than they would have you believe. That knowledge
| got worse over time, my distrust grew, and it made it quite
| challenging to finish my degree.
|
| If we want to students to behave this way, we're going to have
| to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching
| are two different things, and what you're describing sounds
| more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| This write up explains a lot, and is pertinent to this
| particular issue.
|
| http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
|
| There's also an article around here somewhere on signaling
| theory that I don't have on hand.
| fancyfish wrote:
| Employers are setting GPA cutoffs and checking transcripts for
| some of the competitive jobs for fresh grads and interns. Not
| unusual to see a hard GPA cutoff of 3.7, and the employer wants
| a copy of your transcript sent directly from the university.
|
| As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be
| gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your
| first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your
| academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether
| you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite
| literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.
|
| Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating
| because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable
| candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they'll
| go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is
| inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they'll use
| school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.
|
| I don't see cheating changing until the incentives are
| minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the
| entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.
| sarora27 wrote:
| First job out of college (July 2013) was w/ an employer (Bay
| Area company whose name rhymes w/ Crisco) who marketed all of
| these things (GPA cutoffs, checking transcripts, etc). My
| college transcript was....less than exemplary but I made a
| point not to mention my GPA anywhere and bet on the
| interviewers not asking about it (they didnt). Got the job by
| speaking w/ a recruiter at a career fair despite not having
| the degree they were looking for.
|
| Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR
| asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which
| I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever
| again after ignoring that first email.
|
| My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that
| companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious"
| their employees & hiring practices are.
| nostromo wrote:
| People go to university for the credential, not to learn.
| Surprisingly little learning happens at university.
|
| The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how
| worthless most of higher ed really is.
|
| Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| My school had an endless stream of Saudi students only there
| for government cash and they'd cheat nonstop.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| It's a course worth multiple thousands of dollars that is
| filled with info that might or might not be of interest to the
| person taking it. It's necessary to pass or the investment in
| the degree is null and void. And you're a young person in some
| of the first best years of your life on a campus with more
| access to unsupervised socialization than you've probably ever
| had in your life. It seems pretty straightforward to me lmao.
| The real miracle is that anything else ever happens.
| Folcon wrote:
| I might have missed it, but I'm not seeing much discussion on the
| followup[0] where he talks about moving to a more asynchronous
| course where it was possible to do enough extra credit
| assignments that students could bomb their exams and still get an
| A for the course.
|
| The teacher seems very interested in student engagement with the
| material and understanding. Which I can only view as a positive.
|
| -[0]:
| https://crumplab.com/articles/blog/post_996_5_20_22_assignme...
| reactjavascript wrote:
| My university had a strict anti-cheating policy in the CS
| program. It was written very broadly. As a disadvantaged student,
| first in my family to attend college, I needed to graduate more
| than anything else in the world. The policy forbade discussing
| assignments or solutions with other students. The end result is I
| was terrified of socializing with any other CS students. I wonder
| how much I missed out on due to sheer terror and high stakes.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I am reminded of a quote from fictional character Hagbard Celine
| (Illuminatus!)
|
| "They are not in university to get knowledge, they are here to
| receive papers that say they are qualified for job xy"
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Order of importance you get told at school: grades, experience,
| network. Order of importance you realize is out there in life:
| network, experience, grades.
|
| I have a masters and never have I been asked for it for work
| (either for credentials or because I actually needed the advanced
| topics in it). Grades never ever been on the table.
| remram wrote:
| Do you mean that it's not on your CV, or that you don't send
| out CVs?
| aledalgrande wrote:
| It's on my cv but never a requirement in a job description.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| How's the saying go? If you find 10 cheaters, that's their
| problem. If you find 100 cheaters, that's your problem.
|
| Or the California driver thinking of "if we're all speeding, they
| can't ticket all of us."
|
| Also some interesting practical game theory lessons in here.
| OGforces wrote:
| paulpauper wrote:
| I'd hate to be a professor, for this reason. having to spend
| hours/day teaching stuff to ppl who don't care. such a waste of
| effort for both student and professor.
| dleslie wrote:
| This is part of why academic credentials have both lost their
| intrinsic value and become mandatory for all candidates.
|
| While it may seem contradictory at first, the appearance of low
| ability amongst credentialed candidates also lowers the perceived
| value of the non-credentialed; fore if the credentialed are so
| lacking in ability, then those unable to achieve even such a low
| bar must be worse, yes?
|
| Of course, this isn't always true. But for hiring managers
| dealing with an insurmountable mountain of candidates any
| generalized filtering metric, however shaky in its footing, is
| appealing.
|
| Widespread cheating is part of why we have credential inflation.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| I don't know, a multiple choice quiz shouldn't be used for
| grading students at all? My university asks the students to
| make projects in groups which are different from one another.
| One team gets to write a tictactoe game in c with ncurses
| library, one team gets to write connect four with another
| library and has to implement a given Interface, etc pp.
|
| Honestly, these kind of multiple choice tests just suck, and OP
| shouldn't be surprised that people don't take this stuff
| serious.
| nso95 wrote:
| But then 1 person ends up doing most of the work on the team
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| My college Software Design & Testing did this well. One big
| group project that takes the whole semester, but you have
| to write and submit a simple plan that outlines each team
| member's responsibility, then you have periodic milestones.
| Part of the milestones are reporting on what each team
| member actually did.
|
| This works because it's closer to a real work environment,
| where you'll have a manager who's at least somewhat aware
| (or should be) of how much each person is accomplishing.
| The whole, "just let the group figure it out" process that
| is so common in schools doesn't work, because there's no
| one with manager-level awareness and authority.
| vkou wrote:
| That person gets a valuable life lesson. Some of us work,
| so that others prosper.
| [deleted]
| cgriswald wrote:
| No. Group work is terrible and students are--at least
| perceptually, when not in fact--in competition with each
| other both for grades and for time. Even in the best case
| scenario students are incentivized to do the parts of the
| work they already do best which seems antithetical to
| education.
|
| Multiple choice quizzes are also useful to the student
| because they provide a snapshot of fact memorization and
| maybe some application but there is no point in counting the
| grades, IMO.
|
| If we must evaluate students, then we should be treating
| evaluation as important as imparting knowledge and experience
| and spend the time on it that it deserves. Students deserve
| and need timely and thoughtful _individual_ feedback in order
| to improve anyway. That means thoughtful projects and a lot
| of time spent grading. How you incentivize this amongst
| educators who often don't even want to be teaching is beyond
| my pay grade.
|
| (Additionally, a grade should reflect level of mastery at the
| _end_ of the course regardless of progression but that's not
| how grades are generally calculated.)
| eloisius wrote:
| Group work is terrible, but project-based ability
| assessment is much better than multiple-choice tests. I
| quit school before graduating, so maybe I'm not the best
| example, but I had one instructor that noticed a few of us
| were bored out of our minds in an intro to OO class and
| told us we could skip all assignments and the final if we
| turned in a working clone of Asteroids that met certain
| criteria, using a vector drawing library called Processing,
| by the end of the semester.
|
| Instead of making class Dog extend class Animal for the
| whole semester, I found myself learning how to do polygon
| collision detection, optimize it with a rectangle
| intersection pre-test, modeling thrust and inertia, etc. I
| started adding level-ups like extra lives, missiles,
| procedurally generating increasing difficult levels.
|
| Still some of the most fun I remember having with a
| computer.
| dleslie wrote:
| > making class Dog extend class Animal for the whole
| semester
|
| I expect this is hyperbole, but the sense that degrees
| have softened their content density is palpable.
|
| Even when I was attending, decades ago, the
| administration at my university was conjuring plans to
| greatly diminish the breadth and depth of content in
| their courses in order to graduate more students.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| They're talking about an intro class, so doing beginner
| level OO stuff isn't exactly surprising.
| dleslie wrote:
| My intro courses had me building an HC11 out of logic
| gates. The next semester we wrote code to run on it.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| And what exactly does that have to to with an intro OO
| class? Is this a "if it's lower level it must be harder"
| kind of thing?
| dleslie wrote:
| It's not harder, it's more fundamental. Logic gates
| express forms of the basic foundations of computation,
| and building from there conveys their power and
| expressiveness.
|
| In my degree, object oriented programming came in later
| semesters, often paired with courses on symbolic
| computing, discrete mathematics, and computability and
| complexity.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I still don't see what this has to do with the comment I
| was responding to. Who cares whether you tackle low level
| computing earlier or later?
| dleslie wrote:
| Someone who cares about how our existing knowledge shapes
| or understanding of new knowledge. Knowing how a computer
| works helps to understand the why and how of higher level
| concerns.
| cgriswald wrote:
| It depends on the class. Many "intro to OO programming"
| classes are really "intro to programming" that happen to
| use OO. There are no or low-level prerequisites, so the
| class often has to accommodate learners who have never so
| much as written a hello world script. (There is also
| pressure for higher level classes to dumb things down so
| the students from the lower level classes don't reach an
| insurmountable cliff, even if it's only insurmountable
| because the school's earlier classes have failed them.)
| dleslie wrote:
| That's what is wrong! It's like starting an English
| degree as an illiterate person and expecting the intro
| courses to make you literate; worse, the programs are
| designed with this expectation in mind.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I don't think multiple choice tests and project-based
| assessment are in conflict. They are both useful tools
| for evaluation. Multiple choice tests can allow a student
| to evaluate himself to make sure he has the base level of
| knowledge required (facts and application) in order to
| develop mastery. I do think it's useless as a grading
| metric, even discounting cheating issues. Project-based
| ability assessment is useful both for gaining mastery
| (with timely expert feedback) and for evaluating a
| students' mastery. I think project-based ability
| assessments for grading purposes ought to be coupled with
| a conversation about the project so the student can
| explain/defend his or her choices. As a side effect, it
| will help prevent cheating by having someone else write
| your project.
|
| In your particular case, I'm glad you had a good
| professor that allowed you to spend otherwise wasted time
| learning. However, I can't help but feel you should never
| have been forced to take (and presumably pay for) that
| class.
| eloisius wrote:
| > However, I can't help but feel you should never have
| been forced to take (and presumably pay for) that class
|
| I felt the same way, so I dropped out of school and
| started looking for someone who would hire me without a
| degree. I regret not having a university experience, but
| as far as career goes, I got a two year head start and no
| debt.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That sounds like a great option, though I imagine
| offering an alternative objective like that will get
| harder to do as the course difficulty/level increases.
| [deleted]
| mgaunard wrote:
| The fault lies with the teacher, not the students.
|
| Designing an exam that can be so trivially gamed to get 100% is
| irresponsible.
|
| You cannot blame the students for taking the optimal sequence of
| actions to maximize their chances of a perfect grade while
| minimizing their chances of a bad grade.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Honestly, if academic institutions don't get serious about
| cheating, at what point does industry stop paying any attention
| to whether you have a degree or not? What's the point of even
| requiring a degree for anything when there is a very large chance
| the degree holder is just a good cheater?
| zabzonk wrote:
| To all "professors" (so-called) - you are not there to TEST
| people, you are there to EDUCATE them. Cheating in this context
| becomes impossible.
| dmje wrote:
| What makes me sad isn't any of the mechanics around cheating,
| it's that such a vast percentage of people aren't honest. What is
| the point in doing any kind of learning at all - in fact,
| anything at all - if you're just going to fake it?
| landr0id wrote:
| Good read, but man those gifs are distracting.
| ilaksh wrote:
| This kind of thing is why I generally don't like people. They are
| mostly garbage.
| andreskytt wrote:
| This is why I do not teach on graduate level. There is only so
| much I'm willing to do to drag some damn sod kicking and
| screaming through the content. There is only so much effort I'm
| willing to put into engaging people who actively do not want to
| be engaged.
|
| Also, I have a trauma from a calculus exam back in my day. Writen
| exam, physcial classroom, first year students. The professor
| hands out the exam, then proceeds to smile, go "i'm gonna get a
| coffee" and leave. Yay, let's look things up! In about 3 minutes
| all of us realized there is nothing to look up. The questions
| were constructed in a fashion that you could only answer them if
| you understood the material. Also, any plagiarism would have been
| obvious. Besides, none of the questions seemed to have _a_
| correct answer.
|
| I cannot compose such exams. Therefore I keep an eye out for
| obvious things but generally assume my students either are
| motivated enough or are not worth the time to chase after them. I
| do my best to keep them interested, though. As to grading, I do
| oral exams over video calls. Takes about 8 min per person and
| this is where they can't cheat. They either understand or it's
| obvious they don't.
| thih9 wrote:
| I don't like how the teacher created an anonymous account and
| started listening to students' conversations. That on its own is
| creepy at best and lacking academic integrity at worst.
|
| Then he muted it for a couple of months and resumed after
| accidentally discovering a violation. Then didn't act immediately
| but waited and observed more violations.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| Best tests I had were the ones you could bring your notes or even
| any book to. The questions were structured in a way, that you had
| to know and understand the topic quite well to be able to
| answer/solve them in time. You couldn't just copy answers from
| the material you brought it with you, but you could use it as a
| reference to help you solve problems, like you use references in
| real life to find solutions to problems. If you didn't know the
| topic well, you didn't stand a chance to complete the test in
| time.
|
| The tests I respected the least, were the ones were you were
| required to write down memorized definitions. I mean why? In this
| day and age I can google any definition on my phone in few
| seconds. I can also memorize definition of some rule without
| properly understanding it. That's not useful. Give me a task to
| solve that requires me to truly understand that rule.
| blintz wrote:
| Discussion forums like Piazza can really help with stuff like
| this. By allowing students to communicate with each other in
| public, with TAs/instructors explicitly present answering
| questions, the need to get a group chat going diminishes and you
| avoid the temptation to cheat.
|
| As an aside, I will say, weekly quizzes are one of the lowest-
| reward types of homework. They are mainly favored by instructors
| because they are automatically graded, and they do really little
| to make you excited about the material. Students recognize and
| respond to instructor effort (or a lack thereof); if there's a
| written assignment every two weeks that students know you are
| going to take time to grade and give feedback on, then they are
| significantly more likely to invest the effort to do it well.
| bckr wrote:
| > weekly quizzes are one of the lowest-reward types of homework
|
| I loved having weekly quizzes because they forced me to study
| at a regular pace.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| You know the saddest thing is that people don't even know how to
| cheat properly.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| One of the teachers at my University realized that people were
| cheating just by looking at the graph of marks. Because the marks
| did not follow a gaussian distribution, it was pretty clear that
| cheating was implied. No need to spy on Whatsapp and run scripts
| for months.
|
| They were pretty severe at the institution level about cheating.
| All Batchelor and Masters thesis are run through multiple fraud
| detecting software.
|
| People were forced to do a mandatory Academic Integrity course
| for one semester and they had to sign legal papers in which they
| assumed the obligation to respect certain rules.
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| Interesting, that they used Whatsapp. My impression was, that
| it's barely used in the US. I'd expected to see a discord server
| instead
| Aldraz1 wrote:
| Yes, cheating nowadays is almost inevitable, because of changed
| society principles to life, easy access to information, easy
| access to cheating smart devices, etc.
|
| The solution? Let's finally evolve from schooling and let's
| forget that schools and universities exist. Let's open source
| degrees and make them much more compelling. Let's do everything
| online. Let's create collaborative labs in VR.
| fjfbsufhdvfy wrote:
| Reminds me of the time where someone shared the pdf for our final
| exam the day before it was going to be held, including the sample
| solutions and grading key. I still have absolutely no idea how it
| was obtained.
|
| It certainly made for good learning material.
| melony wrote:
| Colleges need to make up their mind about undergraduate
| education. The primary drivers of university rankings are
| research, staff and teaching quality, and professor to student
| ratio. Your average undergraduate STEM student at Harvard and
| Dartmouth (lets ignore the other more academic Ivies for now and
| focus purely on rankings and reputation) will not be subjected to
| the same rigor in assessments as a typical student at Berkeley or
| Geogia Tech in the same faculty after taking into account grade
| inflation. Yet those degrees from the former schools are worth
| "more" and the value of their degrees is not deminished in any
| sense. Clearly merit and hard work ends at the admissions office.
| After that it is just network and legacy.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| Not speaking to how to address cheating, but I found this
| interesting:
|
| > The content can be things like my old exams that someone
| uploaded without my permission
|
| But later...
|
| > And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online
| plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want
| better tools.
|
| So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of
| employment, so it's almost certainly not actually his, and it was
| arguably licensed to students by the university) is bad, but
| submitting their content to a service that retains a copy _and
| profits off it_ isn 't?
| martingab wrote:
| This was one of the reasons why the use of such tools was
| strictly prohibited at my former university.
|
| Another argument given was: even if you only have to *think*
| about using such a tool you are already in a situation where
| good scientific practices is no longer guaranteed. In other
| words: if you/the students would have followed all rules of
| good scientific practise right from the beginning, you would
| never need to use such a tool. But I guess if you are the
| developer of such a tool or work in that area of research, you
| probably see things differently...
|
| Also; how many different ways are there to explain rules on
| scientific practices within 150 word? How much similarities
| would you expect from O(100) different students - even if they
| write independently? - I'm not sure if that is taken into
| account in such tools. On a different scale: when piping e.g. a
| typical PhD thesis though such a tool, the first introductory
| paragraphs will always have red flags (simply because that
| topic was already introduced 10000 times and everyone read more
| or less the same introductory textbooks). The important part -
| the main part of the thesis - of course should be unique (but
| if the supervisor/examist/committee is not able to "detect"
| this in their own, well...). Of course literally copy&paste an
| introduction is still not okay. But -as the blogger also said-
| this can easily detected by issuing a simple yawhoogle search
| in case the text already reads suspicious (e.g. if the style of
| writing varies a lot between paragraphs etc).
|
| So yes, I'd agree that the use of such tools is relatively
| limited when it comes to "real" scientific works but in this
| particular case it was quite neat to see how easily you can use
| it to atomatise the collection of evidences if you have a large
| class of students...
| gault8121 wrote:
| These are tools for teachers to catch plagiarism. He is saying
| he wants better tools to detect plagiarism because these don't
| handle similarity matches well.
| dehrmann wrote:
| My point was that he griped about students posting old exams,
| but had no problem with schools sharing students' work with
| plagiarism detection services. He didn't even recognize how
| it could be a problem.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Well, it was long enough without that tangent. But what he
| did say was he writes his own plagiarism detection tools.
| He certainly wasn't praising those services.
| epakai wrote:
| Faculty likely still owns copyright (or the school does) for
| teaching materials.
|
| Fair use covers the school's use of students work. Submission
| to such services might also be construed as fair use. It seems
| to have been litigated as such already:
|
| https://www.eschoolnews.com/2008/04/17/judge-turnitin-com-do...
| dehrmann wrote:
| > or the school does
|
| The school almost certainly does.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
|
| Tests are explicitly mentioned in the list of works make for
| hire, but it's also within the scope of employment, so it's
| double counted.
|
| > If a work is made for hire, the employer...is the initial
| owner of the copyright unless both parties involved have
| signed a written agreement to the contrary.
| chociej wrote:
| Look, I was a pretty crappy student in a lot of ways. But this
| thread has a few instances of folks implying that, especially at
| more "elite" schools, blatant cheating is practically routine and
| everyone does it. Again, I was not a model student, but it's
| pretty maddening to hear that. I didn't cheat to get my degree.
| I'd ask that you all not rationalize your cheating to the point
| of making your successors feel comfortable doing so, or worse,
| feel like outcasts for not doing so.
| seunosewa wrote:
| I don't think anyone has denied the existence of students who
| don't cheat. If 80% of a class cheats, that means 20% don't.
| You may have been among those.
| bnj wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised to see so many responses in this thread
| that diverge so wildly from my own.
|
| It was inappropriate for this instructor to join the chat and
| silently surveil their students. When they saw the students
| exchanging information like that the first time after forgetting
| about it, they should have posted a warning on the thread and
| left.
|
| Some of the energy of analyzing their students cheating would
| have been better spent looking at how to make the assessment of
| learning more resistant to a student sharing a screenshot of a
| question.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| > It was inappropriate for this instructor to join the chat and
| silently surveil their students.
|
| Why? It allowed him to gather evidence of who was invoiced and
| provide them with a second chance. And apparently it really
| helped students in the next course to be more honest.
| neilv wrote:
| It used to be that a good liberal arts university might claim to
| teach students "how to learn".
|
| Given all the recent deterioration of discourse, maybe the
| university should start with a remedial "how not to be a liar and
| a cheat".
| [deleted]
| paradite wrote:
| One of the longest read I've completed online this year.
|
| The author obviously care a lot about integrity and plagiarism
| and a lot has been discussed from the author's perspective. I
| wonder if we can analyze this case study from a game theory
| angle.
|
| What's the payoff matrix looking like for students in the class
| at various phases of development?
|
| Were students incentivized to cheat due to the structure of
| curriculum?
|
| What are the Nash equilibrium scenarios for both professor and
| students? And how many of them are Pareto optimal?
| celeritascelery wrote:
| At my college there was a class where one of the teacher
| assistants got ahold of the answer key and handed it out to class
| mates. The memorized the key, not the answers, but the actual
| "A,B,A,C,C..." of the key. We told the professor, so he just
| rearranged the answers. So every student that cheated got a
| perfect 0. This had the effect of them failing the assignment on
| their own, and also telling you who the cheaters were.
| judge2020 wrote:
| A perfect zero seems unlikely, unless the answers were changed
| to 'anything other than the original letter'?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I bet that was done by design to achieve this effect.
| ec109685 wrote:
| You'd think they would have sanity checked a couple.
| chongli wrote:
| Sanity checks like this can be defeated by having all of
| the options (ABCD...) be similar enough and plausible to
| anyone who didn't actually study the material.
| xigoi wrote:
| Students who cheat usually aren't the sharpest pencil in
| the box.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| I'm sure same thing happens (or at least happened) in every other
| course. I'll go as far as to say that any assignment performed
| not in controlled environment will mean that student work all
| available sources, including other students.
|
| One solution is make HW an evidence of effort, not knowledge.
| That's what happens in many courses in my uni: HW are some 10-30%
| of final grade and average is very high. Students share their
| solutions with each other and we are ok with it (well TAs are
| definitely aware) as soon as it is not copy-paste. It is so
| common that it is called "reference" solution.
|
| Then there are courses that are hard to evaluate during the exam
| (e.g., programming ones). It seems that my uni solution is to
| give assignment so hard it will require understanding even when
| cheating (unless someone solves it for you of course). There are
| assignments taking north of 40 hours for top students (from
| scratch).
|
| My point is that cheating is of course bad. But trying to catch
| cheaters beyond very obvious ones is just waste of time. Just
| design your course as cheat-proof as possible: ideally, the
| student who didn't learn won't pass given all possible external
| resources at home.
| starky wrote:
| I had a prof during university that had a really good method to
| get people to engage. You would be assigned a reading, and then
| complete the quiz as an individual for a small portion of your
| grade, and then do the exact quiz again in a team of about 5-6
| people worth a much greater amount of your grade. Lectures
| would then have particular focus on topics that students had
| trouble with on the quiz.
|
| Assignments were designed to require iteration until you met
| the specifications of the problem. If you got the same or
| similar answer as anyone else, then it was almost certainly
| cheated.
|
| Exams were open book, but quite difficult and long. You pretty
| much had to make sure you knew where to find all the
| information required in the course materials and were often
| similarly open ended as the assignments in the course were.
|
| >It seems that my uni solution is to give assignment so hard it
| will require understanding even when cheating (unless someone
| solves it for you of course). There are assignments taking
| north of 40 hours for top students (from scratch).
|
| Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The goal
| shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a full
| time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all with
| assignments like that.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| > Using this as a method to reduce cheating disturbs me. The
| goal shouldn't be that students have to make their homework a
| full time job, imagine is someone was taking 7 courses all
| with assignments like that.
|
| To be fair it's the largest assignment of the semester for
| that course (compilation theory). The assignment structure
| per course is more or less fixed, so people know what awaits
| them in the semester and try not to take courses with large
| overlapping assignments. Then again, I think almost nobody
| does it from scratch (and it still takes people tons of
| time), but rather use "references".
|
| And you know, studying is kinda your fulltime job when you're
| a student.
| Kab1r wrote:
| I'm a undergraduate student in California and I've had the
| opportunity to be a grader for a quarter. While I did not enjoy
| the work, it really changed the way I looked at classes. I was
| not in charge of finding or reporting cheating, but I still did
| see a decent amount of it. The most interesting instance I saw,
| while not technically considered academic dishonesty under our
| policy, was a group of students who cited each other's work in
| the class. Sometimes it would be the same assignment where
| students would cite specific line numbers in other students work.
| Our policy for this was supposed to be to give students zero on
| the assignment for turning in work that was not theirs but not to
| report them because it was not a violation under the universities
| policy. I notified a TA in a better position to deal with it, but
| I think it might have been to late in the quarter to do anything
| and they never got back to me about it.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Feels like we're seeing this all over society. From the way
| executives in businesses and politicians act all the way down to
| the way people drive. And everyone has a blizzard of excuses for
| why they constantly look to cut corners.
|
| And these are the kids that are supposedly so much better than
| the old boomers and they're cheating like it is a reflex.
| stadia42 wrote:
| The professor surely knows that cheating is near universal
| because the incentive structure of modern life makes cheating
| optimal in expectation. Nothing he can do will change this
| fundamental fact. So why bother?
| vehementi wrote:
| Another person in the "I am a cheater, surely everyone else
| thinks like me, right?" bucket
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Online exams without proctoring are a recipe for disaster, and I
| think that should be pretty obvious to any instructor.
| rwoerz wrote:
| My anecdote:
|
| 1. Tell students that the remote exam is open book. Everything is
| allowed EXCEPT for any communication between students. Moreover,
| there is a Zoom breakout room for discussing specific questions
| with ME.
|
| 2. Exam starts.
|
| 3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
| anttiharju wrote:
| > 3. Students move to that breakout room to exchange solutions.
|
| While you were in that room? Did you put a stop to that?
| rwoerz wrote:
| A saw that they moved in that room. I was a little baffled
| due to their brazenness but think I made my point clear. And:
| They didn't pass anyway.
| Tarsul wrote:
| My opinion is that he failed as a teacher.
|
| I mean, come on, imagine a scenario where class A has a test and
| class B has the same test a day after. Of course the people in
| class B will ask the people of class A what was in the test. Of
| course. That's why everyone is tested at the same time.
| zcbenz wrote:
| I really admire the author of this post, He is very responsible
| of his students and takes his course seriously, how lucky his
| students are.
|
| When I was in college I was attending a course teaching to build
| C++ project, the professor checks plagiarism by checking the
| creation date of source code files, since the project was built
| step by step with new files being added progressively.
|
| I was being perfectionism about my code and did a lot of
| refactoring before submitting the project, and got a very low
| score because the professor saw the dates of my files were new
| and all the same and thought I copied my homework from someone
| else. While the ones who actually did plagiarize the homework got
| high scores, because they copied other students' source code
| lesson by lesson.
|
| My professor obviously did not even read the source code of our
| homework, otherwise he would easily know who was writing original
| code and who was just copying.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Many years ago I was a visiting part-time lecturer (a.k.a. lowest
| of the low). I was given the syllabus summary from the
| prospectus, and then had to write a syllabus; prepare teaching
| material; write tests/exams; and mark submissions.
|
| The institution was far from elite; they used to send staff on
| recruitment drivs in faraway places, because (a) overseas
| students get to come th this country when otherwise they wouldn't
| get a visa; and (b) they pay more. The result was that many of
| the students were rich, and assumed they didn't have to work.
| Many didn't have basic qualifications for doing the work. So they
| cheated extensively (there was no web and no WhatsApp; they just
| copied one-another's coursework submissions).
|
| I asked my experienced colleagues what to do. They said that I
| could report the cheating to the school; but I would then be tied
| up in exam boards all summer, for which I wouldn't be paid. Also
| I could expect to have to fight charges of racism. Alternatively
| I could explain to them the difference between helping one-
| another out (good) and plagiarism (bad). Guess which choice I
| took!
|
| Basically, the institution didn't care about plagiarism; they
| didn't care about the unfairness to honest students; and I don't
| think they cared whether the students learned anything. By the
| next year, I didn't care either. I just delivered the material,
| and went home.
| nikanj wrote:
| Meanwhile graduates from these institutions lament how
| employers only want A-list schools
| jonmb wrote:
| Which is amusing since students from those A-list schools are
| also cheating.
| nikanj wrote:
| But the A-list schools have a brand to protect, and at
| least try to curb the cheating.
|
| The bottom-of-the-barrel diploma mills don't give a damn,
| as long as they don't face the threat of losing official
| status.
| Gtex555 wrote:
| We cheat on our partners , will cheat on taxes if we can. The
| only effective way to stop humans cheating is punishment as a
| deterrent. We cheat because we are smart, get the same result for
| less work and even if the cheating takes the same amount of work
| as studying at least it was your decision. I don't get how this
| teacher or OP is so surprised that students would cheat. Most of
| us don't want to be in school, its just a necessary evil to get
| that all important paper. These students are completely rational
| and just got unlucky.
| manmal wrote:
| I think 75% students cheating is definitely surprising, and
| probably caused by a culture of rampant cheating at this
| institution (only a guess though).
|
| > Most of us don't want to be in school, its just a necessary
| evil to get that all important paper
|
| I get what you mean, and had a similar sentiment during my
| years at university. I deeply regret this now though. I could
| have transitioned to a studies I'm more interested in, or
| dropped out after the Bachelor's and started earning money
| earlier.
| MadWombat wrote:
| _shrug_ perverse incentives. For a lot of college students, the
| actual learning or lack thereof, while still important, does not
| affect them directly. But getting a bad grade does. Drop in
| average grade might affect their scholarships, various
| arrangements with their families and possibly future employment
| prospects. So while not learning the material properly is bad in
| a somewhat abstract and theoretical way, getting a bad grade
| might have a very practical adverse effect. And I am not even
| going to mention the social stigma of getting bad grades.
|
| So yeah, getting a good grade is more important than actually
| learning and let's be honest, cheating is a more energy efficient
| way of getting good grades.
| bckr wrote:
| > cheating is a more energy efficient way of getting good
| grades.
|
| Well, except for the fact that to cheat is to engage in an arms
| race with an agent who is incentivized to ruin your career if
| you are discovered cheating.
|
| For someone with my personality type and abilities, the above
| adds a significant cognitive load that makes just plain
| studying a lot more energy efficient than cheating. I'm sure
| it's different for people with different personalities and
| abilities.
| madhadron wrote:
| There's an easy solution to this kind of cheating: stop grading.
| Switch to evaluations and self evaluations. Evergreen State
| College and a few others already do this. If there's no GPA,
| there's nothing to game.
|
| It means you can't run giant survey classes and asynchronous,
| online courses.
|
| It's sad to see cheating this rampant. When I was doing my
| physics undergraduate degree, we had little to no cheating. We
| worked together on homework (as expected by the professors) and
| tests I think everyone was scrupulously honest on. The one time
| someone asked for help, multiple people yelled at him. This was
| at University of Virginia, which has an honor code. There was a
| lot of cheating in the big survey classes, but students in the
| upper level classes in their majors took it fairly seriously.
| lexluthor76567 wrote:
| This guy is an idiot.
|
| He created a testing system that encourages cheating. He made it
| too easy to cheat, so if one student cheated other students (who
| are all in competition together) would need to cheat as well less
| they receive a relatively lower grade.
|
| Then when he detected the cheating he didn't attempt to minimize
| the damage. Instead he focused all his time and effort building a
| solution that nobody needed, and let the main problem escalate to
| the point where nearly all his students were cheating.
|
| The lecturer should be fired.
| trivialsoup wrote:
| Personally I find cheating repellent. But if a bunch of cheaters
| can curve you into a lower grade, you don't know the material.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| This will only get worse as new generations are taught to demand
| immediate satisfaction and to abhore having to work for results.
| They think they deserve anything for the simple fact they exist
| and desire it.
|
| Replacing scientists with political activists and learning with
| political activism in Universities just magnified this
| phenomenon.
|
| This will make the people with knowledge and ability and desire
| to do work 100x more precious.
|
| And the markets are rewarding the hard work and knowledge, not
| anything else.
|
| I am trying to instill in my small kids the desire to learn and
| the ability to work. It will be a hard fight because I will
| sometimes have to fight against school, politics and the current
| norms of some parts of the society. But my duty as a parent is to
| try to prepare them for the future, to make them winners.
| montefischer wrote:
| Would things like this still occur if a person's educational
| history data were treated like their medical data under HIPAA? It
| is the cleanest proposal I have seen for decoupling education
| from careerist motivations.
| rurban wrote:
| I could also talk a lot like this how my students tried to cheat,
| and how I detected it. 20 years ago.
|
| I had to write special programs to detect written cheats. The
| online cheating during the written exam was easy to detect, the
| offline not so. But having written this program helped a lot, and
| I told nobody the details.
|
| In the end the cheaters were the minority. But if you allow it to
| spread, 90% will start cheating. The broken windows theory.
|
| PS: And I still talk a lot to my professor colleagues, who are
| still teaching at university. They told me that COVID was a total
| cheating desaster. Everyone cheated, everyone. It was impossible
| to do proper exams at the end of the course. They are all
| extremely frustated.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Yes COVID online exams were a total disaster. Our institution
| wanted to keep them this year, but our department pushed back
| hard for reasons of academic integrity that we needed to move
| back to in person.
| xen0 wrote:
| What struck me the most when reading this, is how long they
| waited to inform the students they knew cheating was occurring.
| If they had informed the class earlier, they may have been able
| to stem the worst of it, rather than letting it become
| normalised. Still spend the time afterwards to fill out the forms
| and engage with the relevant students, but don't wait to notify
| until you think you know everything, because that just leaves
| time for more shit to happen.
| caenorst wrote:
| My experience seems to resonate with a good amount of ppl here. I
| graduated from a very average university and my grades were a
| roller-coaster, I tend to prefer learning in depth topics that
| I'm interested into rather than study for exam and that led me to
| difficult times. I went to a more prestigious university for
| exchange and to my surprise students were not better in in-depth
| understanding but even more exam-smart...
|
| One thing I've ended thinking is that University is just not good
| for learning in-depth (at least my field of computer engineering)
| I'm way better at that on my own, what it was good at tho is
| helping me building a map of knowledge of concepts I was not
| aware of, I'm thankful I discovered ML in a class which then
| became my passion and career.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| As someone who went to a mid-tier state university for computer
| engineering in undergrad, I kinda disagree. The classes were
| not going to push into great depth on the topics. But there was
| plenty of opportunity to push myself beyond the classes, like
| doing independent study or research with professors.
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I
| remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were
| super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I
| was doing worse than usual.
|
| I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even
| released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges
| indicating a detected instance of cheating
|
| Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think
| maybe over half the class).
|
| The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of
| people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so
| much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way
| more time studying, which will then take time away from other
| classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs
| use to understand how well they're teaching material, which
| assignments to drop, etc
|
| imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the
| grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or
| assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where
| everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and
| can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are
| cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the
| class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be
| getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle
| DantesKite wrote:
| I never thought about it that way, but that's such a good
| point.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes - it's similar to the situation in high school where there
| are kids who want to learn and kids who disrupt the class
| because they're lazy/not motivated/have issues/want attention.
|
| Automated teaching and testing with social sharing _automate
| that dynamic._ There 's less attention seeking, but much more
| passive aggressive subversion.
|
| But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if
| it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which
| they have _no competence_. This is truly catastrophic if you
| want software that works and buildings that don 't collapse.
|
| Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and
| hiding their incompetence.
|
| It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge.
|
| Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most
| profs won't.
|
| The underlying issue is that there's been far too little
| research into the social consequences of automating all kinds
| of interactions.
|
| The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower
| them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened
| instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural
| patterns were automated and enhanced.
|
| Culture as a whole has _no defences against this_ because
| hardly anyone has realised that it 's a problem inherent within
| the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an
| unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and
| who knows why?
| throwoutway wrote:
| > But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that
| if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in
| which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if
| you want software that works and buildings that don't
| collapse.
|
| And also why we can't trust a degree to show competence,
| leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part
| interviews
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Some do summer hires - a sort of 90-day interview - in
| their Junior year. Much better signal-to-noise.
| lrem wrote:
| You think STEM is bad? Think about, compounded by COVID-
| induced remote education, medical doctors...
| hoosieree wrote:
| I really appreciate this comment, especially the bit about
| how automation amplifies culture - that's something I've felt
| for a long time but you've stated it eloquently.
|
| Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more
| fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable
| to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just
| a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and
| industry react to scaling issues.
|
| I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could
| somehow be satisfied with less growth.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system
| and hiding their incompetence.
|
| So they're ideally qualified for a career in politics.
| mathattack wrote:
| Or middle management at a large company.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Cheaters by definition are not interested in fair, so this
| argument will not convince any of them.
| Cd00d wrote:
| > If people cheat, it screws up the fairness
|
| I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than
| selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but
| just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its
| own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people
| will be OK on average. But because some people decide to
| cheat, it screws up the dynamic.
|
| This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants
| to cheat, that wasn't really my intention
| fsckboy wrote:
| what's the ethical dilemma of a grade curve? your grade
| reflects how well you learned.
| ginnungagap wrote:
| Your grade reflects how well you learned with respect to
| your peers.
|
| Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might
| earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get
| you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a
| B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A
| the year earlier just because they happened to enroll
| with different peers?
|
| Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be
| determined beforehand?
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _why should the grade distribution of an exam be
| determined beforehand?_
|
| because we know beforehand that population density over
| repeated trials of some measure will fall in a normal
| distribution, especially when constructing such a test is
| more straightforward than 90% gets A, 80% gets B, etc
| elihu wrote:
| Another thing (that the story goes into in depth) is that
| cheating creates a whole lot of extra work and stress for
| professors who would rather just be teaching material and not
| exerting enormous effort into policing other people's behavior
| and enforcing rules. (And that's really hard to do if you're
| afraid of making a mistake somewhere and punishing someone too
| harshly, or for something they didn't do.)
|
| The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of
| dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because
| they notice other people cheating, then they could become
| targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college
| experience anyone wants to have.
| Avamander wrote:
| > This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class.
|
| I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it
| was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic
| yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good
| reason and it frustrated me so much.
|
| Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests,
| calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed
| tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were
| willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct
| answer to each and every question.
|
| It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension
| during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and
| nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was
| reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).
|
| I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and
| resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years
| overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"
| hackernewds wrote:
| Students will cheat. the solve is to get rid of curving classes
| in this manner
| burntoutfire wrote:
| The Polish university I went to never even heard of grading
| on a curve, and yet cheating was rampant. I think it's just
| human nature - as long as cheating is not heavily penalised,
| many people will choose to do it.
|
| During my studies, there was one professor who openly said
| that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his
| class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a
| lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as
| opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you
| another attempt at later time. Also, during the written
| exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the
| window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted
| to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out
| of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the
| time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at
| all - it just didn't pay off.
|
| Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one
| of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in
| university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get
| caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a
| shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of
| young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown
| up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so
| maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.
| L3viathan wrote:
| I don't think the comment you replied to meant to say that
| getting rid of grading on a curve would stop cheaters,
| merely that it would stop some of the bad effects cheating
| can have on those not cheating.
| ok123456 wrote:
| This happened to me in an ML class. Somehow people went from
| not knowing what eigenvalues were to solving all the problems
| in Bishop's book correctly and exactly the way the TA wanted
| them. A bunch of them would go to his office hours and have him
| do a problem, then they would share his answers.
|
| I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just
| chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food
| truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe
| it.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| You should read up on Nash equilibriums. In general, the
| equilibrium only holds with information sharing. In the real
| world, winning due to a lack of information sharing is called
| things like "good business." Academia, and cheating in general,
| is rotted to the core because of ranked grading and curves.
| They fundamentally incentivize cheating, because of the game
| theoretical gain therein.
| grp000 wrote:
| This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case
| where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's
| already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical
| sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a
| big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of
| energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in
| the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just
| a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that
| situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make
| the best effort to understand the material as opposed to
| leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade.
|
| On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an
| unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed
| you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the
| ethical implications.
|
| Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like
| that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty
| irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also
| haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
| briandear wrote:
| The best solution is to report the cheating and have some
| F'ing integrity. Cheating or tolerating cheating is never ok.
| Full stop.
| derac wrote:
| option B, report the cheating
| trashtester wrote:
| Option C, help the others students that cheat, let them
| copy your work, or even help them directly with the work.
| (Especially for things like home exercises, if not actual
| exams).
|
| After you graduate, you will have a network of friends that
| consider you a super-smart, trustworthy, loyal and friendly
| person.
|
| Chances are, you will learn more than the rest, and end up
| with a high GPA. And some of the lost opportunity to
| socialize in bars and clubs, and build networks that way,
| will be compensated by the relationships with people you
| helped.
|
| Btw, this same behavior can still work once you're in a
| job. If you get a reputation as someone who can provide
| help when people are stuck in some difficult problem, and
| not shaming them for it to their boss, that tends to
| reflect positively back to you over time.
| chii wrote:
| I think this is the right move, but only if you can do it
| without being known (at least, by the group).
| eastbound wrote:
| In the best case, you get nothing. Most probably half of
| the students turn against you. And possibly the teacher
| himself takes revenge on you for snitching. Some teachers
| are of the opinion that "snitches get stitches", often as a
| way to cope with their own lack of teaching, and sometimes
| they see it as a good life lesson for the student.
| briandear wrote:
| So report the teacher. The whole snitches get stitches
| thing needs to stop. We aren't in a goddamned prison
| yard. And if someone actually threatens you, call the
| police. Raise hell about it. Gangster, prison yard
| culture needs to die. Cheating is never ok. Cheaters
| should be thrown out of school with zero second chances.
| People in the US are often going into debt for tens and
| even hundreds of thousands of dollars for college -- when
| people cheat, that diminishes the value of that
| extraordinary expense. Not to mention honor and integrity
| ought to matter.
| vict00ms wrote:
| When I was in high school, a bunch of AP students cheated
| off the valedictorian our senior year...when it was
| exposed, they hushed everything up rather than allowing a
| scandal that would ruin the school's and the students'
| reputations (some of which were bound for Ivy League
| schools in a few months' time).
|
| Sometimes, the entire community will protect its
| cheaters.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| As Electrical engineering TAs in the late 80's, we knew
| who was copying class homework assignments from their
| classmates based on transcription errors in the
| handwritten work that was turned in. Since the class
| professor couldn't care less about the cheating, we would
| consistently score the source assignments a few points
| less than the ones that had copied the assignment. We
| kept this up for the entire semester.
| seunosewa wrote:
| You must have thought it would discourage hardworking
| students from allowing other students to copy them. Did
| it work?
| xen0 wrote:
| You graded the original worse than the copies? So the
| copiers were rewarded?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| they did lend their original out to be copied... thus
| facilitating dishonesty.
| seunosewa wrote:
| It's unjust, though, to punish those who facilitated an
| offence more than those who committed it.
| xen0 wrote:
| Sure; dock me a mark or two and tell me why. But why not
| just give a straight zero to the others that didn't
| actually do the work?
| imtringued wrote:
| Companies will sue you if you report security
| vulnerabilities. So yeah definitely a good life lesson.
|
| This world is messed up.
| eastbound wrote:
| And "no situation can be improved by involving police."
|
| And the fact that Justice never correctly delivers
| justice in any country of the world, but adds 2 to 10
| years and large expenses in the process.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kqr wrote:
| > it screws up the class curve
|
| This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument
| for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class
| a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an
| upper hand yourself.
| rtpg wrote:
| Curve grading is such a messed up thing. It leads to
| professors assuming you should get all A's in all of your
| classes basically, cuz of this nonsense from US unis.
|
| I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a
| professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I
| had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving
| points for right answers, and then adding them all up).
|
| Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a
| high level because teachers choose how hard to make
| assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really
| fundamentally important, but when people just have those to
| judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.
| strombofulous wrote:
| I don't get it, don't curves limit the number of people who
| get an A each semester? But potentially everyone in a class
| that isn't curved could get an A (or F)
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| it depends on the curve. "curve" is kind of vague here,
| sometimes a prof will curve by adding so many percent to
| everyone's grade to get enough people over a certain
| threshold
|
| but also the prof will know if the class is full of
| overachievers and curve in a way commensurate to the
| class
| rtpg wrote:
| Well for example, in my school, basically nobody would
| get 90% on an exam. Very good people would get 80% but
| the average is more around 60%. So you stuff that into
| the grade conversion for foreign universities and ...
| well lots of people get C!
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| I think that curves discourage cooperation and encourage
| zero-sum thinking. Curves are only really necessary when the
| professor is out of touch with the class and/or
| prerequisites.
|
| I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths
| of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just
| look like a bunch of people working separately and not
| cooperating at all
|
| In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the
| coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of
| students for every semester
| jrumbut wrote:
| I've always loved curved classes because they allow very
| good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that
| cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective
| on the material.
|
| Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of
| the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the
| difference between you and a real master of the material
| which is a helpful lesson in humility.
|
| I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that
| mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten
| years. The exams I took were geared more towards
| establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my
| future employers' benefit than my own.
| dhimes wrote:
| _they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck
| exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test
| with a new perspective on the material_
|
| I think the problem with this is, although cool, very few
| professors are capable of doing this well and very few
| students benefit from it. IOW, it doesn't scale.
|
| To my mind, oral finals or 'discussions" would repair the
| cheating issues quite well. But again, it's hard to scale
| and professors would need to be trained in how to do
| them.
| atq2119 wrote:
| You don't need after-the-fact curving for that, though.
|
| When I set (free-form written, math/CS) exams, I always
| made a point of designing the exam in a way where I
| didn't really expect anybody to get more than 90% of the
| points. I also made sure that students knew this.
|
| I always set grade brackets before grading (e.g., 80% of
| points gets you an A, below 35% is a failing grade, and
| so on). I always ended up with a pretty reasonable grade
| distribution.
| kqr wrote:
| I think of helping each other as part of the reason we put
| students in the same room to begin with. So when a student
| asks another for help with understanding a concept and the
| other refuses that request, that's working against the
| purposes of group education, i.e. sabotage.
|
| But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most
| people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher
| time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students
| in one room.)
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| I agree with you, but also most of the time when people
| ask each other for help it isn't to help understand a
| concept. It's usually for source code.
|
| In the class I mentioned above, the prof and TAs weren't
| pissed off about people using each other to understand
| concepts or even high level design. They were pissed
| because people were copying source code verbatim,
| comments and custom debug messages and all
|
| On a related note, if someone ever asked me for help with
| a concept or high level design I would be more than happy
| to oblige. But (most of the time) people aren't asking
| for that, they want source code that they didn't
| contribute to
|
| this could be fixed by making assignments collaborative,
| but then the professor has no means of verifying where
| everyone is in terms of understanding
| seoaeu wrote:
| Of course there's a rational argument to using the
| distribution of scores to set the grades: If everyone in the
| class gets half the questions wrong on the final exam, you
| shouldn't just fail the whole class! The test was probably
| just harder than expected
|
| But in that same example, if many of the students get close
| to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the
| class will suffer
| adlpz wrote:
| I disgree. How hard it is to pass a class should be an
| absolute. It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over
| another just due to the first being, on average, less
| prepared than the second.
|
| If an exam turns out to be too hard the teacher can
| investigate, consult their peers, talk to their students
| and decide if it's worth to scale all grades by a factor to
| correct.
| derevaunseraun wrote:
| > How hard it is to pass a class should be an absolute.
|
| It should be, but profs and TAs change from semester to
| semester. The coursework changes also. Also the profs,
| TAs, and coursework of prerequisites change too
|
| > It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over another just
| due to the first being, on average, less prepared than
| the second.
|
| A good professor will have the sense of discretion
| necessary to know when a class is half-assing on average
| myrion wrote:
| No, the proper response to that is still not a curve, it's
| to identify which block of questions wasn't appropriate and
| removing those from scoring or turning them into "bonus
| points" and similar measures.
|
| That way you don't incur any of the (pretty severe)
| drawbacks of a curve but don't punish students for
| questions that were badly phrased or weren't properly
| taught.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Are how do you suppose an instructor can identify which
| questions were too hard when a big chunk of the class got
| them right by cheating?
| chongli wrote:
| Simply removing the offending questions after the fact
| doesn't solve everything. Students may have fruitlessly
| wasted a ton of time on those questions, causing their
| grade in other parts of the test to suffer.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| A lot of my classes the average grade on a test could be as
| low as 30% with a P100 of 50%. The material was
| extraordinarily difficult. I'm glad it was because it
| stretched me in equally extraordinary ways to do my best. But
| I don't see how they would have assigned grades without a
| curve. In most cases I agree with you, but in those classes I
| wouldn't have changed to tests to dumb them down but I also
| wouldn't have accepted score based grades. The curve felt
| fairly rational in the situation and I think the distribution
| of performance reflected a grade curve well enough. The GPA
| though for the department was depressed relative to others
| but it was also widely regarded and recognized
| internationally as extremely difficult.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Curve grading does have a place. But that is standardized
| tests or placing entire cohorts to buckets. So we are talking
| of hundreds if not thousands of students. For individual
| schools or classes inside thereof it is wrong method. Either
| the students know enough of the course material to pass or
| they do not.
| bostik wrote:
| So true. Curve grading works well when the cohort is large
| and heterogenous. (Like, say, Finnish matriculation exams.
| >20k people in a single cohort, and each individual exam
| within the whole thing with at least 5k people in them.)
|
| As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single courses is
| just as bad as stack ranking at work. And in here, with
| high concentration of engineers who _loathe_ stack ranking,
| a disproportionate fraction are somehow in favour of per-
| course curve grading.
|
| Blind spot? Stockholm syndrome? Go figure.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Fun thing with Matriculation examination. The small
| subjects are not on curve. Like for example Latin... Or
| higher level Russian where there is enough native
| speakers to have an effect on it.
|
| Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people are
| good enough to do the work or not. If not eventually fire
| them. On other hand at top the rewarding extra is an
| problem, but I don't know if you can do that without
| someone gaming it.
| bostik wrote:
| That's a good point, thank you. I wasn't aware of it, or
| at least didn't actively remember the fact. But it makes
| sense and circles on the same thing. Curve grading only
| makes sense when the cohort being evaluated is large and
| varied enough.
|
| > _Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people
| are good enough to do the work or not._
|
| Even at the risk of veering quite far from the thread
| topic, I am not sure that's the only angle to look at
| things. In my experience, pretty much anyone who is
| genuinely curious and has the discipline to work at
| understanding how/why a ${THING} functions, is going to
| be good at their job. Some people just don't find what
| their thing is, and surprisingly many are in jobs where
| they are not even allowed to figure it out.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single
| courses is just as bad as stack ranking at work.
|
| In my years of schooling, I never saw curve grading
| resemble "stack ranking" whatsoever.
|
| In stack ranking you have to designate some team members
| as superior and some as bad. You could have a team of
| ineffective idiots and be forced to label some of them as
| high achievers, or a team of superstars and be forced to
| label some of them as bad. I agree that this is
| manifestly ridiculous.
|
| I've never seen curve grading like that.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| There is no rational argument for grading people on a class
| curve
|
| It's an imperfect solution for a legitimate problem.
|
| The counterargument is that it would be rare for a
| prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an
| exam.
|
| If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to
| accurately reflect how well the class is learning the
| material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine
| a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and
| engaged students who are showing good understanding of the
| material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This
| strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an
| adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect
| actual mastery of the material.
|
| There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on
| a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.
| kqr wrote:
| This is why I'm generally against grades with more than
| three levels.
|
| I would like to see a system where almost all (something
| like 99 %?) of students just plain "pass". Then we have the
| lower statistical anomalies (lowest 0.5 %) and upper
| statistical anomalies (highest 0.5 %) which fail and get an
| "excellence" type grade.
|
| If the average score is too low or too high, that doesn't
| mean more students fail or perform excellently, that just
| means the teacher needs to recalibrate.
|
| (Of course, these percentiles ought to be measured over as
| inclusive a reference class as practical. Ideally across
| schools and years simultaneously.)
| pliny wrote:
| If you want to compare grades across semesters you have to
| either keep the difficulty of the tests constant or adjust
| the grades to compensate for how difficult the tests were
| relative to previous semesters.
|
| BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying
| "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument
| against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if
| there is not a rational argument for X.
| lock-the-spock wrote:
| You somewhat seem to miss the wood for all the trees. The
| problem is the curve - grading on a curve is inherently unfair
| and irrelevant. Why should it affect your grade if others in
| the class cheat/struggle/..?
|
| Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now
| dropped grading on a curve.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Maybe not a literal curve, but tons of instructors will
| compensate if an exam ends up being too hard (or too easy).
| Except the main way they tell whether the test difficulty was
| off is by looking at the grade distribution which obviously
| ends up skewed if some people cheat
| failTide wrote:
| I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests
| were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your
| leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one
| day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating
| anyway.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I hope you told the professor what you discovered. Allowing
| cheating is complicity in the cheating without the benefits.
| But I remember the intense social pressure - glad I'm not a
| kid any more.
| donthellbanme wrote:
| silversmith wrote:
| It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what
| university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the
| industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and
| encourages.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| In theory the purpose of the university is to help you
| develop skills independently, so that you can bring
| something to the table when you do consult with colleagues
| in the workplace.
| chii wrote:
| > develop skills independently ... bring something to the
| table
|
| this assumes that those skills are somehow unique and
| others cannot learn it.
| didibus wrote:
| That's basically the point of university isn't it? It
| assumes that not everyone can be qualified to do
| everything and imposes restrictions on who can be hired
| based on their known qualifications.
| derac wrote:
| Perhaps because these aren't equivalent environments. In
| school you are expected to learn, not copy answers...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Or IP theft, depending upon the exact scenario. Off to
| prison you go.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Except if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of
| your company you would get fired. You are not allowed to
| "consult" with anyone, so why should you be allowed to
| consult with anyone about your homework.
| ratww wrote:
| _> Except if you consult with colleagues /friends outside
| of your company you would get fired_
|
| What the hell are you talking about? I routinely consult
| with others and others routinely consult with me. That's
| afaik standard practice in most professions: engineering,
| medicine, architecture, psychology, marketing, and yes
| software development.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You share confidential information with colleagues
| outside your job? I guess how much or what consulting you
| can do depends a lot on your job. I know quite a few
| companies which don't allow talking about specific
| problems you are facing because that would reveal
| information they consider confidential. Now if we are
| talking general questions, sure but you are very much
| allowed to do the same as a student. All this to show
| that sharing information/solutions has quite a gradient
| even in professional life.
| ratww wrote:
| Again: what the hell are you talking about? We were
| talking about professional consulting, not about sharing
| confidential information. These are two very different
| activities, and you can definitely do one without the
| other.
|
| The statement saying _" if you consult with
| colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get
| fired"_ is false.
| cycomanic wrote:
| We are replying to a post which said cheating in
| education is what is consultation in professional life.
| Nowhere did we talk about general "consultation" we
| comparing copying others solutions (cheating) to
| "consultation", I would argue that the equivalent of
| copying someone's specific solution in many (most) cases
| would be a violation of ethical/company/workplace rules
| and is not just "consultation".
|
| Asking someone for help with homework (much more
| equivalent to general consultation) is not generally
| considered cheating in education either.
| ratww wrote:
| Absolutely, the equivalent of cheating is _' not just
| "consultation"'_, but in your original message you said
| _" if you consult..."_ without qualification. And no, you
| don't get fired for "consulting" alone. Right below you
| already changed your statement to _" they are rules in
| professional life about how you consult with others"_.
| Let's maybe leave it at that? This doesn't seem like a
| productive discussion and is entering flamewar territory.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I assumed it was clear from the parent I was replying to
| (like others did), that I meant my statement in the
| context of how they said it's equivalent to what's called
| cheating not a general statement about all consultation,
| but you're right I should have made that more clear.
|
| You are also correct that this is not a productive
| discussion, because we are discussing a misunderstanding
| (due to me not being clear enough).
|
| I did find your language and reaction a bit
| disproportionate though.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Also funny thing you bring up medicine, they have quite
| strict rules about what you can share.
| ratww wrote:
| Yes, so you just follow these rules when consulting with
| a colleague, what's the problem?
| cycomanic wrote:
| We are all replying to a post that said what is
| considered cheating in education is simply consultation
| in professional life. I responded that they are rules in
| professional life about how you consult with others. In
| other words there are rules about consultation in both
| education (there is usually no issue about studying
| together, but there are issues about just copying
| somebody else's homework) and professional life (e.g. a
| doctor can't just share a specific medical file with
| anyone asking for a solution, or an engineer can't ask
| someone at a different company to program some program
| for him).
| ratww wrote:
| _> I responded that they are rules in professional life
| about how you consult with others._
|
| No you didn't, you said _" if you consult with
| colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get
| fired"_, which is clearly false. I'm the one who said
| rules should be followed. But I'm happy that the mistake
| was corrected and we're now on the same page.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I'd rather say that the equivalent of what the industry
| calls "consulting with your colleagues" is more a "study
| session" than an exam (be it take-home).
|
| This is when you learn things, and everyone brings
| something to the table.
|
| I'd say the equivalent of an exam is a job interview. When
| the other party wants to see what the individual knows.
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| There is an enormous difference between the people
| "consulting with colleagues" and the people openly
| cheating. When I was doing my engineering degree there were
| always groups of students who would go over assignments
| together, see if their answers matched up, and then look
| through the textbooks and course materials together to see
| which person was right. That's consulting.
|
| There were also people who would pay someone else to do the
| assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments
| to a private chat. World of difference.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Sure, but what the other person is describing as cheating
| sounds, to me at least, very much like the former case.
| There was a task, the students were allowed to work on
| the task in their own time, with their own resources, and
| chose to put their heads together rather than work on
| them individually. To me, that seems fairly reasonable.
|
| That said, a lot of this stuff seems kind of culturally
| specific. At least for the two degrees that I experienced
| in the UK, there were roughly three types of graded work:
| exams (overseen, sit in silence, possibly with your own
| notes but generally not, fixed time limit around 1-2hrs);
| lab-work (usually done in the building although worked on
| outside of lab hours as well, fixed deadline of around a
| week or two, usually graded at least in part based on an
| oral conversation with the examiner); and coursework
| (take-home work, fixed deadline ranging from one week to
| a couple of months, allowed to discuss but direct copying
| is banned).
|
| In these cases, it rarely makes sense to cheat by
| directly sharing answers. Obviously in an exam it would
| be useful, but the conditions of the exam make it largely
| prohibitively difficult. In coursework, it's usually
| obvious if people are handing copies of the same work in.
| And for lab work, the challenge was usually not to just
| complete the lab and get a "right" result, but rather to
| understand the task and be able to explain what was going
| on to the TA grading you. If you can cheat well enough to
| pass that, you probably understand what's going on -
| which is exactly the aim of the course anyway.
|
| Whereas it feels like what people are talking about here
| is students being sent home with problem worksheets,
| being expected not to talk about them at all, and then
| getting grades based on those answers. That seems to me
| to be a system that practically encourages cheating -
| work together as a group, and you'll obviously be able to
| achieve more than any one individual, even if you could
| all pass the course in the first place. In contrast, we
| also had similar worksheets, but they were never graded,
| and we were usually encouraged to work together to figure
| out what was going on. We could then take our answers to
| tutorials and have a discussion about where we went wrong
| and why we went wrong usually in a group of any four or
| five.
|
| So reading this article and some of the comments here,
| I'm really struggling to get an image of what these
| teachers are expecting from their students, if they're
| setting problems that are so obviously gameable.
| [deleted]
| oefrha wrote:
| Try consulting with your colleagues during your next
| interview and see if it's encouraged.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| >imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the
| grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved
| or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where
| everyone is at.
|
| An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| On the other hand you studied way harder than you normal would
| have, which if your goal is to learn the material, is in fact a
| good thing.
|
| But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative
| effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to
| employment and life success. People cheat because they don't
| want to learn but they do want a good job. I don't know how you
| separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you
| made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the
| material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is
| probably to snitch.
| jwmoz wrote:
| I used to program answers into my graphic calculator for things I
| couldn't remember
| selfhifive wrote:
| The other side of the argument is that online classes have
| horrible engagement. Orders of magnitude worse than a normal
| class.
|
| Virtual meetings also induce more fatigue in the participants
| than normal meetings (researched).
|
| One or two off weeks can derail a whole semester. And professors
| themselves seem lost in absence of live feedback.
|
| The schedules for live classes are rigid. While at college it is
| easy to follow them as you're in the same place, but schedules of
| individual homes vary widely and many students don't have the
| means to change them to suit the class timings.
| thecleaner wrote:
| How exactly was it cheating ? Students were allowed to share
| questions or answers and they did just that on a WhatsApp group.
| Did i read something wrong ? I didn't quite get the path that
| would be considered cheating.
| juhanima wrote:
| What bothers me in this story is that it makes it sound as if
| it's easy to spot from the whatsapp chat who cheated. That
| doesn't make sense to me. Surely the students who cheated the
| worst were the ones who used the shared answers from the chat.
| But how do you monitor that? Those who shared the answers
| obviously got them by other means, so did they really cheat or
| just be too helpful by academic standards?
| ajdegol wrote:
| During my undergrad comp physics days we had to print out our
| code when handing in assignments. It was possible to grab a
| printout and photocopy it. I was fairly well known for my crass
| wit and I got an email from the head of comp labs informing me
| that two identical pieces of code had been handed in... but due
| to the numerous occurrences of the word "boned" in the error
| messages, he assumed the original was mine.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Cheating is not about the instructors. As gutting as it may be to
| be a teacher and learn that your students are not interested in
| honestly engaging in what you may be passionate about, the harm
| cheaters spread is 10x worse for honest students than it is any
| instructor.
| MRobb91827 wrote:
| I'm really torn on whether this was handled right. A real thing
| in the pandemic is that everyone was cheating all the time, at
| every level. Students looking at there phone when they weren't
| suppose to, printing things out, being in various chats,
| whatever. It seemed sort of the norm at the time I would say
| realistically.
|
| Reporting someone for academic dishonesty is a deathblow to any
| kind of application to higher ed. This was an undergrad psych
| class I think? Anyone there trying to get into the PhD programs
| is in for a world of trouble now, that's a competitive place.
|
| It's not that I think cheating is good, I just wonder if these
| students peers in this class/other schools who had better
| outcomes did things the right way, or maybe they just didn't have
| a professor who enjoys this so much that he will spend weeks
| writing R code to fully catch everything. That seems like an
| arbitrary way to have a dream end, I dunno.
| gmd63 wrote:
| It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is
| a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system
| design (for society, we're designing our society with daily
| actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who
| want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for
| encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are
| benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gaps and problems
| in design, but we only have one life, and one go at growing the
| society we want to live in.
|
| By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you
| think you deserve more than the honest student because you're
| willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for
| future generations.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think that cheating is wrong, but I also think that building
| school systems that incentivize students to cheat is even more
| wrong, because it is a systemic bad decision.
|
| During my schooling years, I observed that people most driven
| to cheating were the ones who could not absorb enormous amounts
| of material needed to pass an exam. I never had problems with
| that, so I wasn't tempted to cheat, but I also noticed that a
| year later, I barely remembered anything from what I have
| learnt so painfully to pass.
|
| This isn't a good preparation for a job in modern world, where
| if you do something, you always have Google (or StackOverflow
| etc.) at your hand. And people who have a good ability to put 2
| and 2 together tend to be more successful at such jobs.
| Siira wrote:
| If this kind of thinking was prevalent, it might work. It is
| currently not, and I doubt posting about it will help much.
| Besides, there are lots of incompetent people who prefer the
| current dishonesty, so breaking this Nash equilibrium is hard.
| alexashka wrote:
| Systems that produce so much cheating, are bad system design.
|
| You're at 'cheating = bad', which is the level of a 5 year old
| naive little boy.
|
| Try upgrading that system instead of pointing fingers. You only
| have one life to live and all that.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Agreeing to follow specific rules and then _silently not
| following them_ is lying. Do you consider that to be okay
| too?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| They have a point though. If exam is testing for things
| that can be looked up easily, what's the point? Test for
| understanding and make tests individual enough to make mass
| cheating not feasible.
|
| > Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not
| following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay
| too?
|
| Students are hardly in a position where they can express
| their views freely. Do you consider laying out rules and
| punishing anyone who voices objections okay too?
|
| Things are never just black and white.
| alexashka wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Read any introduction to moral philosophy for an
| explanation of why that is.
| rocqua wrote:
| The problem with cheating is not just "it's not fair". In
| fact, it takes a whole lot of cheating before that becomes a
| problem (through diploma inflation). The problem with
| cheating is that students aren't learning. This sets them up
| for failure on further classes that build on the current one.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _By cheating, you 're voting for a society of scammers, and you
| think you deserve more than the honest student because you're
| willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it
| for future generations._
|
| Scammer implies there is a victim. Who is the mark here? The
| college that charges huge tuition despite having a huge
| endowment? The professor who is being paid a salary to tech
| courses ppl are uninterested in? The employer for requiring
| degrees for jobs that don't need them? If cheating became so
| widespread that degrees stopped mattering, employers would have
| to find other ways.
| bumby wrote:
| The victim is the person who did the actual work and has the
| same credential as the person who did not, as well as the
| group who is using that credential as a decision filter. By
| cheating, you distort the information that credential is
| meant to convey.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Students cannot do much on their own about the system of
| incentives that rewards cheating. You may as well post "By tax-
| optimizing, you're voting for a society of rent collectors who
| do no useful work and just understand the tax system better
| than other people"
|
| If someone realizes that they have become an agent of a much
| larger system tasked with the grunt work of a harmful and
| illegitimate process like college education as a career
| credential, and if that person wants to avoid being evil, they
| need not lift a finger. It is easier not to do the paperwork
| than to do it!
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'm very jaded. I see students who are experts in cramming a
| set of material, vomiting out the answers, and doing this
| repeatedly for every exam. I see other students who are experts
| in cheating without getting caught. It's hard for me to see a
| distinction between these two groups in practice since they're
| both committed to passing the exam rather than learning
| anything, but one is apparently imbued with honour since
| they're gamifying the exam within the written rules instead of
| breaking the rules.
|
| It's not that I like or respect cheaters, it's that I'm just
| entirely unbothered by them. They're just students taking a
| high risk strategy and they'll sink or swim and I'm not angry
| about them or shedding any tears for them. Students who
| actually focus on trying to learn instead of trying to pass
| tests are screwed even if there wasn't a single cheater in the
| classroom. They won't go to the best schools or get the best
| jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test
| answers.
| bruce511 wrote:
| There are two ways to look at this. One is that those that
| cram for tests are doing "what the employer requires" and do
| will make good employees, so the system is working. Those
| that go this approach probably learn stuff along the way as
| well.
|
| The group that focuses on pure learning, and engaging with
| the material, may not end up with the best marks, but they
| have a deep understanding, and delight in the subject that
| will serve them very well over their working career.
|
| Equally though, not all courses are equally useful (to one
| person). I enjoyed oceanography, I went to class, did the
| work (mostly) and learned something. But I don't like boats
| (get seasick) so I've never "used" any of that knowledge.
| Ditto astronomy.
|
| Comp Sci on the other hand consumed all my spare time. We
| gave ourselves extra tasks, read far beyond the textbook, and
| pushed the envelope. This would be our career and we were all
| in. Sometimes test scores suffered (I didn't actually study
| for tests) but I got a job (one I still have and love) and 30
| years later I'm still applying those fundamentals I learned.
|
| Maybe I don't have the highest paying job, but I'm where I
| was made to fit, and money can't tempt me away.
|
| Those that cheat, well, you can fool some people some of the
| time, but it's a lot of work. And a career spans a long time.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I think we need to stop looking at the students and start
| looking at the system. The students are responding to
| incentives set out by their faculty. If you really want
| change, you must evaluate alternative incentives.
|
| Personally, I was an honors student until college, and I was
| often the one in my group of friends to figure out how to
| solve an exercise, yet I would often get average (or lower)
| results compared to some of my friends, because some of them
| were just great at drilling themselves until they could
| repeat every single style of solution quickly. I admit - that
| made me a little frustrated at the time, but 10 years later
| some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not
| doing as well in their careers because real life requires
| innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application
| of past solutions.
| georgebarnett wrote:
| > 10 years later some of those folks that did really well
| in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because
| real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not
| just rapid application of past solutions.
|
| I know many highly successful people didn't go to
| university and this why is doesn't matter.
| Psychlist wrote:
| Some stuff you just have to drill until it makes sense.
| Ordinary differential equations was a bit notorious when I
| studied. Most people took 50-100 hours of drill before they
| could solve them reasonably competently (enough to get an A).
| For me it was that and some of the control theory stuff that
| to this day still seems like a dark art.
|
| Other stuff once you understand it the exams are
| straightforward, if tedious. Antenna design was like that for
| me, I'd solve it geometrically in my head then work out which
| transforms and equations matched my solution. Other people
| just ground that stuff out along with all the rest. I hope
| no-one was twisted enough that ODE's made sense...
| gmd63 wrote:
| I remember it being common at my university for fraternities
| to maintain banks of old tests/quizzes so next year's pledges
| could cram and vomit more than the permitted amount.
|
| This is like your ML model loading your test set into
| training without your consent.
| wiz21c wrote:
| In my university, we do that all of the time. Of course,
| professor knows about it and subtly changes the question
| for the examination.
|
| So as a student, your best option is to actually prepare as
| many of the questions in the bank of old test so that
| you're ready for the exam.
|
| So although you somehow cheat, you indeed review the course
| thoroughly by preparing the questions...
| gmd63 wrote:
| Yeah if you're an ML model trying to get the high score
| on the test set why would you explore the deeper features
| of the data when you can just overfit and get 100%?
|
| At least in my experience, my professors didn't make the
| old material available to other students, and neither did
| the fraternities/sororities.
| atoav wrote:
| I always tried to _understand_ things. Craming was a last
| resort, when that didn 't work. I find learning things I
| don't understand or have a mental representation for
| extremely boring and an utter waste of time and energy.
| verisimi wrote:
| Are you labouring under the illusion that the learning was
| singsong to do with enhancing rather than retarding the
| individual? Did you believe the purported reasons for the
| education systems being as they are?
|
| No, educating people is about the governance structure de-
| individualising people making them all think its a similar
| way that both fosters uncritical love on the system as well
| as dependence.
| passivate wrote:
| > They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs
| because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test
| answers.
|
| Can you clarify what you meant by this? As it stands it sort
| of reads like you claiming actually smart people don't get
| into the best schools - which is absurd.
| nivertech wrote:
| Agile is cheating
|
| Scrum is a gc (group chat)
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Professionally we collaborate with our peers to achieve some
| goal. In school, the goal is individual achievement. If you
| "collaborate" in this way in school, you absolutely aren't
| achieving the purpose you are spending so much time and money
| working towards.
| kushan2020 wrote:
| If you get away with cheating it's not cheating. The real
| problem is whether it's worth the risk of getting caught and/or
| losing an opportunity to learn something which will help you
| later.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Cheating could grade the honest student below you lower on a
| curve and deny them employment in a competitive job market.
| Then there'd be a dishonest person earning more economic
| influence on the world than an honest one.
| metamet wrote:
| > If you get away with cheating it's not cheating.
|
| Yes it is? Cheating is cheating. You can get _caught_
| cheating, but you 're still cheating if you're aren't.
| duped wrote:
| No, the real problem is dishonesty and unfairness to your
| classmates and teacher.
| rocqua wrote:
| It takes a lot of cheating to harm honest students (unless
| graded on a curve). The real problem with cheating is that
| you don't learn.
|
| Cheating is a symptom of something worse. Viewing studies
| as a means to get a diploma, rather than a means to get an
| education. This is a deep issue, that stems from things
| like using the threat of failing a test to get people to
| engage.
|
| The educational system presents itself as a bunch of hoops
| to jump through to get a successful life. Parents tend to
| see it the same way. Society often does aswell. This ruins
| a lot of the intrinsic value of education.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, a lot of what you learn in university is
| shit you won't need for at least half a decade in your
| actual career and by the time you could need it you'd
| have forgotten it anyways.
|
| Universities used to be the place where the best brains
| of the country studied and advanced science itself
| afterwards. Nowadays, with university r&d budgets slashed
| and those that remain in r&d being forced to waste half
| their time chasing grants and another quarter in
| administrative bullcrap, it's a place to weed out people
| with adhd or otherwise disadvantaged so employers can
| pick up the "creme de la creme" without violating a ton
| of anti discrimination law or the risk of hiring a dud.
| It's obvious when large companies require a BSc for an
| _accountant_ or other paper pushers of all things.
|
| Students _know_ this and optimize accordingly - as usual,
| when something becomes a KPI it becomes useless.
| rocqua wrote:
| It sounds like we agree that university education has
| changed for the worse.
| [deleted]
| eimrine wrote:
| Sometimes cheating is a smart way to save some time. Scammers
| are just the other world, it is like when somebody with too
| much of spare time goes for hunting. All scammers do cheating
| but only a minority of cheaters go into scam.
| eastbound wrote:
| Cheating is related to human problems, and engineers aren't
| psychologists. It's human problems when there is a mismatch
| between teachers and students, between schools and
| expectations, and students are at the bottom of the ladder and
| aren't in a position to discuss what is demanded.
| kqr wrote:
| I don't think people are defending cheating. People are saying
| that what in the normal world goes under "desirable
| cooperation" is called "cheating" in school, and for as long as
| that is the case, students who exhibit normally desirable
| cooperative behaviour will be called "cheaters" and that's not
| a reasonable thing to do to them.
| cowtools wrote:
| Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills
| yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high
| school.
|
| These are people who will eventually go into the workforce,
| into jobs that have certain expectations of individual
| knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the
| people around you.
| kqr wrote:
| And there are ways to engage students in learning. In fact,
| my experience humans basically come out of the womb with a
| burning desire to learn.
|
| It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same
| exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is
| extinguished a little.
|
| Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to
| reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
|
| Give them more interesting things to do and they will
| cooperate in more productive ways too!
|
| ----
|
| I also disagree that you have to learn everything for
| yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a
| decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all
| of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to
| the ability to rely on others.
|
| I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved
| by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know
| how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch
| safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the
| sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning
| with other people before going on to spend time on things.
|
| I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't
| rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second
| of the day.
|
| Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each
| other.
| kortilla wrote:
| > cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such
| exercise.
|
| This is laughably naive. Most of the cheaters I dealt
| with in my courses were masters students who had zero
| interest in learning. They were paying for the M.S. on
| their resume for job prospects or for visa reasons.
|
| You're right that some students will cheat on rote stuff
| because they just get bored. Where you're wrong is
| thinking that's the majority of the issue. Huge chunks of
| students are in college for entirely the wrong reasons.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Curious would you go to a surgeon who said he has his
| friend do all his brain surgeries? His friend might be
| out of town when yours is scheduled.
|
| Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don't take
| a math class to simply say "I'll just skip the classes
| and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn
| as little as possible." Why even take the class then?
| kqr wrote:
| I'd much, much rather have the surgeon who asks a
| colleague for a second opinion when they are unsure,
| rather than just going ahead on the wrong assumption
| because "otherwise I would be cheating".
|
| In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted
| cheating as a formal practise: they call it _grand
| rounds_ and it consists of sharing "answers to exam
| questions" (outcome of patient care) with their
| colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort
| of discovering them on their own.
| renlo wrote:
| In this case, the surgeon isn't conferring with a
| colleague; the surgeon is wholly unable to perform the
| operation. Collaboration is not cheating. A WhatsApp
| group used to collaborate on simple assignments or
| complicated projects is one thing, wholesale copying
| multiple choice answers or plagiarizing whole essays or
| projects is something completely different.
| kqr wrote:
| Even so, if my surgeon for whatever reason signed up to
| do an operation they are unable to perform, I would
| rather they ask their colleague to step in than charge
| ahead to avoid accusations of cheating.
|
| I suspect you aren't trying to argue about this
| situation, though.
|
| I think you're asking about comparing the performance of
| the student who does know the material well, and the
| student who needs assistance with it. The answer is not
| to forbid assistance, it's to design tests where
| assistance becomes obvious.
| renlo wrote:
| edit: looking back at the thread here, I see now that
| we're arguing over semantics I think. To me, "relying on
| someone" means that they are incapable of doing it
| themselves. It seems your definition of "relying on
| someone" means to get help from someone. If so, I agree,
| if someone needs to get help from others that's fine. If
| they are completely dependent on the other person being
| there (my definition of "rely on"), then the surgeon is
| incapable of doing the surgery if their friend isn't
| there.
| rini17 wrote:
| This thread is about engineers not surgeons. And it
| happens all the time when an engineer does not feel
| competent for certain problem, they ask friends for help.
| Would you ban such practice or what?
| kortilla wrote:
| I sure as fuck wouldn't want an engineer responsible for
| anything important if they cheated. The problem with
| engineering is that if you cheated through the
| fundamentals, you won't even recognize when to ask for
| help. You'll just build build something shitty or
| (depending on the field) sign off on something that puts
| people's lives at risk because you missed fundamental
| flaws.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop
| relying on others"
|
| This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job
| where you only do the same thing again and again until
| retirement. There are people who do specialize like that
| (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us
| aren't them.
|
| My experience says that the best programmers with the best
| skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside
| one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really
| complicated problem and you are the best fit."
|
| At which point, you are back to "relying on others",
| because your skills need updating and it will be the others
| you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a
| straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill
| ladder.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >You can't just coast forever on the people around you. //
|
| I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in
| general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the
| wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at
| it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively
| banked PSbillions from government reserves -- under the
| guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than
| knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be
| criminally corrupt).
|
| Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a
| dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going
| forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably
| more corruption.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills
| yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high
| school._
|
| Companies would fail if everyone worked in isolation.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills
| yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high
| school.
|
| Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if
| that was true.
|
| The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to
| provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a
| google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you
| are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived,
| and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you
| might have to look things up, but that's not the part they
| are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
| bruce511 wrote:
| I'm not saying you can be a moron, or have no
| understanding at all, but Google and stack overflow are
| tools that more people (engineers) should learn how to
| use.
|
| I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and
| that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question
| was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way
| of doing things, and I for one am a fan.
|
| Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking,
| data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually
| program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So
| it helps if the foundation is there.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I disagree, much of the cheating is not "desirable
| cooperation", but blatant copy pasting. I guess it's no
| wonder that there are so many bits of open source code or
| stack overflow answers copied into proprietary (and sometimes
| open source) codebases. A significant fraction of engineers
| seems to think that ethical standards don't apply to them and
| in my experience the percentage is higher than in other
| technical areas (lawyers are much worse still in my
| experience, but that's a different story).
| Heyso wrote:
| In chinese, copying and learning are the same word.
|
| Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the
| wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem,
| just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the
| same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation,
| why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable
| solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just
| take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex
| : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds,
| netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
|
| I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the
| school (and society):
|
| 1. Does the student really need to remember historical
| dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google
| them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
|
| 2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by
| himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion
| myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't
| care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's
| all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
|
| The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching.
| They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more
| like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate
| (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual
| understanding.
|
| To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job
| interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly
| the plane.
|
| Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same
| type of evaluation.
|
| "I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch
| ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have
| success, it means learning phase is completed.
|
| When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for
| yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer,
| school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is
| called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be
| or not be grading, but only you care about grading.
|
| The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests
| he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the
| skills he need. And grading is just a means for that.
|
| Everything the school does should be a means for making
| someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a
| person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more
| large than employable).
|
| What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher
| focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But
| completly forgetting exams and grading "means to".
|
| In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only
| purpose is to give a learning status indication to the
| student.
|
| In school (in France national education), they also serve
| to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve
| as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
|
| Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If
| students cheat, it means your environnment contains more
| than just learning.
|
| When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it
| override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student
| doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not
| doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give
| them a learning opportunity.
|
| Schools (I am still referring to France national education)
| believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies
| loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should
| be hard and painful.
|
| If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick,
| because authentic learning is fun by itselves !
|
| (I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me
| question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they
| have been designed in a way that favour something else than
| learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).
| cycomanic wrote:
| An answer I gave to a different post addresses some of
| your comments. You are correct teachers (and schools)
| serve two (or even more) purposes. It is to teach someone
| how to do things, i.e. the teacher role and they serve as
| gatekeepers, i.e. make sure that they know enough to get
| this qualification.
|
| I also agree with you that in an ideal world we would not
| need the gatekeeper role and tests would only help the
| students on how far along their learning journey they
| are. However, reality means we do need gatekeeping, we
| need to test that a student has sufficient knowledge to
| perform a certain task, because literally lives can
| depend on it, e.g. we would not let people drive on the
| roads without an exam or let a doctor operate someone
| without proven knowledge that they can do it.
|
| Because of the gatekeeping requirements and the interests
| of students they will optimize for outcomes, that might
| mean they learn some subjects in depth, but it will also
| mean they learn some subjects with the bare minimum to
| pass (and that is fine).
|
| Unfortunately the students who optimize for outcomes
| generally outweigh the students who want to learn (at
| least vocally). I think everyone who taught will be able
| to tell you that students are incredibly conservative
| towards changes, even if they improve their learning
| outcomes (give us recipe instructions, not try to get us
| to figure out things for ourselves), because it might
| mean more work.
|
| And I agree that ideally (and practically) we should need
| much less carrot and stick, but saying we will never need
| them is quite unrealistic IMO.
| lodovic wrote:
| Some say it's only cheating if you get caught.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| Exams and cheating are just parts of the same problem. It's
| unfortunate that academia can't wrap its mind around this and
| design better learning experiences for students and teachers.
| electrondood wrote:
| This smells like a cop out for the cheaters.
|
| Is the system perfect? Obviously not. Are the rules of the game
| laid out in advance? Yes. Do you agree to them as a student?
| Yes. Is there a clear path to success on your own merits,
| through your own effort. Yes.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Students are mostly not that interested in learning
| sevvu wrote:
| You know, an abundance of gifs does not add any substance to your
| article, only distracting the readers from its content, which is,
| may I add, so unnecessarily and pedantically detailed. What a
| redditor. Consider reducing your carbon footprint, and deleting
| all gifs from the article.
| hnarn wrote:
| Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual
| people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on
| how schools are broken with phrases like "we need to fix the
| system".
|
| As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an
| immense frustration with exactly this -- how broken the system is
| -- I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you
| as a person who is almost in all cases not a teacher, nor someone
| with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not
| have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be
| fixed, and that it's not broken for fun but because there are
| some very difficult unresolved issues.
|
| People love to rant about how bad tests are. "We just study for
| the tests" and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be
| international. Curious, isn't it, how all these systems seem to
| fail in the same way?
|
| In the case of testing it's because you choose to focus on the
| obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the
| very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure
| knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
|
| These are very hard questions, and it's frustrating to read the
| phrase "we need to fix the system" because yes, obviously we do,
| but agreeing that things are bad isn't the hard part, and
| probably input from people who have never worked in the field is
| of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will
| not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
|
| So what's the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by
| rolling back this common conception that when it comes to
| schools, everyone's opinion matters an equal amount, and then
| listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle
| educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more
| than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad
| results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak
| regardless).
| rr808 wrote:
| > Testing .. HOW do you measure knowledge
|
| To me measuring knowledge is a minor reason of having tests.
| The main reason is to force students to study. If you have no
| test on knowledge most people will just gloss over the detail
| and not learn.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I TA'd for a Prolog course at my university (Imperial College
| London) during the four years of my PhD there. As part of that
| work I helped correct students' papers. It was pretty clear to
| me that the students were sharing their code and only changing
| variable names etc. to make it look different.
|
| It didn't work, because you could see the same, let's say,
| idiosyncracies, in their code. For example, there might be
| three or four different ways to solve a coding exercise and
| about 60-75% of the papers would solve it using the same way,
| which was not necessarily the best, or even the most obvious,
| way (what is the most obvious way to solve a Prolog exercise
| might not be common sense, but that's why you are given a
| lecture, first, and then the exercise).
|
| What's most interesting is that I saw the same patterns
| repeated over the three years I TA'd for one of the Prolog
| courses. I guess they shared the answers between years, or
| somebody had put them online (I searched but couldn't find
| them). Or they just copied solutions to similar exercises they
| found online.
|
| I didn't report the cheating because I felt there was no
| benefit in doing so. In particular with Prolog, because it's
| not a language commonly used in the industry, and it's taught
| at Imperial mainly for historical reasons (there are many of us
| logicists studying, or teaching, there) I reckoned that most
| students found it a useless chore and did not understand why
| they needed to learn it, and why they needed to "waste" time
| solving those coding problems. So they copied from each other
| in order to get the job done quickly and then have more time to
| spend on the things they felt were more useful to them (like
| learning Python or "ML" I suppose).
|
| I personally thought, and still think, that learning to program
| in Prolog is useful, just to disentangle a programmer's mind
| from the particularities of the coding paradigms, and the
| programming languages, she's most familiar with. At CS schools
| today, programming is introduced with Python and I guess it's
| easy to get into a mindframe that all programming languages
| must necessarily work like Python. Studying languages from
| different paradigms, like Prolog or Haskell, can shake you off
| that mentality (it sure did me, back when I did my CS degree).
|
| The problems is that you can't really force this appreciation
| of the need to learn different things on students, who are
| often in a terrible hurry and under terrible pressure to do
| good on their course, so they can get on with life. The Prolog
| course I TA'd was mandatory and so it must have really felt
| like someone was trying to force the knowledge down the
| studnets' throats.
|
| I don't think that's a good idea. You can't teach people that
| way. They'll just see your obvious effort to force them to
| learn what you want, and they'll simply take the obvious route
| around it. And that ends up teaching them a lesson that you
| really weren't expecting to teach: the world is full of idiots
| who think they can teach you things, but you know better than
| they do and you'll show them who's boss.
|
| That's what students do with tests, also. They can see they're
| a useless waste of time and they can see the obvious way around
| them is to cheat, and that it's to their benefit to cheat. And
| so they cheat. I don't have solutions to this. The students
| shouldn't have to fight the school, and the school shouldn't
| have to fight the students. The school is there for the
| students' benefit after all.
| advael wrote:
| My position on this has been pretty controversial when I've
| shared it before, but I still think it's correct:
|
| Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless.
| The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the
| fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has
| borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way
| has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of
| their value while building an ever-expanding series of
| increasingly meaningless hoops for people to jump through to
| get what they actually need. We have deemed it necessary to
| create assessments to prop up the idea that education can be
| easily measured and should gate meaningful life outcomes for
| most people. Most if not all "cheating" behavior is either just
| a rational, strategic response to this situation, or a
| disconnect between how people actually solve problems (e.g.
| often collaborative and laser-focused on the part of the
| problem that drives the outcome, in this case the assessment)
| and some weird cultist notion of what it means for an
| individual to do it "correctly".
|
| Effective pedagogy will never scale unless we get some really
| AGI-like technologies (I loved The Diamond Age as a kid, but A
| Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is from the perspective of
| extant tech a total pie-in-the-sky fantasy, illustrative of how
| meaningful teaching requires individualized approaches), and we
| see time and time again that teacher-to-student ratios as well
| as particularly good specific teachers are overwhelmingly the
| drivers of even the stupid metrics we are optimizing for
|
| In short, this whole system is broken because its fundamental
| premise is flawed
| jules wrote:
| What you are saying is not at all controversial, but it is
| incomplete, which is probably why you have received pushback
| in the past. Criticising the existing system is easy. Giving
| an alternative is harder. Implementing that alternative and
| showing that it's actually better on some metric is MUCH
| harder than that. But you have not even given an alternative!
| barnabee wrote:
| The alternative is to treat higher learning like any other
| experience in life or on your CV/resume: you do it, you
| tell people you did it, then you either convince them that
| doing it imparted something useful on you or you don't.
|
| As someone who's hired plenty of people, exams and grades
| do not help one bit with the process and you shouldn't pay
| any attention to them.
|
| The only good use of exams I see see is as a potential
| entry gate, administered by the place you're trying to
| impress, to get onto a course, be considered for a job, or
| be given a license to do something. As exit gates they're
| just noise.
| jules wrote:
| Let us consider the proposal of keeping higher learning
| the same except that we don't do exams. What would
| happen?
|
| For better or worse, whether somebody completed their
| degree does often factor into hiring decisions, so exam
| grades do indirectly factor into hiring decisions. Having
| completed a degree signals some level of domain
| knowledge, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Without
| exams you would have a 100% success rate (unless you
| introduced some other assessment mechanism), so the
| signal would be gone; having completed a degree would
| only signal whether or not you were able to afford it
| financially.
|
| Secondly, a large fraction of the students would lose
| motivation and not do anything by the second year. Many
| would stop doing homework, stop doing any real studying
| except maybe superficial reading, and many would hardly
| come to class. In fact, many students currently already
| do this _until the first midterm_ , even though they know
| the midterm is coming. A lot of students need the
| existence of exams to motivate themselves. Not all
| students, but a lot. These students don't _want_ to lose
| motivation and waste time; many would probably regret not
| learning anything for several years. Our monkey brains
| are not suited to motivating ourselves to do things with
| a >3 year time horizon. Exams are a mechanism to
| motivate our monkey brains to put effort into studying.
|
| I think if we consider professions that are important to
| our own lives, we do recognise the necessity of
| assessment. Would you prefer your doctor or nurse,
| accountant, electrician, or for that matter, teacher of
| your kids, to have come from a school that doesn't do
| exams or from a school that does? If they are
| experienced, maybe it doesn't matter, but how many people
| are going to take a chance on a fresh graduate if they
| are from a program without any assessment, where the
| philosophy is "you do it, you tell people you did it,
| then you either convince them that doing it imparted
| something useful on you or you don't"?
|
| There are other ways to solve that problem, and some of
| them may even be better than the current system, but I'm
| not convinced that taking the current system and simply
| removing exams would work.
| criddell wrote:
| The evaluation isn't necessarily the problem, but I think
| assigning grades may be. It's gamifies education and I
| think generally makes things worse.
|
| I think it might be worth spreading some of the standards
| from medical schools to other programs. Don't assign a
| grade to a student, make everything pass/fail. Either you
| know the material or you do not. There's no honor roll or
| deans list and no class rankings.
| jules wrote:
| > Either you know the material or you do not.
|
| This is simply not the case. How well the person knows
| the material is more than yes/no. You'd be rounding the
| exam result to 1 bit and throwing away the extra bits of
| information. Maybe it's a good thing not to show that
| information to the student, but I'd like to see an
| argument for why the advantages of hiding that
| information from the students outweigh the disadvantages.
|
| As for competitiveness in education...there are
| advantages and disadvantages to it. I'm not convinced
| that class rankings are a good idea, but I'm also not
| convinced that the optimal target for competitiveness is
| zero, to the point of not showing students their grades
| beyond pass/fail. Anecdotally I've seen the aim for zero
| competitiveness have perverse effects, where students
| instead start to compete on how lazy they can (appear to)
| be while still getting a pass, to show how smart they
| are.
| olau wrote:
| Are you aware that there are grade-free and exam-free
| schools out there and that they have been operating for
| decades?
|
| Measuring the effectiveness of school systems is difficult
| because of selection bias, but I'm sure you could find some
| attempts (e.g. PISA) if you went looking.
| abecedarius wrote:
| You don't need more of an alternative to stop digging the
| hole deeper (subsidizing the problem, hard-requiring
| degrees awarded by the problem, etc.).
| elondaits wrote:
| Exams are a bad way of learning... but a good way for a
| university to filter out slow down people that would devalue
| their degrees.
| mobjack wrote:
| Computer science is one of the harder subjects to assess
| knowledge through tests.
|
| In other industries, passing an accreditation exam gives you
| value in the market. In software engineering, certificates are
| seen as useless.
|
| This can explain the cynical attitude programmers have against
| testing.
| analog31 wrote:
| I have degrees in math and physics. Those degrees gave me
| close to zero value in the market. Spending X years in
| school, then having to prove to an employer that you can do
| barely more than squat is a familiar experience in a lot of
| fields.
|
| There are tests you can take in those subjects, such as the
| Graduate Record Exam. Those tests work to some extent because
| the subject matter is relatively mature, and consistent from
| one college to another. And yet there are entire fields of
| math and physics that I've never been exposed to. Their main
| purpose is to see if you're conversant in a body of knowledge
| that would prepare you for typical graduate study, not for a
| job.
|
| Software engineering is a comparatively young field, with
| less standardization. There are even debates on HN as to
| whether software engineering is a real thing. There are
| places where every programmer has the title "engineer"
| regardless of their background.
|
| I'm only employable because most people hate math and physics
| so much that they're relieved if anybody offers to do those
| things for them. That, and I'm pretty good at programming and
| electronics.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how
| do you scale it?
|
| This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge
| takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not
| scale.
|
| Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever
| weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do
| know, you get exactly what you measure for.
|
| Hence, the system is not broken - it's working exactly as
| intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at
| this scale.)
|
| Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking
| up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or
| B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a
| workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they
| take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge.
|
| College does not prepare people for the working world (and
| never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
| hnarn wrote:
| So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating
| citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any
| change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
| yunohn wrote:
| > any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
|
| That's a bit extreme; I interpreted their view as, it's
| hard to fix because of intractable issues, but it doesn't
| mean we can't have marginal improvements. Radical upheavals
| and revamps are sketchy.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You can't educate someone who is not ready to be educated.
| Those that get the most out of college are those that put
| the most in. This was true 1000 years ago, and is true now.
|
| Yes, this system is the best [1] because access is open to
| all (which it wasn't). So those that want to go, can, and
| those who want to learn, can.
|
| What probably needs to change is the understanding of what
| college is for. It's not to give you an education, it is to
| give you the opportunity for you to take an education for
| yourself.
|
| [1] for some definition of best. Not all schools are
| created equal, nor all subjects, scale is in play here as
| well.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I somewhat agree about it being a chance for students to
| take education for them, but there is also the issue of
| an institution offering a limited view on a subject like
| computer science. For example some time ago I estimate
| that mainstream OOP was taught everywhere, while there
| was almost no place teaching FP (This is changing slowly
| now). Even if you took every opportunity you had, you
| might not have even a teacher or lecturer, who is
| familiar with it. You could only learn on your own, which
| you would not need that institution for. Teaching quality
| is not the same in all places. Teachers and lecturers are
| not the same everywhere.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Indeed not all schools, and not all subjects, are created
| equally. And your education is not limited to the
| specific subjects, or competencies of the school you
| happen to be at.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| In the case of testing, it very much can scale. Tests need to
| be based on long form questions that test comprehensive
| knowledge. Open book, Open notes, and hell even open-
| collaboration up to some limit.
|
| If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the
| field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder
| to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer
| questions.
|
| This obviously doesn't translate for multiple choice tests
| where there is no partial credit but at least in engineering
| those don't really exist outside of first year and maybe one
| or two second year classes. And honestly, every intuition
| tells me that those classes that I remembered doing no-
| partial-credit multiple choice should not be doing so in the
| first place.
|
| Maths classes like algebra, precalc, calculus, statistics,
| and linear algebra should by no means be using no-partial-
| credit exams. That defeats the entire purpose of the classes
| as those classes are to teach techniques rather than any
| particular raw knowledge.
|
| Same for the introductory hard sciences like chemistry and
| physics.
|
| And for the ability to handle those more "bespoke" exams, we
| really need to be asking the question of why certain students
| are taking certain classes. Many programs have you take a
| class knowing that only maybe 30% of that will be relevant to
| your degree.
|
| Instead of funneling all the students through a standard
| "maths education" class, maybe courses would be better suited
| by offering an "X degree's maths 1-3" or even simply breaking
| up maths classes into smaller semesters where you are
| scheduled to go to teacher X for this specific field up to
| week A, then teacher Y for this other unrelated maths field
| up to week B, and teacher Z until the end of the semester.
| In-major classes need not do this but general pre-req classes
| could benefit by being shorted and split up through the
| semester into succinct fields of knowledge so that maths or
| physics departments aren't being unnecessarily burdened by
| students who will never once apply the knowledge possibly
| learned in that class.
|
| -------------
|
| The solution to testing students in a way that they can't
| cheat is to simply design tests that require students to
| apply their knowledge as if in the real world. No artificial
| handicaps and at most checks should be made for obviously
| plagiarized solutions. If that's not a viable testing
| mechanism, it's probably worth asking why and considering
| reworking the course or program.
|
| The solution to students not wanting to absorb knowledge is
| to stop forcing students to learn topics & techniques they'll
| never use because maybe some X<25% of them will. Instead
| split up courses into smaller chunks that can be picked and
| chosen when building degree tracks.
|
| ---------------
|
| Edit: I forgot to include it but this is largely based on my
| experiences not necessarily just on my own as a student but
| as a tutor for countless peers and juniors during my time at
| university, and as a student academics officer directly
| responsible for monitoring and supporting the academic
| success of ~300 students for an organisation I was part of.
| This largely mirrors discussions I've had with teaching staff
| and it always seems to boil down to "the administration isn't
| willing to support this" or some other reason based on
| misplaced incentives at an administrative and operational
| level (such as researchers being forced to teach courses and
| refusing to do anything above or often even just at the bare
| minimum for the courses they are teaching).
| almenon wrote:
| Can you expand on why splitting up the class would help? I
| didn't quite get that part.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Tests are a complete waste of time. Nothing in the world of
| work truly resembles what a test is so why bother testing
| for it.
|
| Students should be graded on projects and ability to do
| real things not memorization of a pre-determined set of
| facts.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Unit testing is also frequently very artificial and
| disconnected from production use of a codebase.
| Nevertheless, there is a great deal of value in checking
| whether things you wrote actually do have the effects you
| intended.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Tests need to be based on long form questions that test
| comprehensive knowledge. Open book, Open notes, and hell
| even open-collaboration up to some limit.
|
| Coursework is already along these lines, no?
|
| > The solution to testing students in a way that they can't
| cheat is to simply design tests that require students to
| apply their knowledge as if in the real world.
|
| How would this apply to a course in real analysis, say?
|
| University education generally isn't intended to be
| vocational.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > Coursework is already along these lines, no?
|
| It is but exams are not and if the intent of exams is to
| test knowledge, they should be in a format that is
| applicable to the real world and one that can't easily be
| cheated. Also for what it is worth, for essentially all
| of the courses I took in university, unless they were
| explicitly projects based classes, exams were the
| overwhelming majority of the grades in the course (often
| ~75-90%).
|
| What this meant in practice was that exams that were
| closed-book, closed-notes often had averages in the 30s
| or 40s where everyone got curved upwards at the end of
| the day while open-book exams had averages in the 60s-80s
| and students who could apply their knowledge passed the
| exam while students who couldn't didn't. I can't recall a
| single course with the latter style of exams where I
| passed without knowing the material or failed while
| knowing it. For the prior however I personally
| experienced both and witnessed numerous other students go
| through this at the same.
|
| > How would this apply to a course in real analysis, say?
|
| Sorry if I wasn't clear but when I said "as if in the
| real world" I was referring specifically to students
| having access to the same resources they would have in
| the real world (aka reasonably flexible time constraints
| and with access to texts, resources, and tools) not
| necessarily that the questions needed to be structured as
| "in your field you'd use this like this" kind of
| questions.
| golergka wrote:
| > HOW do you measure knowledge?
|
| This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal
| of the measurement is. There are two main options.
|
| 1. Measurement as part of education process -- for the sake of
| both teacher and the student.
|
| 2. Measurement as part of external qualifications -- for the
| people who would later use the credentials achieved in
| measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job
| offers.
|
| Most of the problems with different measurement strategies
| happens because people conflate the two.
| mordae wrote:
| > do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system
| should be fixed, and that it's not broken for fun but because
| there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
|
| Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives.
| This could and should resolve nicely.
|
| 1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence
|
| To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You
| may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might
| get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may
| have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge
| acquisition.
|
| Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or
| fail.
|
| If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay
| for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials
| again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed
| and disoriented. Then you succeed.
|
| Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too
| bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years!
| This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating
| their way through!
|
| Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification.
| Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No
| problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics
| some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool,
| give them the title!
|
| Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years
| and then come back to earn some more certifications and even
| the title when they actually need and want to learn those
| skills.
|
| Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe
| people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many
| doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible
| to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a
| part of the adult culture.
|
| Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to
| earn their place in the world.
| bumby wrote:
| I've thought engineering licensure found a reasonable
| balance.
|
| Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their
| discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming
| somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging
| from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to
| having a college engineering degree.
| tnecio wrote:
| So true. And another benefit would be that domain experts
| giving a course could focus on teaching and sharing their
| knowledge instead of being forced to deal with all the
| organisational fluff around final grading and "catching
| cheaters" that is a giant waste of their time. (I see only
| usefulness in grading as a feedback mechanism for students -
| but not as "certification" of student's knowledge for the
| outside world. I also believe it would be more healthy for
| both students and teachers if you the grades were just a
| guidance tool, not something that will affect your future
| prospects at life).
|
| At the end of the day the final grades from school / college
| grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to
| noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more
| important than the actual learning and so much time and
| stress is spent on them.
|
| In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations
| that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers",
| separate from colleges, where you could go and get a
| certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private
| companies that want to hire the best people actually have a
| good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as
| possible.
|
| To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the
| college would act as a generative part and "exam center"
| would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty
| well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D
| bnralt wrote:
| This is it. To expand on further on why it's so crazy to
| couple education and credentialing - already know all the
| material in a class? Too bad, you have to pay for it and
| spend time taking it anyway. Is it a class that's completely
| unconnected to your field? Too bad, the university is making
| you take it, so you take it. Is the class taught poorly, so
| that you need to teach yourself outside of it? Too bad, you
| still have to pay for it and put time into it, in addition to
| actually teaching yourself the subject.
|
| The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the
| credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By
| forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay
| a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they
| find little worth in just because it's the only way to get
| the credentials.
| 21723 wrote:
| The other problem with the "we need to fix the system"
| arguments is that they often ignore the much greater problems
| in our society.
|
| Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad
| spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off
| areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social
| conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If
| kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn
| homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer,
| they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of
| "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems
| to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work,
| producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students
| turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.
|
| We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society
| run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates
| cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie
| and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the
| head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't
| justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does
| explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.
|
| People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral
| drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that
| they want to cheat their way through college like some future
| insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with
| minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or
| looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're
| plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual
| work... and this is when they usually get caught.
|
| Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a
| world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the
| preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become
| teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only
| based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic
| games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded"
| to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to
| get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to
| ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks
| over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone
| cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global
| corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most
| of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a
| moral argument to them that cheating is categorically
| unacceptable.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system
| should be fixed, and that it's not broken for fun but because
| there are some very difficult unresolved issues
|
| I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so
| many people to share their opinions on the matter is that
| nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point
| in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so
| much of what was taught but what was written down as the result
| of the teaching.
| scythe wrote:
| >In the case of testing it's because you choose to focus on the
| obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the
| very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you
| measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale
| it?
|
| This sounds like an entirely different question. When you have
| a method for testing, you have at least two different measures
| of effectiveness:
|
| - how well the test measures knowledge when it is taken
| honestly
|
| - how likely is the test to be taken honestly vs. subverted
|
| I thought this thread was about the second question, but you
| seem to be focused on the first. But these problems require
| different kinds of solutions, and crucially, it is much easier
| (but still not easy) to verify success or failure in addressing
| the second question (cheating) than the first (predictivity).
| nabla9 wrote:
| > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common
| conception that when it comes to schools, everyone's opinion
| matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and
| academics.
|
| Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen
| teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2)
| teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning
| that the job is attractive to competent people.
|
| Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype
| papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young
| are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn
| by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but
| slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all
| the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution.
|
| ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of
| the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work
| across widely different cultures.
| trashtester wrote:
| As a Norwegian who lived in Finland for a year, it struck me
| that the parents I met actually CARED what the kids learn in
| school, instead of just treating school as daycare for older
| kids.
|
| This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain
| respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools
| more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I
| think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.
| hooande wrote:
| This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about
| this as I do", and little else.
|
| Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study,
| seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are
| they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the
| other issues associated with measuring learning through
| testing?
|
| If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem,
| what does it tell you about how to fix it?
| hnarn wrote:
| I said no such thing. I never even claimed to be a teacher
| (which I am not).
|
| What I said was that we should listen to people who are
| active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we
| face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I
| said quite the opposite.
|
| I really don't understand why your comment is so
| confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all
| problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only
| suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably
| shouldn't do it by having an open discussion involving only
| programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for
| that matter).
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Is this what you really got from that comment? The implicit
| point is that the better you want to assess knowledge the
| less scalable it is, eg. giving oral/one-to-one interview
| style assessments to university students is not feasible even
| if it is a better knowledge assessment.
|
| Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone
| knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if
| they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like
| poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all
| these and say the system is broken
| wildmanx wrote:
| > This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much
| about this as I do", and little else.
|
| No, it's not. Not at all.
|
| But _your_ comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we
| listen to experts? We _all_ should have a say! ". And that's
| the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like
| that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before
| they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal
| you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any
| different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should
| work..
| slibhb wrote:
| > So what's the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by
| rolling back this common conception that when it comes to
| schools, everyone's opinion matters an equal amount, and then
| listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| Oh please. Teachers advocate for themselves. Academics are
| currently waging a war against standardized testing for
| ideological reasons. Instead of a polemic against people giving
| their opinions please just tell us what you think.
|
| For my money, the problem with education is that we decided
| it's not about knowlege but rather increasing the socioeconomic
| position of participants. From this it follows that everyone
| needs a 4 year degree. Education will only function when it's a
| small number of weirdos who want to be there.
|
| Solve the problem by attacking credentialism, reforming student
| loans, and bolstering alternative post-secondary education
| (trade schools, bootcamps).
| todd8 wrote:
| > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common
| conception that when it comes to schools, everyone's opinion
| matters an equal amount
|
| I have some thoughts about the education system, and despite
| not being a teacher or academic I like to believe that my
| opinions have some value because I'm an expert programmer that
| has worked in the field for over 50 years. I attended three
| different major universities and have degrees in Math, EE, and
| CS. I still code almost every day (my Emacs configuration is
| never finished!), and I have in the past taught or been a
| teaching assistant for both undergrad and graduate courses for
| four semesters. Cheating has always been a concern, but now
| things are different.
|
| The original article highlights the scale of exam cheating
| during the pandemic, but for us, the readers of HN, there is
| another problem with university learning that happens because
| of the internet. I've seen this affect virtually all of my
| younger friends pursuing degrees in CS. Programming assignments
| in school are unrealistically difficult, and it causes everyone
| to cheat.
|
| Here's a typical real-life example: after covering doubly
| linked lists in the undergrad data-structure's class the
| programming assignment is to write a GUI based text editor in
| Java using doubly linked lists. This isn't especially hard for
| a professional programmer, but this is the first programming
| assignment of the course. Students had to wrestle with Eclipse,
| learning the AWT/Swing interfaces, event loop programming, and
| how to translate low level pointer based data structures into
| non-idiomatic Java based imitations of linked lists that kind
| of simulated using pointers. Most of the students really
| couldn't do this on their own, but they didn't have to because
| they can find the solutions to this very problem right on the
| internet.
|
| Why would professors give such a program to beginning
| programmers to write? Because every student turns in a
| solution, and this causes the professors to lose touch with how
| difficult their assignments are. Over and over again difficult
| assignments are given, but the students are seemingly keeping
| up. The bomb lab assignment is a great assignment for CS
| students[1], but I've seen it given out with far too few
| attempts allowed to solve it. Again professors feel like a
| small number of attempts is all the students should need, they
| keep turning in the answers. The reason they can is that the
| complete solution is available on dozens of public Github repos
| and web sites.
|
| The consequence of such hard and challenging programming
| assignments is a kind of inflation of the difficulty. The high
| difficulty causes students to cheat more, since their fellow
| students are cheating by downloading, cutting and pasting, or
| simply sharing their programs. There are commercial web-sites
| like chegg.com that sell the solutions to virtually every
| homework problem found in CS textbooks. Why should an undergrad
| spend so much time working on their own homework solutions
| while other students work openly in big teams at table in the
| university library?
|
| This kind of cheating is pervasive at the undergrad level. How
| do we prevent our students to being pushed into cheating to
| keep up? Graduate school is different, the classes are smaller
| and more interactive. In my grad school classes I've often had
| to go to the board to demonstrate my code or proof to the
| class. Professor Dijkstra used to give individual oral exams to
| his students. So small interactive classes would help.
|
| I've also seen assembly language programming classes given that
| require all work to be done on lab computers. The lab computers
| weren't on the internet and students had to sign in with the
| lab proctor to use the machines for their assignments. This at
| least helped some with the problem.
|
| If I was teaching a programming class now, I would require
| everyone to maintain a git repo that could be checked for
| realistic commits of the programs as they are written. This
| might discourage the simple copying of a solution from GitHub
| the day before the assignment was due.
|
| [1] The text for the bomb-lab assignment (highly recommended by
| the way): Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3rd
| edition,Bryant and O'Hallaron, Prentice-Hall, 2016 (ISBN:
| 0-13-409266- X), a google search will return many bomb-lab
| assignments and solutions from colleges all over the world.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _and then listen to the teachers and academics_
|
| Should we also always listen to the car mechanics, used car
| salesmen, and cops because after all they are the experts?
| radu_floricica wrote:
| > So what's the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by
| rolling back this common conception that when it comes to
| schools, everyone's opinion matters an equal amount, and then
| listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human
| beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just
| that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits.
|
| If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely
| we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening
| to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or
| (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.
| chrsig wrote:
| > So what's the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by
| rolling back this common conception that when it comes to
| schools, everyone's opinion matters an equal amount, and then
| listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| Cynically, because they're part of the problem.
|
| Personally I don't think the "obviously bad thing" is the
| current state of testing. I'd instead say that the problem is
| the intermingling of education and credentials.
|
| Society doesn't care about education, however all of the
| inspiration is geared around it. So you wind up with the case
| that students either become disillusioned with the system after
| realizing it's ripe with hypocrisy, or otherwise structured in
| a way that creates resentment in the system.
|
| As an anecdote, a friend I went to high school with dropped out
| when he was disallowed to participate in the school band,
| because it was his only source of motivation to show up every
| day. I don't think that was the intended goal, but when faced
| with the reality of the situation, the system is unbending.
|
| I think as a result, the ones you see succeeding in college
| tend to be more driven by either ambition or obligation rather
| than any actual desire to learn. So in that respect, I think
| colleges are self selecting for students that are more willing
| to think cheating is a good idea. And in many respects _they
| may not be wrong_.
|
| > Curious, isn't it, how all these systems seem to fail in the
| same way?
|
| No...the systems haven't evolved independently. It's no more
| surprising to me than learning that felines could get covid.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm a community college dropout. The
| education and mental health systems were absolutely structured
| in a way where my severe adhd (and its best friends anxiety and
| depression) went undiagnosed and untreated through my senior
| year of high school. I loved learning, but there wasn't any way
| to get an education that could present the coursework in a way
| that could keep me engaged. And of course my inability to do
| homework was continually met with being told it was some
| personal failure on my part and I should just apply myself.
|
| So back to
|
| > So what's the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by
| rolling back this common conception that when it comes to
| schools, everyone's opinion matters an equal amount, and then
| listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| _They're the ones that've made me think we'd be better of
| scrapping the system and starting over._
| learner1234 wrote:
| why do we need to "measure knowledge"? school should be to
| teach knowlege. Measuring is not our problem. It is the problem
| of the employers. Test the teachers not the students. We only
| need to make sure the teachers are of good quality, not the
| students.
| [deleted]
| fallingknife wrote:
| Our brilliant courts have made it illegal to give aptitude
| tests to prospective employees, so they fall back to college
| degrees as gate keepers.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Assume for a second that your goal is to teach knowledge, as
| you say.
|
| How are you telling whether you are successful at that? Even
| if you do not care about the personal individual achievement
| level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be
| able to measure to understand where you are successfully
| teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc
| teaching.
|
| As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these
| problems away, and they are not easy things.
|
| The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems. They
| can't be "solved" through simplistic answers
| hnarn wrote:
| > why do we need to "measure knowledge"?
|
| Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege
| and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are
| not put into positions where they can do harm.
| imtringued wrote:
| You mean measured knowledge acquired through a every
| specific way is currency. Someone who acquired the same
| knowledge on his own will be cast aside until he gets his
| certificate.
| hnarn wrote:
| That's because the certificate _is_ the value, not the
| knowledge itself. The knowledge is assumed. Without a
| certificate, the onus of verifying the required knowledge
| is now on the consumer or employer, and unsurprisingly
| neither of them want that, so of course knowledge
| combined with a respected certificate is worth more than
| just the knowledge itself.
| hhmc wrote:
| Would you let an uncredentialled surgeon operate on you?
| bezier-curve wrote:
| That's not possible because of regulation. For
| occupations that don't relate to other people's life or
| death situations, or security in general, it's reasonable
| to assume if someone has a skill, they should be able to
| use it professionally regardless of how they achieved it.
| hnarn wrote:
| > if someone has a skill, they should be able to use it
| professionally
|
| Sure, but why would you hire an unlicensed electrician,
| or surgeon, or car mechanic, or builder, or elevator
| mechanic, or really anything that matters?
|
| The only areas where this point becomes moot are in areas
| where certifications already are not an issue, i.e. in
| jobs that almost anyone can do.
| workingon wrote:
| Because they are cheaper? I've hired unlicensed people to
| fell trees in my yard that weren't really going to fall
| on the house etc.
|
| Also, I'm fairly certain car mechanics are not licensed
| where I live. Sometimes licenses are just frivolous,
| especially in modern day society.
| ben_w wrote:
| I wonder if those unlicensed people had liability
| insurance, and, if so, if the insurance companies charged
| more due to their lack of license?
| logicchains wrote:
| >Sure, but why would you hire an unlicensed electrician,
| or surgeon, or car mechanic, or builder, or elevator
| mechanic, or really anything that matters?
|
| You don't need a licensing system, you just need a
| reputation system. Like how bonds have a rating system;
| nobody's stopping you buying a junk bond, but the system
| makes it clear to you that it's a got a high probability
| of default.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Ok you can be the first person to receive open heart
| surgery from an uncredentialed surgeon.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| if it was a matter of life and death, of course yes.
|
| If it is not a matter of life and death, there's no
| possibility it will happen, because of regulations.
|
| Anyway:
|
| _More than 250,000 people in the US die every year
| because of medical mistakes, making it the third-leading
| cause of death_
|
| _10 percent of all U.S. deaths are now due to medical
| errors_
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Because knowledge is currency
|
| can I sell it?
|
| Can I buy grocery with knowledge?
|
| Knowledge is a tool!
|
| And it's not even universally true, if you know American
| English it is perfectly useless in rural China or Japan or
| Central Africa.
|
| EDIT: I'll add another example that won't upset the
| American audience.
|
| Numbers in French.
|
| We are used to the decimal system, it won't work in France,
| they count numbers using the vigesimal system.
|
| So 84, 80 + 4 is quatre-vingt-quatre, 4 x 20 + 4.
|
| My way of counting numbers, which is a basic requirements
| for kids aged 5, is completely useless in France, even
| though France is a close Neighbour of my country and we
| dealt with each other since the dawn of history.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| How do we know if schools are working? If you test a teacher
| instead of a student, the problem still exists, how are you
| going to test a teacher?
| snarf21 wrote:
| Classic "tell me you have never been a teacher without
| telling me you have never been a teacher". Are there bad
| teachers? Of course. There are bad employees in all
| industries. But teaching is an _extremely_ difficult job that
| underpays so most people are in the profession because they
| want to help kids.
|
| Some things to understand about teaching. You must always
| teach at the _middle_ kid in terms of ability and
| intelligence. By default this already means that some kids
| will be lost and some kids will be bored. This is made worse
| by conflating age with competence. Additionally, teachers
| have no understanding of what the kids are going through at
| home. Say you have a kid that never does homework? Is that
| the teacher 's fault? Is it because the kid is lazy and just
| plays fortnight at home? Or is it because the parent's only
| job is night shift and the kids is a de facto parent watching
| two other kids? Or is it because the parent has a substance
| abuse problem and the kid hides out at playgrounds until late
| at night after everyone is passed out and it is safe to come
| "home"? Statistically, kids with problems at home also tend
| to be lower on competence scales. The real problem here is
| social help for the _parents_ but we don 't have the
| political will for this. Do you have any idea how often a
| teacher has had a student's parent come to a conference to
| discuss concerns about the kid falling behind just to be told
| that "It is _YOUR_ job to teach my kid, not mine! " Tell me
| how testing teachers fixes that? And these are the same
| teachers that must buy paper/pens/supplies with the other
| salary because we ration school supplies.
|
| We have some similar problems at the collegiate level. I
| worked full time while carrying 12+ credits paying my own way
| through college. I had to cut corners and ration my time.
| This meant lower grades for some classes but luckily I have
| the aptitude to get away with it. We also are sending kids to
| college that shouldn't be there. They don't have a real
| desire for a professional career outside of something like
| Social Media Manager. Of course they are going to cheat and
| use all the tools they have at their disposal having grown up
| digital. They aren't interested in the subject matter they
| just want to check the boxes and get through it. There is an
| issue here that needs solved at the institution level that
| kids will always be better at tech than the teachers but that
| is silly to lay at the feet of the teachers. In the end they
| are trying to lay a foundation of knowledge but the students
| have to care. Most college classes don't take attendance, is
| that the teacher's fault too?
|
| Having the best software engineers doesn't mean anyone will
| use the product. Having the best doctors doesn't mean
| patients will do what they are told. Having the best trainers
| doesn't mean people will workout on their own. Having the
| best therapists doesn't mean anyone will use the techniques
| suggested in their daily lives.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| The AP classes in American high school, which include a test
| which can provide college credits if passed were great in my
| opinion. Mostly because I felt the tests were really good. I
| took 11 of these tests and I learned a ton that has been
| relevant and stuck with me ever since. In particular
| statistics, comp sci, and Spanish seemed really good.
|
| Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded
| conversations and giving responses.
|
| Comp sci I didn't take the class, just self studied for the
| test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to
| object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a
| little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn't
| really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years
| later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented
| concepts still seem familiar.
|
| I think the two things that made these exams good is they were
| very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and
| they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good
| grades, so they were pretty hard and didn't advertise exactly
| what would be tested.
|
| Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So
| much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy
| content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the
| concepts mastered.
|
| Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally
| accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams.
| Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private
| school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public
| school experience.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > In the case of testing it's because you choose to focus on
| the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than
| the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you
| measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale
| it?
|
| I would actually focus on the question of "Why do I need to
| quantify everybody's knowledge at a high resolution?"
|
| When I was TAing, I held the position - never accepted I should
| say - that we should make more courses pass/fail; and instead
| of investing effort in the numeric grading keys, try to give
| more meaningful feedback on assignments.
|
| Some alternative suggestions I brought up:
|
| * I suggested that the final grade be a combination of the
| assessment a roll of 1D6 points - to hammer it in that the
| grading is to a great extent artificial. Somehow this was even
| less popular of a suggestion...
|
| * I once proposed we offer people a perfect passing grade if
| they just never show up to class nor submit anything, and only
| people who want to learn would risk an imperfect grade. I
| really liked that proposal, because it put the two motivations
| - learning and making the grade - which are often conflated, at
| direct odds with each other.
|
| Of course none of this was taken seriously - even though I was
| serious. Kind of.
| bnralt wrote:
| > ...input from people who have never worked in the field is of
| pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will
| not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
|
| If people within the education system are getting upset that
| the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and
| who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the
| education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say
| that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the
| system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at
| customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of
| attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system
| was opened up and students were actually given some choice
| (say, by separating education and credentialing).
| rscho wrote:
| Listening to teachers, yes please! Listening to pedagogy
| academics, no thanks!
| swasheck wrote:
| i like this thread and wish to tug at it a bit.
|
| i'm not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my
| opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it's an
| imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types
| we're going to meet and interact with for the rest of our
| lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring
| the "goal", be it content domain knowledge, or project
| completion kpi, or something else.
|
| the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off
| the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and
| motivation to find creative ways to impart information and
| knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to
| navigate complex, broken systems.
|
| teachers who come up with novel educational methods are
| generally heralded for their innovations, but there's not much
| else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not
| to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions
| of their personalities and not an actual template for how every
| teacher should teach.
|
| the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for
| navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream
| of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have
| they learned? i'd say they have learned a fair amount. some
| will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have
| learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but
| pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some
| will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore,
| exploit, or fill. they've also learned.
|
| these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the
| top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should
| seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we
| treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff,
| materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage
| the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental
| health, SES, etc.)
| midhhhthrow wrote:
| Why do we need to measure it in the first place?
| cbsmith wrote:
| > These are very hard questions, and it's frustrating to read
| the phrase "we need to fix the system" because yes, obviously
| we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn't the hard part,
| and probably input from people who have never worked in the
| field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard
| part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
|
| It's kind of hard to believe this needs to be said, because it
| is so obviously correct.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common
| conception that when it comes to schools, everyone's opinion
| matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and
| academics.
|
| No, we should listen to the people when deciding what the
| purpose of school should be, THEN refer to the experts on those
| purposes. Is it teaching random factoids? Making people
| "cultured"? Separating out people who follow instructions and
| learn well from those who don't? Introducing habits useful in a
| workplace? Good habits of thought? Teaching the knowledge
| required to vote sensibly? To provide some foundational
| knowledge for later vocational training? To navigate and
| function in the modern world? Is it just day care for kids?
|
| First decide on the purpose(s) (and their weightings if many)
| and only then can we have a plan. I think there hasn't been
| anywhere near enough thought given by most people about what
| the purpose(s) of schooling is(are).
| j45 wrote:
| A minor critique and support for what you are saying.
|
| The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely
| digitally literate (they can't use technology in any competent,
| engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their
| students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most
| institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005.
|
| Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and
| know what they don't know. Academic leadership often doesn't
| have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted
| modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came
| back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in
| 2 weeks.
|
| Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation.
|
| Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly
| often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how
| children learn, it has less relevance in higher education,
| which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how
| adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is
| used.
|
| It's pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy
| is used every 3 words when... How adults learn (andragogy)
| including young adults is quite different than children.
|
| When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it's
| tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might
| not really know the difference.
|
| If experts really wanted to get into digital learning
| taxonomies based on old ones that don't seem to bridge the
| divide, maybe that would be a start.
|
| Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital
| learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students
| ( how many different things do students have to log into),
| perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically
| most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are
| pretty complex but can take your money smoothly.
|
| I think part of this is because too many academics are poor
| listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions
| that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all
| of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often
| buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries.
|
| In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too
| slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in
| society.
|
| Another observation is that most universities only teach how to
| teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it's why the word
| pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities
| have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do
| for K-12?
|
| In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs
| is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created
| by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more
| ways to engage with the material. It's a big problem.
|
| Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It's
| decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at
| the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire
| and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting
| into those roles and help change.
|
| You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both
| ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that's what
| politicians want.
|
| Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to
| happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk
| of education. There's a need for our leaders, experts and
| institutions to recognize and do something about this, but
| bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at
| all costs.
|
| One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions,
| or put the same effort into building new institutions for the
| future.
|
| Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats.
| Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so
| curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks.
|
| It's interesting to see how much more society has opened up to
| taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any
| topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if
| they can't create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3
| years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a
| course.
|
| If it's relevant, I've built platforms to deliver online K-12,
| post-secondary education and industry training certification
| for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world
| sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering
| education like it's designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs.
|
| Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to
| build the skills and competencies they need in people because
| education isn't turning out people that are needed. The
| advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn't
| be discounted.
|
| Edit: Grammar, clarifications.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance
| in higher education, which is more about learning how to
| learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to
| see how often that word is used.
|
| It's always amusing to see lectures on correct usage from
| people who don't know the difference between _etymology_ and
| _meaning_. (And also who don 't know the etymology, either,
| since etymologically, pedagogy isn't "how children learn" but
| more like "the act of leading children".)
|
| In English, especially American English, "Andragogy" is
| mostly used in relation to a particular theory/approach to
| adult education originating with Martin Knowles, who
| leveraged the same conflation of etymology and meaning--even
| when it originated, pedagogy was well established with its
| modern and more general meaning despite the narrower sense of
| its Greek roots--to promote it; education for different
| audiences by age or other circumstance is not generally
| distinguished by different greek-root terms in English, but
| by English terms ["early childhood education", "adult
| education", "continuing professional education", etc.)
| Peritract wrote:
| > Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly
| often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about
| how children learn, it has less relevance in higher
| education, which is more about learning how to learn.
| Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how
| often that word is used.
|
| The original root of "pedagogy" relates to children, but I
| still have a lot more time for someone who uses that
| industry-standard term than I do for anyone preaching
| 'andragogy'. It's a niche, culturally-bound and assumption-
| based theory with little research to actually support any of
| its claims.
|
| Despite the grandiose name, 'andragogy' is just another
| 'learning styles' or 'growth mindset' - it's pop psychology
| designed to sell training courses.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| It is perhaps unreasonable for the purveyor of a critical
| service to demand that they be the only one who is allowed to
| understand or validate the quality of the service on offer, and
| to insist that the customer is too naive to be permitted a
| viewpoint.
| overgard wrote:
| Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so
| I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is
| helpful.
|
| I think there are a few constructive things that can be done.
| One is allowing curious students to design their own academic
| career (with guidance and supervision). I think students
| usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant
| to their future lives. Sure people need to be exposed to new
| things, but a semester on something you know you will never
| care about is torture. I have a computer science degree, but I
| remember being forced to take geology. To this day I can't
| think of a bigger waste of time, I remember nothing from it,
| and even if I did I would never use it.
|
| Vocational schools and apprenticeship should also really come
| back. I know parents want their kids to be part of the affluent
| elite, but in a good society being a car mechanic should be a
| good life. There's no point saddling people with student debt
| if their degree gets them a job at starbucks.
|
| I also think that things like essays are a lot better than
| quizzes. Sans plagiarism, it's hard to fake knowledge if you
| have to write it out.
| xpe wrote:
| > Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers,
| so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion
| is helpful.
|
| Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these _truly_
| likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not.
| Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills
| to comprehend and advocate for better solutions.
|
| Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government over
| others. However, I'm under no illusion that democracy's
| broad, sweeping claims about what government are "best" are
| really defensible when applied to the general problem of
| collective problem solving under real-world constraints.
|
| Having one person, one vote seems intuitive and valuable for
| certain decisions. In particular, it seems useful and
| practical for selecting certain representatives. But I (and
| many others) don't think it is a great way of making policy
| decisions in general. Just as one example: committees of
| experts can make sense in some contexts.
|
| But in general, we can do better than what most of us have
| seen so far. We have to do better than that. Look at how well
| government(s) at all levels are serving their constituents. I
| think it is self-evident that all can stand tremendous
| improvement.
|
| So, for any particular context, think about how to design
| mechanisms that are likely to work well. In so doing, one
| _must_ account for many factors, including: human biases,
| cognitive limitations, cultural differences, imperfect
| communication, economic costs, time constraints, factions,
| self-interest, lack of experience, and so on.
|
| Keeping these in mind, how _exactly_ would you select,
| organize, and structure an ongoing set of interactions
| between, say 1,000 people such that one can maximize the
| quality of their resulting collective recommendations?
|
| One option is to choose 1,000 people at random and weight
| their opinions evenly. But this is underspecified. How do you
| compress those recommendations into a form that others are
| likely to read? How do you discover collective preferences?
| There are dozens of key questions even if you generally
| adhere to the idea of "equally weighting each person's
| opinion".
|
| But there are manifold other options where each individual's
| starting opinion is _not_ the driving factor.
|
| I encourage _everyone_ here to study political economy,
| history, philosophy, and anthropology. Disregard your
| preconceived framings of how people make decisions. Look at
| how others have done it. Look at what theorists suggest might
| be alternatives. It is an amazing journey. I 've been
| thinking about it for almost twenty years, and it is just as
| fascinating, if not more, as when I first got exposed to
| these ideas in policy school.
| overgard wrote:
| Well, in the private world its customer feedback. Sure you
| dont use their ideas neccessarily, but if, as in this case,
| 75% of your customers find your product bad then expecting
| people already part of the system to make radical changes
| sounds foolish. Theyll just list why it cant change. I
| admire this teachers cleverness getting his students to
| pass, but the reality is that it was so big a problem that
| the system can only be vastly broken and I dont expect
| people too involved to fix it
| strawhatguy wrote:
| That last paragraph shows the real issue: that schooling is
| government controlled and provided.
|
| The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and
| other school employees) the students (and their parents) of
| that school.
|
| The fact the it might take '5 election cycles' to see a reform
| through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating
| for the teachers as well.
|
| If government does it, that literally opens the door for
| everyone else to be involved, muddying otherwise clear waters.
| oblio wrote:
| How do you offer free universal education without government
| control?
| brutusborn wrote:
| Government vouchers for every child that can be used at any
| education institution whose curriculum includes the
| government mandated curriculum.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| But then people with resources to do so will shop for the
| best schools meeting this criteria, which hurts people
| who don't shop.
| oblio wrote:
| 1. How does the "government mandated curriculum" get
| enforced?
|
| 2. What are the barriers to entry and the fungibility of
| the educational market? If the educational market isn't
| truly a free market, then what's the point? More private
| monopolies and oligopolies without proper oversight?
| strawhatguy wrote:
| There's vouchers, as mentioned.
|
| And why is it necessary for education to be 'free' or
| universal for that matter?
|
| People are different, doesn't mean we all need to learn the
| same exact things in the same exact way to be productive
| members of society. Not that such a goal is ever
| realistically achievable.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I can't see how this addresses the main problem mentioned in
| the article. My take is that if a student cheats, they should
| be expelled from university. If you're very lenient, introduce
| three strikes. The first two strikes will nullify your course
| as if it hadn't been taken, the third will get you expelled
| from university. I personally think that would be too lenient,
| though, and believe that nobody who cheats in any way should
| have a place in academia. This question has nothing to do with
| the quality of teaching or problems with tests, etc. It's a
| matter of intellectual integrity.
|
| When I first heard that students often cheat in higher
| education not too long ago, I was shocked. When I studied
| during the 90s at two good German universities, I had not ever
| heard of anyone who cheated in any course. A cheating student
| would have been a huge scandal. To be fair, I studied
| philosophy and general linguistics. I guess people in more
| practical disciplines cheated even then, e.g. economics -- more
| specifically, "BWL" in Germany -- always had a bad reputation.
| However, even in these disciplines cheating was rare. Its
| incomprehensible to me why lecturers and universities nowadays
| appear to be so lenient about it.
| Deritiod wrote:
| I assumed you would say that the programmers should start
| working for the school system but your final description.of
| problems is not difficult to solve.
|
| The teachers are the problem.
|
| After all I was also sitting in school for 13 years
| nicolas_t wrote:
| > HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do
| you scale it?
|
| I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in
| France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions,
| only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot
| of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.
|
| The problems were long, had few questions besides describing
| the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student
| along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to
| solve those problems.
|
| Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those
| tests having often learned something new.
|
| I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple
| choice questions, they were closed books with questions around
| rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the
| US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they
| didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject
| matter and more with learning facts that are more or less
| tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in
| a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when
| Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and
| other completely useless knowledge.
|
| What's interesting to me is that there's much less
| opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later
| tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a
| symptom of bad tests.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Yeah I came from uk undergrad to us grad school and was
| shocked to see that even some advanced undergrad classes,
| with grad students in them, were tested by infantile multiple
| choice questions (this was at harvard). It almost makes one
| wonder whether the us dominates academia to the extent it
| does because of the foreign influx.
| pgCKIN wrote:
| Totally agree. I might a bit partial to that, because I tend
| to underperform multiple choice tests for overthinking, but
| I've really the impression that open ended questions test
| knoledge much better and make it more difficult to cheat.
| Beside that, having almost nothing to do with cheating,
| another good thing in the French system is the continuous
| grading: labs were graded, projects were graded, small
| intermediate tests were graded, so you really do not study
| for just the exam (actually often you do not study at all for
| the exam). (beware: my experience is limited to a single
| grande ecole I attended).
| codefreeordie wrote:
| Why is it a foregone assumption that the important attribute
| of education is "measuring knowledge"?
| oblio wrote:
| Because we have a limited number of everything and we have
| to compare people.
| qsort wrote:
| I don't know if it's popular in France, but another very
| simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams.
| They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted
| a binary tree on a whiteboard :)
| baud147258 wrote:
| I was a student in France and during the two years of high
| schools I had a bunch of blackboard exams and yeah, you
| kinda have to learn the material. Of course it also helps
| to be confortable in such situations, but we had enough of
| them to get trained in that
| tharkun__ wrote:
| You had enough of them to get trained in that. And it
| might have taken you just few enough to get comfortable
| for it not to affect your grades in such a way that you
| dropped out. I had a friend in university that would just
| completely fall apart in any kind of such situation, even
| when it wasn't for an exam and even when it was a group
| presentation setting and it wasn't just him up there.
| Written exams were completely fine though. Did he not
| deserve to get a CS degree and just work in some company
| where he doesn't have to become a team lead or architect
| where he'd need to speak and present and instead steadily
| and happily work in his corner, talk to his immediate
| peers and crank out solutions?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that
| presenting to other humans is (a) a skill that most
| people _can_ learn (to at least "acceptable" levels of
| proficiency) & (b) a skill that most people _should_
| learn, because it 's a huge part of working in the field.
|
| I understand it's incredibly uncomfortable.
|
| I'm a pretty serious introvert and got the shakes and
| sweat dripping off my hands the first few times I did it.
| But with exposure and effort to self-improve, it's
| doable. I didn't _like_ it, but I 'm incredibly thankful
| I was forced to work on it.
| toyg wrote:
| Ah yes, the good old fallacy: "I could do it, so it's
| doable". It's doable _by you_. That doesn 't mean it's
| doable by someone who is not you, even though they might
| be otherwise deserving.
|
| It's like LeBron James saying "I learned to dunk, so
| anybody can dunk!" - but basketball is not just about
| dunking, and not everyone is LeBron.
| oblio wrote:
| Talking to other people is not dunking a basketball 3m
| into the air.
|
| Frankly, I've been in oral exams, in Romania they're
| (were?) part of a national exam at the end of highscool.
| You just have to practice.
|
| If hundreds of thousands of highschoolers in a rather
| poor country could figure out how to do it (any generally
| not flunk due to the oral part), for sure university
| students can do it.
|
| Anyone not able to do it will not really be able to pass
| any interview, persuade peers that their idea is good,
| etc.
| baud147258 wrote:
| I think the way those examinations were set up helped a
| lot in getting confortable (or at least good enough):
| like it was a weekly event, just three students and the
| teacher in one room, each student working on its own
| question(s); the teachers were more or less helpful, but
| most would guide us along, not leaving us stuck at our
| blackboard for the whole duration.
|
| But if one, even if those situation really can't do it,
| they'd have to switch to a course/class without any oral
| examination to get their degrees, but I think it's way
| better to learn as a student than as a professional (and
| yes, like the sibling comment, I think most people _can_
| learn to an acceptable degree)
|
| > work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and
| crank out solutions
|
| Do such post really exists?
| seoaeu wrote:
| All students in a class cannot take an oral exam
| simultaneously. This means that either:
|
| * everyone gets the same questions meaning later students
| can cheat by asking earlier students what was on the test,
| or
|
| * everyone gets different questions meaning much more
| effort to design the exam and big risks that some students
| will get easier questions and others will get harder
| questions
| ratww wrote:
| IMO oral exams and open-ended answers are the kinda things
| that _really_ work better for their intended purpose, and
| everyone knows. But people still prefer multiple-choice
| because "they scale". The goal isn't simply measuring
| knowledge, it's doing so in an acceptable/shitty way, with
| (edit) limited resources.
| DougN7 wrote:
| I think you might be who the top response is responding
| to. You seem to have inside knowledge that saving money
| is the top priority without considering any real-world
| resource constraints.
| ratww wrote:
| The top response is the one that brought the constraint
| of "scale" into this discussion, and that's what I'm
| addressing. Maybe you should bring your objections to
| them rather than to me. "Real-world resource constraints"
| is just a euphemism for "wanting to save money" in this
| case. I'll edit it to clarify that I mean the same.
|
| And I'm not passing judgement on the choice made, nor
| saying the constraints aren't there, nor saying anyone
| should do anything different. I'm just pointing out that
| the scalability constraint _will_ affect the test
| possibilities, which will affect the quality of the
| measurement. Feel free to disagree with this all you
| want.
|
| EDIT: Also, I do happen to have some inside knowledge by
| having worked in higher education for about a decade,
| starting in the mid 00s. Coincidentally, most of my work
| was on cost-saving measurements, designing a few
| algorithms that allowed universities to reduce their
| teacher headcount (first at a university, then at a
| software vendor), so yes, the #1 goal there was saving
| money. But I don't think having done this affects my
| answer, nor I do think that I deserve special treatment.
| I'm merely answering to a chain of comments.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Wanting to save money also falls under availability of
| staffing trained to do this. Considerations of if the
| massive increase of expense and diversion of people from
| other economic endeavors is worthwhile.
| ratww wrote:
| Good hunch, but in my experience, availability of trained
| staff was never really an issue in practice. Hiring well
| trained university faculty was always purely an
| economical problem. Universities often already have a
| trained surplus of faculty employees working in a highly
| reduced capacity. Especially in the last 10-15 years
| where distance learning became commonplace, a lot of
| faculty was replaced by low-paid part-time quasi-
| teachers, which would be more than happy to be offered a
| permanent position. To further demonstrate that this is
| an economical problem: those quasi-teachers often have
| different job titles other than "teacher", depending on
| the jurisdiction, in order to evade laws and evade the
| reach of (often very powerful) faculty unions.
| hoosieree wrote:
| Next semester, we plan to start doing "interviews" of
| students in which they explain their own code to us.
|
| It obviously doesn't scale, so we'll use random sampling.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| How do you justify the fact that only some of the
| students get the pleasure of an in-person grilling? Or,
| am I completely misunderstanding the process you're going
| to be using?
| hoosieree wrote:
| In my plan, each student is interviewed at least once.
| Ideally more than once by the same teacher, so the
| teacher can get to know them a little better, spot areas
| where the student needs more help, etc.
|
| There's still a scaling problem, but I think it makes the
| ~200 student classes we have now more feasible than 100%
| autograding. I also like the other commenter's suggestion
| of coming back to interview certain students each time,
| if they need it.
| oblio wrote:
| Is this about pleasure or about measuring knowledge?
|
| A lot of stuff you learn and the way you learn it isn't
| necessarily pleasant, but frequently you still have to do
| it and you really discover 20 years later why it was
| needed.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| No, it's about why only a subset of students get singled
| out for extra scrutiny, literally arbitrarily, as the
| selection procedure itself is defined as "random
| sampling."
| singhrac wrote:
| As a TA we did something similar: we asked them to self
| grade their own homework using a provided rubric, and
| then we spot checked 1/4 of the students (without
| replacement) to punish lying about what grade you
| deserve. We didn't punish for a few disagreements over
| the rubric, but if it was blatant we checked their
| assignments every time in the future (and told them). I
| think if it was bad enough we could have reported them.
|
| This saved a bunch of time on actually grading
| assignments and made us write a very clear and
| unambiguous rubric (which required a very clear homework)
| and also demonstrated to the students that grading was
| not arbitrary.
| dahfizz wrote:
| HN is very much opposed to whiteboard interviews. I can't
| see this being a popular alternative.
| hibbelig wrote:
| After a class on data structures and algorithms, a white
| board interview asking you to invert a binary tree is
| very different from the same interview when you apply for
| a job.
| pgCKIN wrote:
| I might miss the irony in your words but... Job
| interviews and eduction tests have different objectives,
| I hope.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Isn't assessing skill/ knowledge/ aptitude the objective
| of both?
| yuliyp wrote:
| The only thing they have in common is "assessing". An
| exam for a course seeks to assess mastery of the subject
| matter of the course. An interview for a job seeks to
| assess skills / aptitude for a particular job.
| sroussey wrote:
| I had an electrical engineering final as an in person oral
| exam. One question. One hour to solve on whiteboard. It was
| a hard class to begin with and I got a hard question. I did
| well, but definitely expected to fail.
| pgCKIN wrote:
| Oral exams have an entire other bunch of issues. Just
| looking at the professor side, beside time, I imagine it
| would be very difficult for to grade with same meter an
| arrogant student, a dismissive one, a smelly one, an
| eloquent one, or even the first and the last one in the
| same session.
| toyg wrote:
| ... a male student, a female student, an _attractive_
| student ...
|
| And yes, this is actually a well-known problem in Italy -
| with (typically male) professors being routinely accused
| (and occasionally convicted) of favouring attractive (and
| typically female) students.
| kome wrote:
| if you think that a written text is a great equalizer,
| it's not.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| But it is much more than a oral one.
| qsort wrote:
| I don't agree with this. They have different failure
| modes, but I believe that in aggregate an oral exam
| affords the candidate the fairer shot, given the minimal
| assumption that the professor is in good faith.
|
| If I say something imprecisely or if I make a non-
| fundamental mistake, an oral setting gives me the chance
| to correct myself and prove to the examinator that I have
| a strong grasp of the material regardless.
|
| Written exams, especially multiple choice and closed-
| answer quizzes reward people who regurgitate the notes,
| oral exams and written long-form open questions reward
| actual knowledge.
|
| Of course the "better" methods require a greater time
| investment, and I can't really blame professors who
| choose not to employ them. But it's quite clearly a
| tradeoff.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't know. For example, in music examination, the
| outcomes change drastically if you blind the examiner
| from seeing the student or knowing their name. Unless you
| see something different in the world of music, I'd say
| the examination is happening at the same level of "good
| faith"ness.
|
| How would you blind oral examination so that the examiner
| is unable to distinguish the student's
| gender/race/identity?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > If I say something imprecisely or if I make a non-
| fundamental mistake, an oral setting gives me the chance
| to correct myself and prove to the examinator that I have
| a strong grasp of the material regardless
|
| This is just even further proving the point, which is
| that in an oral context this means that the animosity of
| the examiner is much more significant than in a written
| one, which by definition implies that the oral one cannot
| be fairer than the written one.
|
| You yourself are saying that you "have the chance to
| correct yourself". This is either because you will self-
| correct yourself on recognizing a specific (perhaps
| subconscious) face or gesture from the examiner, or
| because the examiner will directly tell you that you are
| wrong. Both cases present ample opportunity for unfair
| discrimination. In the first case, perhaps a person is
| less skilled at reading people, or perhaps the examiner
| just has a better poker face. In the second case, you are
| now at the whim of the examiner to decide based on your
| body language whether "you are making a non-fundamental
| mistake and deserve a second chance" or just "have no
| idea of the material and don't deserve a second chance".
| And, compared to the written exam, there is absolutely no
| record of the context that drew the examiner to such
| conclusion -- which is also kind of important, since
| evidently the written exam is also subject to some
| discrimination.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It's not the examiner deciding "you deserve a second
| chance or not". In a normal oral exam everyone gets a "I
| don't think that's correct" or "please explain that to
| me" kind of response on a wrong answer. They don't
| silently scribble a note to distract a point from your
| score or something like that.
|
| How you deal with that is really where your score comes
| from. Because if you know what you're talking about
| you'll correct it and while doing so show that you know a
| lot of related things. While if you have no idea you
| can't guess yourself out of that type of question.
| qsort wrote:
| This isn't how oral exams work, though.
|
| Nobody expects you to be 100% on point, it's just
| impossible; it's not like the spoken variant of a written
| exam. The kind of "correction" I mean is more along the
| lines of what would happen during a normal conversation.
| Imagine I was asked to write a recursive algorithm and I
| forgot the base case. It's not a fundamental mistake, but
| the professor might interject to make sure I actually
| know about termination, inductive sets, etc., which is
| actually great if you understand the material deeply,
| because it gives you a chance to prove that you actually
| just forgot.
|
| Obviously this is assuming good faith by the examiner,
| but if you aren't willing to assume that, there aren't
| very many examination formats that are going to work very
| well.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Is not a question about good faith or not. He may be
| showing completely unintentional bias. But the point is
| that the oral one gives you a shitton more opportunities
| to play that bias. If you even try to say that the oral
| exam is just "a normal informal conversation" rather than
| something following a very strict protocol you might as
| well just give up any appearance of fairness. How much
| role bias would play on such a conversation is just
| outside the scale.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I studied engineering in Italy and all my exams were both
| written (with exercises, multiple choice didn't exist at
| all) and oral. No way you could cheat or not engage with
| the materials.
| sbohacek wrote:
| I'm currently grading an open book test as you describe. It
| turns out that someone put their attempt at answers on
| chegg.com shortly after I posted the test. The temptation to
| use chegg is too great for students to resist. When chegg has
| the wrong solution (which is often the case), students will
| doubt themselves and will go with the wrong chegg answer.
|
| To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students
| cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its
| copies did not exist.
| ModernMech wrote:
| My solution to this is to use version control and have them
| record an explanation of their work. If they copy from
| chegg they also have to forge a commit history, as well as
| explain the code line by line. I'd like to see them do that
| without learning anything.
| HanClinto wrote:
| What about seeding the system and putting your own (bad)
| answers up there ahead of time?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > HOW do you measure knowledge?
|
| This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
|
| You DON'T measure knowledge.
|
| You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
|
| Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to
| protect is the will of the members of their society to keep
| improving and learning.
|
| > maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception
| that when it comes to schools, everyone's opinion matters an
| equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
|
| pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of
| all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in
| many developed countries in the World, so people have a right
| to say.
|
| Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers
| do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate"
| young people and is is often the case that it means they impose
| or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents
| them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their
| kids.
|
| And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too,
| even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I
| completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
|
| The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not
| to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
|
| Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to
| school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and
| practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus
| drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State
| laws under the State government but also offering a service the
| people paid for to the State.
|
| Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we
| should look at places where the system is proven to work and
| copy it: see Finland.
|
| CONTROVERSIAL
|
| On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most
| important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
|
| If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a
| bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in
| every possible way.
|
| The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
| Glawen wrote:
| >This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
|
| >You DON'T measure knowledge.
|
| >You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
|
| >Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to
| protect is the will of the members of their society to keep
| improving and learning.
|
| What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would
| have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying
| each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip
| parties.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have
| great marks
|
| that's the wrong way to look at it.
|
| As a student you would have been very satisfied to have
| _recognition for your hard work_ (something that rarely
| happens in most school systems I know)
|
| You switched cause and effect.
|
| > while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I
| had to work and skip parties
|
| So you were getting satisfaction from doing it, or you
| would have skipped studying to go to parties.
|
| Which is what I did, I had great marks and went to parties
| to reward myself.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This speaks to the heart of the issue to me.
|
| Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my
| way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school,
| as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as
| they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other
| topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience
| them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I
| dropped out of 7th grade.
|
| Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was
| that time in-between those two that even allowed that to
| happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I
| wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get
| there.
|
| As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't
| even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've
| got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how
| quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring
| for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be
| correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring
| test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What
| I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a
| metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single
| jack of all trades programmer.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out
| of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in
| school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM
| classes, as they were filled with content I already knew.
|
| Thanks for posting this.
|
| This was my experience as well, with the added malus that
| when I went into school, people were still saying things
| like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never
| write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it
| was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely.
|
| Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I
| have a very big family and I am grateful for being
| surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to
| 20.
|
| I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just
| because it was new to them and build up from there, at an
| incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the
| limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very
| short time.
|
| I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop
| that needed no external validation: knowing more about that
| thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing
| it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong
| way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about
| not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new
| mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more.
|
| What you call "acceleration".
|
| I saw most of them struggle in school because they were
| bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at
| least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get
| them, but their motivation started lacking, until they
| arrived to university and chose something that could
| (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents
| happy.
|
| It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's
| also a "great filter" and we should strive to make
| education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm
| not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that)
| and not the other way around.
|
| When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from
| Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back
| there when they had kids. I've visited them on many
| occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was
| astonished.
|
| They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no
| standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks,
| they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply
| thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and
| then helped to follow their paths.
|
| I think that, in general, it makes happier adults.
|
| Which is a good goal by itself.
| MadWombat wrote:
| "You should measure the satisfaction of the students"
|
| OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical
| diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and
| passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you
| only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical
| student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > OK. Then how do you measure competency?
|
| You don't.
|
| You certify it, when it is required.
|
| > Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person
| took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a
| practicing physician.
|
| exactly! because it is required by regulations.
|
| > If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you
| which medical student is ready to treat real patients and
| which isn't?
|
| there is a high chance than an unsatisfied medical student
| is gonna be an equally unsatisfied doctor, even if they
| check all the boxes.
|
| let's be clear: satisfaction is not a measure of how much
| they are having fun.
|
| just like if you go to the gym you're not more satisfied if
| they give you free candies and hot dogs and couches with
| Netflix, but you end up being fatter and less fit than
| before.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You DON'T measure knowledge.
|
| > You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
|
| > Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs
| to protect is the will of the members of their society to
| keep improving and learning.
|
| But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their
| satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were
| getting _isn 't_ desire to keep improving and learning.
|
| Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security
| theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to
| distinguish from actual education.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their
| satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were
| getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
|
| good for them.
|
| In which way this is an obstacle for those who want to?
| srveale wrote:
| > Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics,
| we should look at places where the system is proven to work
| and copy it: see Finland.
|
| I did an education degree, and come from a family of
| educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I
| can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more
| like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in
| that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents
| and high-up administrators.
|
| >Teachers are not doctors
|
| Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job,
| even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the
| education system have opinions that are informed by years of
| experience in the field and decades of research. With
| respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of
| person described by the comment you're replying to: not much
| experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of
| how to fix it.
|
| > schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many
| developed countries in the World, so people have a right to
| say.
|
| My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with
| taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I
| get to tell a doctor how to do their job?
|
| > teachers are there because students are forced to go to
| school, so they serve, they do not lead
|
| Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also,
| what point are you trying to make with this statement? That
| because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion
| is negligible?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even
| if you had spent years as a patient
|
| That's not correlated: doctors ask patient how do they feel
| all the time.
|
| If they don't feel well, they try to adjust the
| prescription and/or the therapy.
|
| Don't like the word satisfaction?
|
| Replace it with "listen to feedback from your customers".
|
| Maybe it's gonna ring a bell.
|
| disclaimer: most of my family members work or have worked
| in health care.
|
| > That because they are necessary by law, their
| professional opinion is negligible?
|
| The point is that they do not run the education system,
| they are employees of the education system
|
| And should act like that.
|
| Meaning that they have proper channels already in place to
| file their complains. Including protected rights like the
| right to go on strike.
|
| If they want to govern it, they better step up their career
| and try with politics or with manager roles.
|
| So that teachers can complain about them, their choices and
| how much of a better job they would do if they were in
| their position.
| srveale wrote:
| > doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time.
|
| And teachers _constantly_ monitor how their students are
| doing - "feedback from their customers" if you want to
| put it that way. Talking with them during or after class
| to see how things are going, assessments on homework,
| projects and tests, parent-teacher interviews, individual
| learning plans, collaborations between teachers... I
| would venture to say "making sure a student is doing
| well" takes up most of the time of the job.
|
| A patient complaining to their doctor about some
| treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do
| their job. Your first comment made a claim about how
| student assessments should be done. This is something at
| the heart of pedagogy and has been studied and
| experimented on. The analogy to health care would be like
| if you declared the ways in which doctors should screen
| for cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever
| think to make such a claim, but many people seem quite
| confident in making similar claims about how the
| education system should work, as you did in your first
| comment.
|
| I'm not even making an argument about whether you are
| right or wrong. There are many ways in which assessments
| can change for the better (educators would be the first
| to agree with you there). But to then go on and say "you
| shouldn't measure knowledge, only student satisfaction"
| without really showing an understanding of how knowledge
| or satisfaction are currently - or potentially could be -
| assessed... are you up to date with recent literature on
| these concepts? Do you have experience performing these
| kinds of assessments?
|
| I'm still not sure what point you are making with your
| second section in this comment so I won't try to respond.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > And teachers _constantly_ monitor how their students
| are doing
|
| They actually don't do it, not constantly, nor as a way
| of improving teaching.
|
| They monitor their output, but rarely listen to what the
| student have to say.
|
| In the end it's not their job, their job is to teach what
| they are told to teach, they rarely go on a limb for
| their students.
|
| Because their salary does not depend on it.
|
| But as personal story I've always had a conflict with my
| Italian teacher in high school, I've always been an A
| student, even after high school, but she hated my temper,
| so I've always been graded C (I believe it means
| sufficient in some parts of the World, for us is 6 in a
| scale from 3 to 10) and when in our latest test I've
| submitted the assignment of her favorite and she
| submitted mine, she was graded 9 and I was graded 6,
| again!
|
| I won't tell you what color her face was when we told her
| the truth.
|
| You are going through all of this, no matter what,
| there's always gonna be some bad teacher and yo can't do
| anything it.
|
| That's why I think student should be asked if they are
| satisfied of their teachings, not of their grades or
| about how much fun they are having, but of the people
| teaching.
|
| > I would venture to say "making sure a student is doing
| well" takes up most of the time of the job.
|
| I'm glad it was like that for you.
|
| It isn't so common in places I know.
|
| In my country they spend 12, 15 maximum, hours - by
| contract - a week in school as high school teachers, that
| is when students need it the most.
|
| Let's start by making them work 30 hours a week, it's one
| of the few jobs left where presence is fundamental, but
| we still keep treating teachers like those poor souls who
| have to grade a bunch of four pages written tests, like
| if computers have not been invented yet. It takes them
| weeks usually.
|
| > A patient complaining to their doctor about some
| treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do
| their job
|
| I think I have not been clear: they are not complaining,
| they are being asked questions and depending on their
| answers the doctor can (should) understand if the
| treatment is working as intended and not causing too many
| contraindications .
|
| So the analogy in education should be smth like "what's
| your favorite Renaissance author, and why?" not "What's
| the date that changed the life of Machiavelli forever?"
| (real question from a real questionnaire)
|
| > The analogy to health care would be like if you
| declared the ways in which doctors should screen for
| cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever think
| to make such a claim, but many people seem quite
| confident in making similar claims about how the
| education system should work, as you did in your first
| comment.
|
| I haven't said anything of the sorts.
|
| I am simply saying that if half of the class is getting
| bad grades in maths you should blame the teacher, not the
| students.
|
| But bad teachers are allowed to teach anyway, because
| they are not responsible for their bad teachings.
|
| At least in my country they can't be fired even if they
| are literally doing nothing.
|
| > without really showing an understanding of how
| knowledge or satisfaction are currently - or potentially
| could be - assessed... are you up to date with recent
| literature on these concepts? Do you have experience
| performing these kinds of assessments?
|
| I have a few ideas.
|
| For example monitor what subjects show the worst grades
| or the highest rates of absence from school the day of a
| test.
|
| These are all basic symptoms of fear and anxiety.
|
| It doesn't take a Nobel prize to understand basic human
| emotions.
|
| Let's try to understand why, the subject could be really
| hard or the students really stupid or it could be the
| teacher. Anyway, being stressed by school it's not
| something that motivate students.
|
| you could simply ask them to grade their teachers
| anonymously a couple of times a year.
|
| Internet forums are full of cry for help from students
| not understanding why they are asked such silly questions
| and what's the point.
|
| We could monitor those forums, for example...
|
| Unsurprisingly when these kinds of discussions come up,
| unions complain and go on strike.
|
| And I am all in favor for unions, I have been union
| delegate in companies I've worked for, but school unions,
| they are a corporations, at least here.
|
| I've talked to some of them, of course what I'll say is
| anecdotal I don't pretend to know everyone of them, but
| when asked why they don't want teachers to be paid better
| instead of a lot of teachers badly paid who don't do
| anything important for __education__, they told me
| blatantly that they prefer two jobs at current wages than
| one job paid double. They can spin it as a victory. They
| also told me that if newer teachers are paid better, old
| timers are going to complain ans tart asking for the same
| pay (it's kinda impossible here to pay two people
| different wages for the same job, especially if it's for
| the public) and that better salaries would encourage more
| prepared teachers to start teaching and that would look
| bad for the rest of them.
|
| That's the state of our education system, I hope it is
| different in all the other countries but according to my
| friends living all over Europe it's kinda the same
| everywhere, especially during COVID crisis, where
| families where left to solve problems schools would not
| solve, because they couldn't get teachers to get
| vaccinated or to go to school.
|
| Except, of course, for a few exceptions, that I already
| mentioned.
|
| But, back on topic, if people studying the subject have
| no idea, well, that's a problem, don't you agree?
|
| If we wanna keep grading people and "judge a fish by its
| ability to climb a tree", I think pedagogy is not doing a
| great service to future generations.
|
| > Do you have experience performing these kinds of
| assessments?
|
| As a matter of fact I do.
|
| I wanted to be a teacher, I was discouraged by how
| limited the space for new ideas was.
|
| In my family, that is very big as I've said, there are
| teachers.
|
| All of them keep doing it because it's a safe job and the
| salary is granted, none of them is satisfied of the work
| they are doing and would gladly do something else, if
| they had the opportunity.
|
| They all feel like are doing nothing substantial to help
| the students and that the students know it, but going
| against the status quo would cost them too much. They
| tried, they've been burnt, they gave up.
|
| So to get rid of the guilt they grade everyone good, at
| least they are not unpopular.
| Peritract wrote:
| > You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
|
| It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's
| a lot harder to make that valuable.
|
| If we focus on student satisfaction rather than
| understanding, we're failing them.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > If we focus on student satisfaction rather than
| understanding, we're failing them.
|
| while making them unsatisfied gives them a lot of
| motivation to understand.
|
| Anyway, satisfaction is about the product: the product is
| education.
|
| The product is not entertainment.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| FWIW the teachers lack perspective. I've dated several teachers
| and listened to their side about why they teach the way they
| do. I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous
| improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at
| random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross
| referenced to build new models. They had never considered these
| ideas before.
|
| When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution,
| you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box
| thinking is _possible_ , but it's the exception. You need
| outsider ideas and collaboration.
|
| Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be
| grassroots and volunteer driven.
| Peritract wrote:
| > I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous
| improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at
| random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross
| referenced to build new models. They had never considered
| these ideas before.
|
| I've never met a teacher who didn't do those things; I have
| met many who wouldn't phrase it like that. Just because
| they're not using the same terminology as you doesn't mean it
| isn't happening.
|
| It's very easy to look at a system from the outside and think
| that they're missing the obvious [1]; things become more
| complex the more you understand them.
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/793/
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> HOW do you measure knowledge?
|
| The teachers I've known don't really care about measuring
| knowledge. They're looking for a reasonable way to motivate
| engagement with the class, that's not too disruptive of the
| overall flow of the course. One professor told me, "A student
| who has made an effort to work through the homework problems a
| couple times should be able to easily get a B on the exam.
|
| Testing also acknowledges that you're competing for your
| students' attention, and if you give no assessments, your
| students will rationally focus all of their effort on the
| courses that do. Preparation for the test becomes a reasonable
| measure, not of your knowledge, but of how much effort you need
| to apply to a course. Since students have been taking exams for
| years, each student knows how to calibrate their own level of
| effort.
|
| As a student, after some trial and error, I developed a pretty
| good routine for getting A's in the two kinds of classes I was
| taking: Those that were dominated by solving problems and
| proofs, such as math and physics, and those that were based
| primarily on written assignments, such as art history.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I can tell you that almost every teacher who is not burnt
| out, does care about how we measure knowledge, mainly because
| they have to. The big difficulty is that there are two roles
| for teachers, on one hand you are a mentor and supposed to
| impart knowledge onto your students (the teaching part). On
| the other hand you are a gatekeeper, you are supposed to
| check that the thresholds for some qualification are met. Now
| if we had an ideal way to measure knowledge those two roles
| would not really be in conflict with ech other, but because
| we don't teachers have the difficult job of trying to teach a
| subject and at the same time find a good way to see if the
| students actually learnt what the were supposed to. All that
| with a limited amount of time that is available.
| analog31 wrote:
| What do they do with the information? The threshold in most
| courses is to be able to pass the next course. The students
| who won't do that, tend to drop out, or switch to an easier
| major, of which there are many.
|
| Teachers do tend to change their content and methods if a
| large number of students are failing exams, but I think
| it's based more on a hunch, than on hoping that test scores
| will yield analytical quality data. This is the sense I get
| from talking to a lot of teachers. My only teaching
| experience was one semester at a big ten university, a long
| time ago.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below
| average marks, for others I was the best.
|
| I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things
| work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one
| ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different
| idea.
|
| And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me,
| programming without having a solid understanding of CS
| background and how computers work it would make me just a code
| monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy
| pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be
| fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't
| make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z.
|
| I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer
| after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp.
|
| Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than
| medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
|
| I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after
| watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and
| architecting software.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > _I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how
| things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning
| with one idea I can extend it or come up with an entirely
| different idea._
|
| > _programming without having a solid understanding of CS
| background and how computers work it would make me just a
| code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy
| pasting SO answers without understanding them_
|
| Other people genuinely want to understand how things work,
| and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.
| II2II wrote:
| > Other people genuinely want to understand how things
| work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get
| there.
|
| Yes, except ...
|
| University courses are always going to have a mixture of
| people with different motives. One of those motives is
| going to be a desire to go into research, while another is
| going to be earning credentials to prove they have an
| understanding of their field before they embark upon their
| career. Then there are the people who take the courses with
| a pure desire to learn how things either in a structured
| environment or to learn along with like-minded people,
| without pursuing it as a career path. That runs the gamut
| from needing university credentials, to the credentials
| being nice to have, to not needing the credentials at all.
| Yet, in each case, the desire to learn is genuine.
|
| Then there are the people who are cheating the system by
| treating the university as a credential mill, the means to
| an end, where the end has little to do with furthering
| their understanding. Some of them are upfront about this. I
| remember one of my high school peers saying they chose
| their discipline based upon how much money they would earn
| and how well they would perform. Some choose to deceive
| themselves about this, largely by griping about how poor
| instruction is or how irrelevant the course material is
| while putting little effort into the courses. Whichever way
| you look at it, these people are problematic when they step
| over the line by cheating. They go from being passive
| leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.
|
| There are genuine advantages to learning in a university
| environment. For some it is structure. For some it is being
| able to work with their peers. For some, it is having
| access to professionals in their chosen field. All of these
| can contribute to understanding, if the learner chooses to
| do so. I have known very few professors who would turn away
| someone who was genuinely interested in learning. For the
| most part, they were more inclined to side with the
| students who would benefit from learning in a university
| environment, but were struggling to keep up with the
| demands of those who would not!
| doix wrote:
| > Then there are the people who are cheating the system
| by treating the university as a credential mill, the
| means to an end, where the end has little to do with
| furthering their understanding.
|
| Is this really an issue? I eventually feel into that
| bucket. Went to university for EE since I figured I could
| teach myself CS easily, whereas learning EE without a lab
| would be harder. I quickly realized I hate a very large
| portion of EE (anything outside semiconductors) and for
| most of my courses I did the bare minimum to get an A
| with minimal understanding.
|
| > They go from being passive leeches on the system to
| actively destructive forces.
|
| I really don't see how that makes me a passive leech. I
| agree that cheating is actively harmful to the peers that
| don't cheat, but someone that doesn't engage is a net
| gain to the others in my book. By not attending any
| optional tutorials/office hours it gives other peers more
| focus time with the professor/TA.
| II2II wrote:
| The most trivial example, the requirement for assessment
| will put a load onto the course staff. While a correct
| answer presented in the conventional way is a typically
| easy to assess, an incorrect answer or an answer
| presented in a non-conventional way is much more
| difficult to assess.
|
| The people I worked with typically wanted to see students
| succeed. It went well beyond the mechanics of delivering
| instruction and assessing work. They considered what they
| were doing and put time into modifying their practices
| when students did not appear to be engaged. For a handful
| of students, it would be successful. In the vast majority
| of students, it would flop since the disinterested ones
| were rarely receptive. Some cases may have been similar
| to yours, where it sounds like you were focusing on other
| subjects. Some students appeared to be, ahem, more
| interested in the non-academic merits of university life.
| It is difficult to tell what the breakdown is since those
| students were always the most distant. But either way
| those passive students were a drain. They simply weren't
| as much of a drain as the cheaters.
| ratww wrote:
| IMO even CS degrees are worth much these days. I know too
| many CS graduates that can't grasp the basics, and their
| work suffers from it. For a recent example (which I hope
| doesn't get picked apart): even with help they can't
| guesstimate the complexity of simple algorithms they write.
|
| Genuine interest is a requirement, a degree isn't. Anyone
| wanting to measure knowledge is even more fucked than we
| assume.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well it's probably down to the harm done if the standards are
| lowered vs. the gain.
|
| Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People
| die, or at least there's substantial material damage.
|
| When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever
| have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open
| matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something
| practical. Does that make them programmers? Probably I guess.
|
| Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where a
| poorly written program will cause anyone any harm especially
| since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected before being
| used for real, unlike a doctor who must use their skills on
| the fly and get it right first time, every time. So the bar
| for entry is obviously much lower and lowering standards
| doesn't do much to increase harm.
| ako wrote:
| Wrote a program that helps find patients for donor organs.
| Make a mistake people die, luckily first real life test 6
| people successfully received an organ.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where
| a poorly written program will cause anyone any harm
| especially since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected
| before being used for real, unlike a doctor who must use
| their skills on the fly and get it right first time, every
| time.
|
| That's as true for any scientific or engineer field, for
| architects, pianists, lawyers, painters end economists as
| is for people designing and writing software.
|
| And yet, all those occupations are generally practiced by
| people with a degree, who did a lot of study and practice.
| No watching YouTube videos, no 3 week boot camp will lend
| you a job as a physicist, concert piano player, economist
| or architect.
|
| Is not that we don't have a high bar in this field, is that
| we don't have any bar at all. A programmer is a person who
| calls himself a programmer. Even car mechanics and
| construction workers are held at much higher standards than
| this.
| j-bos wrote:
| "Even car mechanics and construction workers are held at
| much higher standards than this."
|
| This is not universally true. Many of the best blue
| collar wokers I've worked with had no formal training or
| certification, some have. A few trained and certified
| blue collar workers I've known have been mediocore at
| best.
|
| The alumni of certifications, official training, and
| schools are only as good as the integrity of the
| institution and of the alum.
| varjag wrote:
| More broadly people who refer computing to the standard
| of construction/architecture would likely be severely
| disappointed if they had a glimpse how the latter is
| really done.
| Retric wrote:
| Until very recently the most skilled people in our field
| had no degree because such degrees didn't exist when they
| started.
|
| Car mechanics went through the same shift where learning
| how to fix cars was an on the job thing and many still
| don't have a relevant degree. Construction work is an old
| profession, but still mostly an on the job thing outside
| of heavy equipment.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Has more to do with credentialing bodies holding legal
| power over who can practice. If you masquerade as a
| pediatrician and tell every parent their kid needs an hour
| of exercise and fruits and vegetables, just letting the
| nurse give the injections, you'll probably do fine in
| 99999/100000 cases. But that one time you'll miss childhood
| leukemia because you don't know what you don't know.
| Likewise, you write SQL injection code and for maybe
| 99999/100000 visitors you'll be fine. Until the first
| malicious bot destroys your company's primary DB and you
| lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in data, and trash
| your reputation for getting future contracts due to data
| security.
| bordercases wrote:
| bambax wrote:
| > _Incompetent doctor? People die._
|
| Many, many doctors are completely incompetent, as in, they
| don't know anything. Yet not all of their patients die.
|
| I have been a "standardized patient" at medical schools;
| students at the end of their education (after 6-8 years of
| learning) still don't know shit. And most pass. Maybe they
| learn on the job... but I doubt it.
| rscho wrote:
| You are completely wrong about that. If they passed their
| exams, they know a lot. They're no good in practice
| because they had little practice. Yes, we do learn most
| of our practical skills on the job. Medicine is very much
| a 'know-how' profession.
| bambax wrote:
| > _If they passed their exams, they know a lot._
|
| Yeah, it's an exaggeration. They certainly know some
| things, and some of them know a lot of things. But, they
| all had big holes in their knowledge (huge, gaping holes)
| and
|
| 1/ They weren't aware of it
|
| 2/ They were trained to hide them and appear to know
| everything about everything, because they're the experts.
| That's the scary part IMHO.
| rscho wrote:
| > They were trained to hide them and appear to know
| everything about everything, because they're the experts.
| That's the scary part IMHO.
|
| You've got to realize that we can't really train
| healthcare workers to admit failure. Culturally, it's not
| admitted in any society I ever lived in. People get
| really angry really fast if you don't hide the gaps, as
| they feel you're subpar and they're being swindled.
|
| > They weren't aware of it
|
| I recently taught an undergrad course, and I must admit I
| was baffled by the lack of knowledge of the students, and
| also how little effort they put into their studies.
| Doctors who don't read books. That's _much_ more
| worrying, IMO. Grade inflation, and all that...
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Conversely my general practitioners are part of an
| organization where they are doing their residency. They
| all are competent, very caring, and effective.
|
| I talked to one of their IT people who told me what a
| good place it was to work. And had multiple nurses say
| the same, one going on a 5 minute rant about what a good
| place it was to work. So that could be a significant
| factor.
| c048 wrote:
| Because most of what is needed out there doesn't require an
| equivalent of a doctor's degree.
|
| The truth is, is that programming languages themselves have
| evolved far enough that knowing exactly what's running
| underneath the hood isn't needed anymore, outside of niche
| specialist cases. Most people don't even need to worry about
| seeing a single 'index out of range' issue, or worry about
| CPU cycles. And it's only going to become easier and easier.
|
| I'd compare it to bricklaying. Yes, you need to use the
| correct formula for the cement you use, but figuring out that
| formula has already happened. For niche cases that require
| special cement, you go to the cement specialists that know
| the ins and outs of it.
| koheripbal wrote:
| This is true for any field, including medicine.
|
| Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to
| understand how mitosis works, etc...
|
| The same is also true in finance. People who do model
| equity index volatility don't remember at all how to derive
| the equation for put-call parity.
|
| In each of these fields there are people who study each of
| the fundamentals, and then there are people who do more
| routine "code monkey" work in a narrow area - think
| chiropractor or vanilla stock trade execution.
|
| Programming is not unique.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| > chiropractor
|
| I'm not sure that this example is making the point you
| wanted to make. There's a reason we have
| Docotors/Pharmacists/Physios and don't reply on
| Chiropractory / Homeopathy. It's because we want to get
| better.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm a homeopathic programmer. I fix huge terrible
| consequential bugs by adding lots of similar small
| diluted bugs.
| projektfu wrote:
| Haha. Fixing an off-by-one error by adding an off-
| by-10^-10.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to
| understand how mitosis works, etc...
|
| A psychiatrist has to obtain an MD degree before they can
| start to study their chosen specialty. There's a reason
| for that: before you can treat a psychiatric illness, you
| have to be able to eliminate all other possible causes
| for the condition. I for one would not want to be treated
| by a psychiatrist that couldn't distinguish bipolar
| disorder from brain cancer.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Yes, you need to use the correct formula for the cement
| you use, but figuring out that formula has already
| happened.
|
| I got serious doubts about this. It seems we are constantly
| changing the cement formula.
| deviner wrote:
| We do, it doesn't change anything in OPs statement tho.
| What's the point?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| GP
|
| > but *figuring out that formula* has already happened.
|
| Me
|
| > It seems we are *constantly changing* the cement
| formula.
|
| You
|
| > doesn't change anything
|
| Really?
|
| OP makes the classic error to assume that A) physical
| engineering isn't changing; B) computer world is
| analogous to physical.
| c048 wrote:
| By the time the bricklayers are there to start on the
| project, most of the time the choice of cement mixture is
| already made. For most projects, a standard cement
| mixture is used and a custom one isn't even needed.
|
| When issues do arise during the project, an expert is
| brought in/consulted. Standard cement formula's might
| change over time, for varied reasons, but it's not the
| bricklayers that keep themselves busy with that.
|
| The same hold true for most IT projects.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > The same hold true for most IT projects.
|
| Definitely not my experience. Even if you say choose
| Spring Boot the architecture and somewhat lower level
| constantly change.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| The reason why doctors have to jump through so many hoops is
| that the stakes are higher for failure.
|
| While there are times where a piece of code failure or poorly
| worded instructions can cause injury to others, those are
| exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking- the cost of
| failure for writing and software is lower than it is
| medicine, and it makes sense not to gatekeep these industries
| behind theory, and rather just let results speak for
| themselves.
| forinti wrote:
| There are markets for a wide range of abilities.
|
| Even in medicine, the first triage will probably be done by a
| nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
|
| You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with
| computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to
| require such a high standard everywhere.
|
| People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and the
| buyers get good value from it.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >There are markets for a wide range of abilities. Even in
| medicine, the first triage will probably be done by a
| nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
|
| Then why require long time in school and residency for
| doctors? A boot camp should be enough.
|
| >You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with
| computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to
| require such a high standard everywhere.
|
| No, you don't need any degree to use Excel or MS Word or
| modifying WordPress themes. But you should need a batchelor
| degree if if you want to be a high level specialist,
| programmer or architect.
|
| >People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and
| the buyers get good value from it.
|
| Likewise, you need a proper education to be a civil
| engineer or an architect. You do not need a degree to lay
| bricks or pour concrete.
|
| I am asking for degrees for the higher levels of IT field,
| not for the people who modify WordPress themes, whom I am
| sure do a great job and are highly needed but are not
| exactly exponents of high level work in this field.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Then why require long time in school and residency for
| doctors? A boot camp should be enough.
|
| Someone else answered the question: Nurses do not require
| a long time. In some (mnany?) states you can become a
| nurse with a 2 year associate's degree, and career
| outcome/pay is correlated with experience, not the
| degree.
|
| And nurses aren't even at the end of the spectrum. You
| have LPNs, etc.
|
| But the reason I commented: This notion that it takes so
| many years of school + residency is mostly a US/Canada
| thing. In many/most countries, you go to medical school
| right after high school - it is typically a 5 year
| program.
| voidr wrote:
| > Then why require long time in school and residency for
| doctors? A boot camp should be enough.
|
| Nurses don't go though the same system, what they go
| through is closer to a bootcamp.
|
| > No, you don't need any degree to use Excel or MS Word
|
| Yes you do, because if all I want is someone who can
| write Word documents, I don't need that person to
| understand computer architectures, see:
|
| https://www.reed.co.uk/career-advice/what-is-ecdl/
|
| > I am asking for degrees for the higher levels of IT
| field, not for the people who modify WordPress themes,
| whom I am sure do a great job and are highly needed but
| are not exactly exponents of high level work in this
| field.
|
| The IT field is multi dimensional, a person who is
| building a 3D engine is not the same person who is going
| to set up the backend system for your bank or write your
| kernel drivers. If put everything in one hat you are
| either going to teach too much or not enough in the field
| that the student will end up pursuing.
|
| Why do you believe the education sector would be a worse
| place if we would have 3D engineering, backend
| engineering, mobile engineering and Wordpress theme
| development as separate fields? I would enjoy it when
| hiring people if there would be more specific credentials
| to the role I want to hire for.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| I agree with the general premise, but the job market is
| insane enough to see this more as trying to cure the
| symptoms than the treating the cause.
|
| 3D engineering and backend engineering are very
| different, but backend engineering is generally easier
| than 3D engineering. Meanwhile, mobile engineering and
| backend engineering are far closer related. If one argues
| mobile engineering and backend engineering are different
| enough to warrant separate majors, you might as well
| argue "console/pc game development" and "mobile game
| development" do the same. You end up with so many ways to
| split hairs you're really just appeasing hiring managers
| being lazy.
|
| To put into perspective the absolute insanity, if it were
| up to hiring managers, we'd have a university trajectory
| "Bachelor Java backend developer", "Bachelor .NET backend
| developer", "Master of Microservices", etc. which are
| obsolete within 2 years and catching up is left entirely
| to the individual. The field changes way too rapidly
| while also denying the similarities between different
| aspects and the ability to learn most things as long as
| someone can function as a specialist (and most places
| have a specialist already). Current courses may be too
| generalist, but at the very least they acknowledge almost
| every field in CS is effectively still data creation,
| modification and storage, while strategizing around
| physical limitations.
| voidr wrote:
| I believe that the cause is the following: IT has evolved
| far too quickly for education to pick up and education
| itself is resistant to change for both good and bad
| reasons, we cannot change the system every year and
| expect grades to be comparable.
|
| I do believe that we could create specializations that
| are not too specific yet useful, the main goal is to get
| rid of subjects that the student likely never encounter,
| I mean, we can start teaching history in Computer Science
| because maybe you'll program the next Age of Empires, yet
| we agree that the likelihood of that is so small, we can
| round it down to 0, my issue is that we don't check this
| for all the current subjects so that we don't waste
| people's time teaching them stuff they will never use.
|
| > To put into perspective the absolute insanity, if it
| were up to hiring managers, we'd have a university
| trajectory "Bachelor Java backend developer", "Bachelor
| .NET backend developer", "Master of Microservices", etc.
|
| You don't need "Bachelor .NET backend developer", you
| just need "Backend Developer", someone who has a good
| knowledge of one stack can easily migrate to another in
| the same field.
|
| > which are obsolete within 2 years and catching up is
| left entirely to the individual
|
| - MVC was invented in the 70s, still useful, it's been
| over 50 years and counting
|
| - SQL also appeared around the 70s
|
| - OOP appeared in the 50s, that's over 70 years and
| counting
|
| If you know MVC, you can do MVVM.
|
| If you can handle MySQL it's doubtful that you will have
| trouble with MongoDB.
|
| I'm not implying that there were no changes and you don't
| need to keep yourself up to date, I'm saying that there
| are technologies and concepts that have longevity.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >The IT field is multi dimensional, a person who is
| building a 3D engine is not the same person who is going
| to set up the backend system for your bank or write your
| kernel drivers. If put everything in one hat you are
| either going to teach too much or not enough in the field
| that the student will end up pursuing.
|
| I think that for a Batchelor degree, things are good as
| they are. Students are better learning CS fundamentals.
|
| Learning the framework or the language du jour, is easy
| to do by yourself. Frameworks, libraries, tools,
| languages come and go. Fundamental concepts will stay.
|
| I did a master in Web Development, so there is some
| specialization. Others did masters in Data Mining,
| Machine Learning, Database Technology, Bioinformatics.
|
| I plan to do a PhD related to using ML in Web
| applications, so there can be even more specialization.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I would enjoy it when hiring people if there would be
| more specific credentials to the role I want to hire for.
|
| There are plenty of credentials out there. You just
| mostly don't get them from universities because
| universities are not in general in the business of
| granting trade credentials.
| musjleman wrote:
| > But you should need a batchelor degree if if you want
| to be a high level specialist, programmer or architect
|
| I'd like to ask, how are any of these specialties
| technically related to a bachelors degree?
|
| One does not learn how to be a successful software
| architect in a semester or two of university. Neither
| does a bachelors degree make you anything more than a
| beginner in any specialized topic. While the definition
| of what's a "good" programmer is up for discussion,
| universities definitely do not produce them in any
| dependable capacity.
|
| From my personal experience, at this point in time, major
| part of the students that complete a bachelors degree are
| in it just because programming is viewed as a well paying
| job and are about as worthless as a person that completed
| a 6 month bootcamp. The only difference being that the
| person with bootcamp experience might actually end up
| with an exact match of knowledge an employer wants, which
| hasn't had time to slowly evaporate over 4 years of
| "study".
|
| Lastly to bring up another one of your points, I'd argue
| that learning from YouTube videos is not the same as
| going to a bootcamp. I do not view either highly, but I'd
| say that learning on your own deserves some level of
| commendation as it's the most crucial skill in a field
| that's constantly shifting and changing.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There was an expression at my school, in response to
| exactly what you're questioning.
|
| "We train you for the last job you'll ever have, not the
| first."
|
| The intent of a well-rounded bachelor's education isn't
| to be able to walk through the JavaScript library du jour
| from memory, but to have at least a base level of
| understanding how _everything adjacent to_ the thing you
| 're doing works.
| oblio wrote:
| > "We train you for the last job you'll ever have, not
| the first."
|
| That's a bit funny for Computer Science since, even
| though I don't have numbers, I expect the average
| graduate now to work until they're 65+, and the vast
| majority will probably be out of the field of direct
| software development by the time they're 45 (burnout,
| people management, program management, project
| management, executive suite, etc).
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >One does not learn how to be a successful software
| architect in a semester or two of university. Neither
| does a bachelors degree make you anything more than a
| beginner in any specialized topic.
|
| That's entirely true. But if you din waste your time in
| school, you know fundamentals, you have the necessary
| background to proceed further and become good or
| excellent.
|
| > that learning on your own deserves some level of
| commendation as it's the most crucial skill in a field
| that's constantly shifting and changing
|
| I agree. You have to continously learn. But having a
| solid grasp of the fundamentals and understanding how
| things work will just help you on your path of future
| learning.
|
| In University you still learn by yourself, but under
| supervision.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > But you should need a batchelor degree if if you want
| to be a high level specialist, programmer or architect
|
| alternatively, I have seen people with long CS degrees
| but who cant code for their life. degrees are just
| papers.
| ratww wrote:
| Maybe we should require anyone graduating to take a
| FizzBuzz test before receiving the diploma.
| maccard wrote:
| > Even in medicine, the first triage will probably be done
| by a nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
|
| For very basic rote queries most pharmacy assistants (who
| are really just retail staff) will be able to guide you in
| the right direction too.
| jart wrote:
| Programming isn't a profession. It's just a new form of
| literacy. A lot of people claim to be able to write, but that
| doesn't make them writers.
| CPLX wrote:
| Programming is just a specialized form of writing.
|
| A person who writes for a regional trade magazine, a failed
| novelist, and Shakespeare all considered themselves writers.
| bhargav wrote:
| Sorry but I'm gonna be very blunt. I think sound pretentious
| as fuck.
|
| > I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how
| things work
|
| I don't think you do.
|
| Genuine curiosity forged in one's own mind. It is not
| something that can be bounded, repackaged as a curriculum,
| and sold in university. It's like ether, it's everywhere and
| can be captured by anyone, through multiple means.
|
| University degrees for any professions are useless. Even in
| medicine! There are shit doctors and good doctors. Most
| people here would've run through a couple of them before
| picking one. I've been with my current doctor for 10 years
| now, because they are really good, empathic, and teach me
| rather than just pushing pills.
|
| Software in my humble opinion works the same way. I care more
| about what someone does with the tools they have, rather than
| them being made of wood or metal or gold
| bumby wrote:
| > _University degrees for any professions are useless. Even
| in medicine!_
|
| I think there is a fundamental distinction between the
| professions of medicine and law, in that they have
| licensing boards that are a means of ensuring a
| standardized minimum amount of competency. Computer science
| does not.
|
| Despite the fact that many call themselves "software
| engineers", they are not engineers in the legal sense of
| the word in US, unless they also have an engineering
| license. The point of these licenses is, in part, to
| protect society in professions where they are expected to
| ethically serve in the public good. One of the problems
| with CS degrees in the past is that there is no
| standardized curriculum, so one CS student may have had
| zero semesters of calculus and another required to take 4.
| The standardization is what helps pull structure from the
| ether. That structure is compromised when people cheat.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I think there is a fundamental distinction between the
| professions of medicine and law, in that they have
| licensing boards that are a means of ensuring a
| standardized minimum amount of competency.
|
| You might want to read the transcript of this This
| American Life episode:
|
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/719/trust-me-im-a-doctor
|
| The summary: Licensing boards do a really poor job in
| maintaining quality. You can do extremely bad things as a
| doctor and still keep your license.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm certainly not claiming regulatory boards are perfect.
| Far from it. But I do maintain that some quality control
| and accountability is preferable to the alternative of no
| quality control and accountability.
| bhargav wrote:
| We have slightly different opinions, but I thank you for
| taking the time to chat, and trusting that we can do so
| nicely.
|
| The boards are to provide society comfort, but they
| enforce as you, said the minimum. Something just cannot
| be measured. This is very true in medicine as it contains
| a human aspect, as well as ethics aspect (I make more
| money if I see more people and give each less time).
|
| When I was a teenager, I was losing hair due to Alopecia.
| My doctor at the time, who barely made sense (both of us
| were ESL) decided to put me on a course of prescription
| Iron pills. I was pooping black haha. Only later, I was
| told that I shouldn't be taking it and that it was
| prescribed to me by accident by her because she had the
| file of another patient. Their last name was my first
| name, and they were pregnant female, I am a male.
|
| The same doctor injected my mom with some drug and as she
| did, she said "oh shit" and "OMG" and decided not to tell
| my mom what it was. She tossed the bottle in hazardous
| waste box so my mom could not find out what it was. My
| dad was furious and made a scene as he and my mom
| naturally got worried. We went to this board and they
| said they did nothing wrong, and my parents were making a
| scene, and that we should find another doctor. So much
| for protecting my best interests and holding a bar.
|
| These boards are mafia; another high profile thread about
| this is in HN right now. The boards are there to provide
| a facade of credibility.
|
| > The point of these licenses is, in part, to protect
| society in professions where they are expected to
| ethically serve in the public good.
|
| I don't want to be called an engineer and opted out of
| license because I think most of engineers are doing the
| exact opposite. Working at companies that knowingly
| continue operating when we know it's causing depression?
| Collecting data for users without them knowing?
|
| Regarding equality of curriculum and standardization, I
| hear you. None of this is stuff we can ONLY get in
| school. I think the interview questions we all conduct at
| our jobs, or give when applying are doing just that.
| Checking minimum competency; tangentially I much prefer
| take home tests or something of that nature.
|
| After this, I tend to think learning should be like
| gardening. Not all gardens are the same and they have
| different needs. You may need to learn more calculus if
| you are in robotics, but not if you are working on
| something really far from that. Another example, you
| might really need to learn about algorithms and databases
| if your job/interests require it.
| bumby wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. I think in the context of your story,
| the board seems like they did not do you justice. I can
| say from my experience with engineering boards, they seem
| to be more transparent and will publish their decisions
| and the underlying opinions on how they reached their
| conclusions. I think that added transparency goes a long
| way to mitigate the scenario when a regulating body ends
| up serving as a mechanism to avoid accountability for the
| group they are intended to regulate.
|
| I think I agree with your gardening analogy. It seems to
| me that the issue is often rooted in the hiring process.
| If a company was able to adequately assess the skills,
| they wouldn't need to rely on credentials, period. I
| think credentials become a lazy shortcut in many ways.
| Sometimes I think this is borne from the fact that many
| hiring decisions are made by people who are too far
| removed from the work being hired for, and thus need some
| pragmatic shortcut. It's easier for HR to say "you don't
| have the right degree" than for them to read and
| understand your resume to conclude "you don't have the
| right skills". The first is binary, the latter requires a
| lot of nuance.
| ghaff wrote:
| _Many_ engineers in the US do not have PEs even when it
| 's an option. If you're not having to sign off on
| regulatory agency-related documents, potentially doing
| expert witness-related work, etc. there's no need for it.
|
| I started the process at one point in mechanical
| engineering (engineer in training exam) but moved on to a
| different type of job so there was never a reason to get
| the certification.
| bumby wrote:
| I understand most engineers work under industry
| exemptions. The ones that do not will have to work under
| a PE or be a PE themselves. In those cases, the work has
| been determined important enough to require the
| additional accountability of a PE stamp.
|
| I'm not a big fan of credentials, but I understand when
| credentials become a proxy for something valuable. In
| some cases, the value of a PE is accountability and the
| legal authority for a PE to push back when they are being
| asked to do something unethical/unprofessional. I think
| one of the central issues of this thread is that the
| credential of a college degree has become so watered down
| that it has lost a lot of value.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than
| medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
|
| It doesn't, a good programmer is self evident to good peers.
|
| And schooling isn't the only way to get there. I know plenty
| of academically educated CS grads that aren't a great
| programmer not because they didn't do well in school (I have
| no way of knowing but I assume they did well), but because
| they lacked curiosity and interest into programming.
| barefeg wrote:
| But you don't need a degree to understand the fundamentals.
| Jus because you don't have a degree from an institution it
| doesn't mean you don't count as a programmer. You can learn
| all of this things on your own pace even if you started by
| learning how to modify Wordpress themes or got into the field
| after taking a boot camp. My point is (from the original
| comment) that grading knowledge and ability to produce
| quality work is a very hard thing to achieve. I would even go
| further and question whether it's even necessary. For example
| you're likely not getting a job straight after college
| without facing the company's interview process. And every
| company has its own way. So even if you were to solve the
| issue in academics, it's likely to not reflect on the
| student's ability to get a job and perform properly
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >But you don't need a degree to understand the
| fundamentals. Jus because you don't have a degree from an
| institution it doesn't mean you don't count as a
| programmer. You can learn all of this things on your own
| pace even if you started by learning how to modify
| Wordpress themes or got into the field after taking a boot
| camp.
|
| We can argue this about any other field.
|
| >For example you're likely not getting a job straight after
| college without facing the company's interview process.
|
| We should have a bare minimum standard, not a maximum.
|
| But colleges and universities should be good enough that
| graduating one means you are in a proper position and have
| proper knowledge and abilities to start a career. Since
| that is not always the case, companies do still organize
| their own processes.
|
| By not graduating some recognized form of higher education
| in the field, you don't prove to your future employers that
| you might be good at what they need. You just prove that
| you weren't willing to do the work for a few years and that
| you might not have the knowledge. Some won't care as their
| work is simple enough and they might train you on the job,
| some will test you harder and some will not get you past
| screenings.
| barefeg wrote:
| > Some won't care as their work is simple enough and they
| might train you on the job, some will test you harder and
| some will not get you past screenings.
|
| Another option is that the candidate has relevant work
| experience instead of a university degree. This is the
| case for a lot of candidates I've seen. There are a lot
| of factors that make Software easier to get into. For
| example, in physics you need to have foundational
| knowledge that was created 100+ years ago. Whereas
| software frameworks go out of fashion every 10 years or
| so. Of course there are many important CS foundations and
| design patterns, but I believe those can be absorbed by
| working along other experienced engineers
| gjm11 wrote:
| > I know I will get downvoted for saying this
|
| I doubt it, but I downvoted you for saying _that_. No comment
| anywhere has ever been improved by adding "I know I will get
| downvoted for saying this, but". Please don't do it.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Thank you for your comment. It is highly valuable to me.
| voidr wrote:
| I have seen plenty of bad code monkeys who had high grades,
| the idea that the current 'high standards' give us better
| programmers is unfounded.
|
| The issue is that modifying a Wordpress theme is just as much
| of a job as optimizing a low level 3D rendering pipeline or
| writing facial recognition software. One of these is not like
| the others and the issue is that universities fail to realise
| this and just try to teach everything.
|
| In my mind we would need to abolish the idea of a general
| programmer and move towards specialization.
| franciscop wrote:
| In retrospective now I know that I unconsciously sabotaged
| myself, I knew the best way to pass subjects was to have a
| basic understanding of the theory and then practice a lot of
| exam question examples, but I just couldn't get myself to do
| that until I had in fact understood the theory in depth.
|
| That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at
| one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in
| the most difficult course in my degree. Everyone, specially
| those who were normally top of the class, were like "WTF did
| you do??" lol
| culopatin wrote:
| Ha, this led me to fail school the first time I tried it.
| Now 10 years later I'm back in school with a 4.0 because
| I've learned to navigate the system and I know what the
| school wants. I still balance diving deep into what I'm
| interested in, but I don't let it get in the way of the
| grind.
| willio58 wrote:
| I think you're over-estimating the difficulty of the average
| programming job. The simple fact is we have great frameworks
| to work off of and building things from scratch is a waste of
| time and money for most business applications. Wordpress is a
| great jumping off point for like 75% of businesses. If you
| know how to write some custom theme code I'd call you a
| programmer. Doesn't mean you'll get a job in system-level
| design, but you'll be able to pull a paycheck and sustain
| your life (and potentially support others). What exactly is
| wrong with that?
| ekianjo wrote:
| > I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after
| watching YouTube videos
|
| Yet real doctors actually believe the bullshit they get from
| medical reps when it comes to prescribing actual drugs that
| goes in patients bodies. I will let you ponder how successful
| that strategy is.
| ahzhou wrote:
| Scaling solutions invariably rely on parents. Ignoring parents
| seem like a great way to design broken systems.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Now you increased the burden by a factor of 3...
| staticassertion wrote:
| I feel that school is criminal and I deeply resent how my
| childhood was spent due to school. So I'm going to opine on it.
| johndevor wrote:
| Well they do oddly resemble prisons for kids... In both
| function and appearance often.
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| > probably input from people who have never worked in the field
| is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and
| will not do much
|
| This is the story of hacker news. And of most other online
| forums. And of most meetings. Let's bikeshed. Hi, I'm on the
| Internet and I read the whole post title. Let me share my
| thoughts.
|
| People are stupid, lazy, and uninformed in the general case.
| People writing in an 8 line comment fields on mobile aren't
| going to be the exception.
|
| There is no need to be frustrated. Unless you enjoy that
| feeling. Then by all means embrace it.
|
| Try this? Dip into the comments with right expectation. These
| are off the cuff uniformed thoughts of the masses. Maybe they
| make you laugh or cry or maybe something inspires you. Maybe
| there's a gem buried here somewhere.
|
| Don't expect HN commenters to know anything deep. If you are in
| the mood for a deeper thought, go to the library.
| bambax wrote:
| > _HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how
| do you scale it?_
|
| When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no
| quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics
| such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was
| done in class, in longhand.
|
| There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because
| what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the
| approach, and the solution, and you got points for that even if
| the ultimate result was wrong.
|
| "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was
| writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you
| could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or
| two would not make sense.
|
| This system didn't "scale" very well; in fact it didn't scale
| at all.
|
| If you build a system that let one person "teach" classes of
| hundred of students and generate quizzes that can be instantly
| rated by a machine, then some (most?) students are going to try
| to game that system.
|
| This is inevitable, and I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student
| was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless
| you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a
| sentence or two would not make sense.
|
| In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of
| problems so we can't copy off each other because people
| sitting one sit away from each other have different sets.
|
| I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from
| both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the
| beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed
| the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind
| me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him).
|
| In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried
| to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in
| place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in
| USA).
| elondaits wrote:
| Yes, although many of the students in the story weren't
| interested enough in learning, had "low morals", "no honor"
| and some apparently were scumbags, as a group they were
| somewhat efficiently solving the problem of passing the
| class... that's not nothing!
|
| In the real world the solutions to your problems can't be
| found online, or if they can it's valid to search them there
| (and lawyers will charge you a lot to do that). Collectively
| searching and distributing a solution is something young
| people are quite adept at (e.g. gaming wikis).
| paskozdilar wrote:
| I don't think the problem is that complicated - you just can't
| measure knowledge with a process (or a machine). Only a human
| can approximate another human's level of understanding.
|
| Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream.
| All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid
| mechanical box.
|
| Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
|
| Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you
| remove the need to print out diplomas, everything _does_ become
| simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale"
| is the hardest problem.
| brazzy wrote:
| > My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
|
| How do you prevent them from becoming corrupt gatekeepers
| that maximize their own profits while ignoring learning as
| much as possible?
|
| "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is exactly
| the tool to prevent that.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| By removing any kind of formal authority by them. They
| should be places to learn, not a bureaucratic machine for
| deciding who is "worthy" and who is not.
|
| There could be another organization that specializes in
| knowledge verification and certification. But that should
| be completely independent of learning.
|
| Of course, now the question becomes "how do we prevent a
| verification and certification authority from abusing their
| power?" - but that question is not particular to this
| context and can be applied to any human organization of any
| kind. However, in this particular case, I think that
| employers would be the verification authorities themselves.
| They are the ones that need the real-world knowledge, so
| they should be the ones to measure it.
| hnarn wrote:
| Again, it's so easy to criticize, point out the "problem" and
| then offer no solution.
|
| The "knowledge factory" exists for a reason. The way our
| society is constructed, we need structured specialization
| (pick a course), verification (you're OK) and rating (you're
| the top 5%) -- because our _entire society_ expects these
| things to work and be available.
|
| It sounds like the only difference in your example is that
| these things exist but are not centrally verified to be
| identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the
| problem.
|
| People need to be able to improve, be excluded when
| incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how
| our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing
| that will always be true about an educational system is that
| it will mirror society: and if it doesn't currently it will
| in a few decades.
|
| You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational
| system without more or less advocating a revolution in
| society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and
| never continue to proposed solutions.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| > It sounds like the only difference in your example is
| that these things exist but are not centrally verified to
| be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are
| the problem.
|
| Yes, exactly.
|
| You are using a diploma as an indicator of knowledge, and
| you have a diploma-giving machine (university) that gives
| the diploma to anyone that can pass a test. People cheat
| the test in order to get the diploma. It will always
| happen, no matter how intricate you make your tests,
| because you cannot automate knowledge verification.
|
| It isn't a "problem" - it's an "impossibility". And it's
| one impossibility software companies have gradually started
| dealing with - most don't care about diplomas anymore,
| because the correlation between knowledge and having a
| diploma gets lesser and lesser the more diplomas are
| printed artificially.
|
| So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas
| altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way
| they seem fit. They will have responsibility for the
| mistakes of an employee, so it makes sense that _they_ make
| the criteria. That way, educational institutions will
| _have_ to make their education useful in the real world, or
| their reputation will crumble.
| hnarn wrote:
| > So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove
| diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge
| in a way they seem fit.
|
| It's not a "pretty good solution", which shows if you
| start breaking down how you would attempt to achieve
| this. How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"? Do you
| suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our entire
| society works just to remove cheating?
|
| A "diploma", "certification" or whatever you want to call
| it, can be issued by many different entities: a
| collection of nation-states, a state itself, non- and
| for-profit organizations, even individuals. These all
| have varying degrees of value depending on the trust
| placed in the issuing body, from a certificate of having
| completed Bob's Weekend Sales Course to a state-issued
| certificate to perform a specific type of surgery.
|
| First of all, which of these are you saying should be
| "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them?
|
| Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them?
|
| Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you
| certify a surgeon?
| paskozdilar wrote:
| > How do you, first of all, "remove diplomas"?
|
| Very simple - just stop giving them to people and let
| them be forgotten as a concept.
|
| > Do you suggest that we fundamentally overturn how our
| entire society works just to remove cheating?
|
| Are you suggesting that university diplomas are a
| fundamental factor of how our society works? If so, would
| you please explain how?
|
| > First of all, which of these are you saying should be
| "removed"? Only the ones from universities? All of them?
|
| Only those from the universities. Universities are
| officially recognized "places to learn" and they should
| be kept that way. Studying for longer than "appropriate"
| number of years should not be frowned upon, but
| encouraged. The whole process of "verification" should be
| completely independent of learning.
|
| Bundling "learning" and "verification", the way
| universities do, inevitably leads to hordes of people who
| want verification, but not learning - i.e. cheaters.
|
| > Secondly, how do you remove them? Do you outlaw them?
|
| Very simple - stop issuing them (I suppose a country-
| level ban of university diplomas could do, but politics
| depend on the country so I can't give you a general
| answer). If you want a certificate authority, make a
| certificate authority and make it its sole purpose to
| verify that people have the knowledge. Leave university
| out of that.
|
| > Thirdly, what happens when they're all gone? How do you
| certify a surgeon?
|
| A certificate authority (that only verifies surgeons'
| skills, and doesn't bundle the process with "learning").
| ptsneves wrote:
| The proposal on the central verification authority is
| actually how pilot licenses are given. The flight schools
| have no legal power to exam. For example theoretical
| exams are done by the aeronautical authority of the
| country which itself only doles out exams with question
| from a standardized set of questions. Pilot training was
| for me how education should be. I was not the best pilot
| but I clearly now see how that was both my fault as well
| as not my calling.
|
| Also in Portugal and in Poland there is a thing called
| national exam which is a nationwide exam at certain check
| points. It is very useful in showing per school social
| economic issues as well as grade inflations(school grade
| VS national exam grade). I honestly do not understand why
| the verification is not done independently of the
| teaching in all levels of education. It would also
| liberate teachers to focus on teaching while having a
| nationwide benchmark validation on their approach to
| teaching. Teachers ironically hate to be evaluated.
|
| Another factor that is very hard to handle is that
| education is an industry that employs a very powerful
| class, the teachers. More often than not when education
| is in the news it is for teacher' labor issues. In
| Portugal recently they held a strike on national exam
| days. To give you an idea of how important national exams
| are, they are held in police stations and delivered by
| police officers to the schools on exam day to avoid leaks
| and so nobody has unfair advantages.
|
| I will never forget that teachers held students national
| exams hostage for their negotiations. (they lost and
| suffered such a public backlash that their bargaining
| power was neutered for a few years).
| wcarey wrote:
| > A certificate authority (that only verifies surgeons'
| skills, and doesn't bundle the process with "learning").
|
| It seems like you've just moved the cheating problem from
| one organization to a different organization? How would
| this new certificate authority measure learning better
| than universities are currently measuring learning? Are
| there examples of such certificate authorities existing
| now? Do they also have cheating problems?
| workingon wrote:
| So you've come full circle here, though. What's the
| difference between trying to have people not cheat the
| test at university and not cheat the test at the
| certificate authority? I was with you until you brought
| in this part, because it's literally the same thing now
| but at a different building, basically.
|
| Employer verification made sense, you mention they have
| to deal with it if their hire is dumb. This secondary
| certificate authority idea undermines your entire
| argument though. Maybe I'm missing something though and
| you have a good idea for how the CA will mitigate
| cheating that a university can't do.
| imtringued wrote:
| It sounds more like we need students to be mentors so that
| the number of teachers scales with the number of students.
| spockz wrote:
| This is what we do in companies with "train-the-trainer"
| and with satellite/ambassador engineers/teams.
|
| The only thing I know from education that does something
| similar is "Jena-plan" in elementary school and Teaching
| Assistants in uni. Nothing in our high school.
| trashtester wrote:
| Interesting proposal.
|
| Let's say this was formalized as follows:
|
| Each student would be encouraged to serve as mentor for up
| to 3 younger students, starting on year 3 of their studies,
| and each semester thereafter, and receive some small
| stipend for each mentee.
|
| At the start of each semester, prospective mentors would be
| listed and students would be allowed to seek them out. Both
| parties would be allowed to know the grades of each other,
| and the mentees would be allowed to reach out to former
| mentees of the same mentor. Mentors would also be allowed
| to do some kind of self-promotion where they could "sell"
| their abilities as mentors.
|
| After each exam, the mentoring would count as having taken
| a course for the mentor, with the grade equal to the
| average grade of their students, and it would provide a
| numbe of "mentoring credits" equal to the number of
| students passing. This might seem unfair, but the idea is
| that this would encourage competition among mentors to
| "catch" the best students, encouraging the mentor to put
| effort in.
|
| For the next semester/course, new mentor student
| connections could be set up, or the same as the semester
| before could be kept, if both sides agreed.
|
| When a student receives their final diploma, all the
| mentoring results would be listed, both courses, average
| grade of students, and number of students, as well as total
| students*courses mentored and the average grade for those.
|
| I can imagine a lot of employers would be highly interested
| in this information, as it could be extremely predictive
| for some kinds of positions (in particular positions of
| leadership or teaching). Students who had repeatedly
| mentored other students who achieved great results would be
| likely to, in the future, be able to recruit and keep high
| quality employees and help maximize the output of a team.
| In both cases, it might be it would be the very students
| they had been mentoring that would be potential hires.
|
| Or, if employed by a university, would be likely to attract
| high quality post-graduate students as well be effective
| supervisors for them.
|
| Now shy, intravert or people with bad social skills might
| find this unfair. But I think there would still be room for
| people who focused exclusively on learning the subjects
| themselves, and these would have more time available for
| that. These might also care less about those jobs where
| mentoring success would be seen as crucial.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| This will also encourage unscrupulous mentors to help
| their kids cheat!
| [deleted]
| Quindecillion wrote:
| > Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle
| educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more
| than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the
| bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the
| flak regardless).
|
| Well obviously we need to fix the system of the system!
| dasz wrote:
| I'd say everyone has been a student so they all have an
| opinion. Its ripe for bikeshedding. That's the reason imho.
| axblount wrote:
| I taught high school math for 2 years. Which really isn't
| really enough to diagnose (much less solve) the system's
| problems. But it did give me a sense of how intractable the
| problem is.
|
| I find it enormously frustrating when people (not you) complain
| about "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test is good
| pedagogy! First, determine what you want to students to
| know/do. Then choose how you're going to assess their
| knowledge/ability. Then design instruction that prepares them
| for the assessment. This is called backwards design.
| passivate wrote:
| >These are very hard questions, and it's frustrating to read
| the phrase "we need to fix the system" because yes, obviously
| we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn't the hard part,
| and probably input from people who have never worked in the
| field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard
| part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
|
| I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is
| something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using
| immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization
| is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured,
| distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal
| schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the
| situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement -
| where everything, including education can be improved.
| hnarn wrote:
| My opinion is that the educational system in most
| industrialized countries today rewards the wrong things and
| that the quality of education suffers to allow an easier time
| of mass-grading and classifying.
|
| Whether this means it's "broken" or not is of course
| completely subjective because it depends on what you think
| the educational system should be doing in the first place.
| passivate wrote:
| >completely subjective because it depends on what you think
| the educational system should be doing in the first place.
|
| Yup, you nailed it. That is the crux of the argument. I
| think it also leads into the meta discussion of what it
| means to be a "productive member of society" and how
| education fits into that philosophy. Why should one be
| forced by society at-large to be educated, or productive,
| or anything at all? :)
| riedel wrote:
| For my excises I started to allow copy/cheating etc because
| students will cheat themselves. On the other hand I even did on
| site oral exams (20-40 per course, so it is still manageable)
| during the pandemic (using video terminals).
|
| Particularly reading this, the whole enforcement of anticheating
| becomes a privacy nightmare. I do not want my students to learn
| that putting root kits on PCs is OK (for proctoring) or that
| archiving potentially private chat messages without consent (I am
| in Europe, so GDPR applies) is OK.
|
| At the same time students have to learn how to use stackoverflow
| or copilot effectively. So I want to teach them that initial
| copying is OK if you fully understand the result and that often
| doing it yourself from scratch is better to achieve it.
|
| I know we talking about slightly different things, but grading
| based on multiple choice seems to be at the core of the problem.
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| As someone who also teaches programming to college students, this
| is one of the most glorious things I've ever read.
|
| Though, anyone know what "hes so Canadian" means? I assume it
| means he is Canadian, hence why he seems to be taking this so
| calmly and not flipping out, but I'm not sure.
|
| Edit: I'm now reading the comments. The amount of people trying
| to justify lying and cheating is truly disheartening.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I think "Canadian" here stands for the stereotype of Canadians
| as overly nice, apologetic, etc. (and that the author is in
| fact Canadian though he teaches in America)
| kved wrote:
| "He's so Canadian" likely refers to the stereotype that
| Canadian people tend to be very nice and apologize a lot
|
| Edit: didn't see the other reply, but it's pretty much the same
| idea
| honkler wrote:
| huh. i am a proud cheater. the entire chain of command, from
| local bureacrat to the chief of fed, and all company execs are
| cheaters. so why not me? I'd be a fool if i didnt trick the
| system.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| I personally find cheating repulsive. Are you not bothered by
| the lack of integrity?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You show me a "great" man who died with endowments and
| charities named after him, and I'll show you a man who spent
| his life cheating the system.
| urthor wrote:
| The issue is the perception society doesn't reward integrity.
|
| Those with integrity are very clearly perceived as the
| handicapped in modern America.
|
| Nowhere is this more clear than cryptocurrency and gun
| reform.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| The reward for integrity is entirely personal. There's no
| need for any societal input aside from maybe motivating
| people to have integrity. There can be some "sacrifice"
| sure, but in this context there's no real sacrifice. People
| should earn their grades.
| honkler wrote:
| nope. I value my time and effort. Not going to
| "sacrifice" for the system.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| I don't know if you're already out of school, but if you
| are, can you afford to get caught? Is the system against
| you when you face some sort of punishment?
| honkler wrote:
| I'd be bothered with my own stupidity if i did not cheat. And
| nature does not care for what you are repulsed by. Otherwise,
| cockroach wouldn't exist.
| pushrax wrote:
| > I'd be bothered with my own stupidity if i did not cheat.
|
| What? I'd be bothered with my own stupidity if I felt I
| couldn't get a good grade without cheating. I put in a
| minimal amount of time/effort in university where the
| subject matter didn't interest me, but always did fine
| without cheating.
| honkler wrote:
| jumping through hoops to get a degree doesn't seem stupid
| enough to you already? Unfortunately, this is what our
| world is now, and you have do play this game if you want
| to be in the middle class. The least you can do is make
| the process less painful by cheating your way through.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| I can't agree, sorry.
| akomtu wrote:
| Integrity suffers when you know what's right and still do
| otherwise. If you dismiss the institution entirely, integrity
| doesn't suffer. Not giving money to the Church is a sin, but
| if you aren't taking the Church seriously, your integrity is
| fine. Ignoring a beggar who is obviously an imposter is fine,
| but ignoring a beggar who seems legit corrupts integrity,
| even if the legit beggar is in fact fake.
| quantified wrote:
| We'll always have parasites in the system, it's got enough
| wealth in it to withstand a few. Thankfully in the systems most
| of us interact within. Which country are you in?
| honkler wrote:
| > it's got enough wealth in it to withstand a few
|
| For how long? I assume you're in the west. Look around and
| tell me - how long?
| honkler wrote:
| the only way to deal with parasites is to parasite them.
| mkl95 wrote:
| In my country these are the two main challenges students face:
|
| - Storing and retrieving information (memorization). A process
| that is exhausting for the human brain but a database does
| effortlessly.
|
| - Heavy computation, such as solving a difficult equation for a
| variable. Again something that is taxing for the human brain. A
| machine cannot always do it effortlessly but it will help in most
| cases.
|
| Whenever I've observed cheating it's been because students had to
| solve problems in a human-unfriendly way, and education (lessons,
| problem sets) was subpar.
|
| Honestly the industry is so different to school that it sometimes
| makes me think if higher education -as we understand it today-
| makes sense for people who don't want to become researchers.
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| I'm guessing this was an introductory course? Every college
| stuffs kids into courses they have no interest in. Society
| pressures them into college in the first place. Most introductory
| courses, perhaps not this one but especially in liberal arts,
| involve not much beyond agreeing with the professor's personal
| opinions presented as fact to get an A. And, well, people like to
| cheat to get ahead, mooch off the government, etc. Today is
| probably worse than other periods; generations in the US are on a
| steep downhill slope, and academia and educators in general seem
| increasingly deranged. Convincing others this is a solvable
| problem sounds like a great way to get money.
| alexb_ wrote:
| I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of _why_
| students cheat.
|
| College for the longest time has not had anything to do with
| learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college
| because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to
| have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about
| actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment,
| where you go into debt totaling up to hundreds of thousands of
| dollars because you know that it will net you more money in the
| future. Not cheating is completely risking any hope of financial
| independence you can ever have _for your entire life_.
|
| Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat? You take an extremely
| minimal risk (most profs don't have any clue, or do not care
| about cheating at all) to avoid a much greater risk (you not
| getting good grades and potentially never getting any return on
| your lifelong 6 figure deep debt).
| jandrese wrote:
| You wouldn't cheat because once you are out in the real world
| supposedly applying the knowledge that you learned in college
| it is going to be really obvious to your boss and coworkers
| that you don't know what you are doing.
|
| Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green,
| but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the
| basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a
| degree in.
|
| So the danger is having a good GPA but then washing out in job
| interviews with real companies. "Wow, a 4.0 in CS from CMU! So
| why do you seem to be completely mystified by Fizzbuzz?"
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You'd think cheaters would consider the issues they'll
| experience down the line, but the fact that FizzBuzz even
| exists and works at all proves they don't.
| Gtex555 wrote:
| Most cheaters don't, work doesn't allow you to
| procrastinate plus it motivates you with money. Also there
| is no arbitrary rules like solve this without help from
| your friends or the internet in the real world.
| Gtex555 wrote:
| I feel most cheaters get by in the industry pretty well,
| cause school is way harder than he average job. The reason
| they make it at work is that the deadline for work is
| everyday while you can procrastinate at school for 3 months
| straight plus you aren't getting paid at school.
| proc0 wrote:
| Seems a bit cynical of a take. Cheating prevents you from
| learning, otherwise you wouldn't need to. Also, college is very
| limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job. It only
| offers a subset of knowledge that is needed to be good at any
| given job. Cheating is basically showing up to class and
| avoiding the whole point of being there. Why would you show up
| to a training, to then ignore the training part.
|
| I think it's a combination of culture and every person's
| upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time
| cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either
| from parents or society, but they don't really want to be
| there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the
| motions and will take the path of least resistance which is
| cheating.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Why would you show up to a training, to then ignore the
| training part.
|
| You said it yourself.
|
| > college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for
| a real job.
|
| The goal isn't to be well prepared for a job. The goal is to
| get the job. For most students, including myself while I was
| there, university is a massive signalling exercise. I just
| cared about the magic combo that would lead to a good paying
| job.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I'd also like to add that most generic white collar jobs
| require a bachelor's degree. Adding the requirement cuts
| down on the number of applicants, so hiring managers have
| few qualms with doing this.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Going to the grocer has for a long time been about the food,
| not the pleasure of the shopping experience. Given this, why
| wouldn't you steal?
| Gtex555 wrote:
| risk of getting caught and arrested.
| handoflixue wrote:
| A better example would be: If your goal is to get food, are
| you really going to complain when one person offers to do
| everyone's shopping for them? Keep in mind, you'll lose out
| on the valuable lessons that grocery shopping has to teach!
| Aeolun wrote:
| Which will absolutely suck later in life, when you'll have
| to go grocery shopping by yourself for the first time.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If your goal is food. Why aren't you on farm every day to
| learn how it works? Maybe a few decades there making it all
| by your hands manually would teach?
| staticassertion wrote:
| Looking back, I wish I'd cheated. College was fun for partying
| and living alone and having time to study, but coursework was a
| joke. I remember skipping my CS 101 class, coming in for the
| midterm, and finding it insane that they were still trying to
| get through pointers.
|
| Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun.
| Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get
| away with it.
|
| You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.
| [deleted]
| omoikane wrote:
| If someone went to college with the belief that only the degree
| at the end mattered and that they weren't going to learn
| anything along the way, I can see how they might convince
| themselves that cheating is a low-risk shortcut toward that end
| goal. I do not subscribe to that belief and have learned quite
| a bit by trying to absorb the lessons earnestly, as opposed to
| taking shortcuts.
|
| I have also had the experience where a professor interviewed me
| and one other student because our homework appear too similar.
| That experience reinforced my impression that cheating is a
| risky venture and I want none of it. (Also, leaving printouts
| of your code around is extremely high risk if helping someone
| to cheat is roughly as bad as cheating at your university).
| klodolph wrote:
| Students will also have an opinion on what classes they think
| are important, and what classes they are only taking because
| they are required.
| User23 wrote:
| And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about
| undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There's
| literally no signal to be had.
|
| None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into
| the ivy league self-dealing club.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Stopped giving <a shit> about undergrad degrees? No signal to
| be had?! Somehow I'm not getting that read from the tech
| industry... what I am getting is a willingness to hire non-
| traditional candidates. That does not translate to not giving
| a shit.
|
| If you have more information on the source of your
| confidence, please do share.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Yeah, some bootcamps will hesitate to even admit you
| without a college degree. And I got offered to skip a
| technical interview just because I had a fancy degree on my
| resume that has nothing to do with cs.
|
| Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my
| undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything
| cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small
| percentage gets through and sticks with some small
| percentage of students.
|
| My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and
| to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long
| time to settle into an adult brain.
| User23 wrote:
| Happy to. I've done well into the hundreds of interviews at
| FAANG or whatever the acronym du jour is. We didn't even
| look at resumes except to see if they were obviously self-
| disqualifying. Google SteveY's rants on the subject if you
| want more corroboration. Also it's obvious to anyone that
| isn't stupid that "daddy bought me into Stanford" doesn't
| indicate an ability to do top tier engineering work.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Google isn't turning up anything - mind linking SteveY?
| User23 wrote:
| Stevey is his handle. He's notable enough to have a
| Wikipedia page[1]. I don't know if that page will
| directly get you to his posts on interviewing, but with
| some cleverness that should be enough to go on.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge
| omoikane wrote:
| Probably one of these blog posts:
|
| http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-
| goog...
|
| http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-
| slightl...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Probably Steve Yegge?
| hhmc wrote:
| Is it possible there was a resume filtering stage before
| you saw them?
| native_samples wrote:
| When I was interviewing at Google virtually all the
| candidates were sourced or referrals, not selected from
| submitted CVs. I never even looked at the education
| section. There are was too many universities or there to
| know if they're meant to be good or bad and education
| never told you anything useful anyway.
| User23 wrote:
| Back then recruiting did a very basic resume screen and
| then they'd go to an SDE or SDM's inbox for final
| screening. I imagine that's no longer the case.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| I dunno about the 90s, but it definitely feels to me like
| the industry largely stopped giving a shit about undergrad
| degrees at some point
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Since we're converting purely anecdotal data into blanket
| generalizations, I am happy to provide a counter point.
| Graduated in 2004, and most of the companies that I looked
| into listed a bachelors degree in computer science for entry
| level software engineering positions.
|
| In several interviews we even went over some of the actual
| subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and
| I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering
| undergrad work during some whiteboarding.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| This is false, 99% of engineers at top software companies
| have a degree and a lot have masters or Phds (especially
| those doing more specialized work)
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Given your cynical take, it's in the school interest to prevent
| cheating; if everyone cheats and the word gets around, nobody
| will take that school seriously anymore.
| DeWilde wrote:
| I'm not sure how it is for other industries, but for computer
| sciences nobody takes schools seriously anymore.
|
| Your knowledge and skill level is the most important thing
| they will evaluate you for, for the three SW jobs that I've
| gotten nobody asked me for my college degree let alone my
| grades, including a FAANG-type company.
| mrep wrote:
| Google asked for my full transcript even after I had been
| working at another FAANG for 2 years.
| StillBored wrote:
| have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job.
|
| Maybe at some big name co, but you will probably learn more at
| some little self funded place that pays a little less and can't
| attract the top tier graduates.
|
| After a couple years, get a job at a small startup where you
| and 5 other people write the entire product. From there you
| will be a far stronger candidate just about anywhere with a
| real engineering culture.
|
| My GPA was fairly reasonable, but I worked through college, so
| I got a position at a large name brand company. Drove me nuts
| after having worked at places where I had written more code in
| a single year than most of the lifer's had written in their
| entire career. That is when I went the startup route, and
| basically did small companies for ~20 years until
| wife/kids/stability drove me into the arms of a mid sized
| company where I only work ~40h/week. Now I write code on the
| weekends to keep my mind active.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I graduated with a poor GPA. The only place that gave me an
| offer did so because they forgot to ask me for my GPA. I got
| _dozens_ of rejections purely for my GPA. Not all of them
| were from large employers.
|
| [Edit]
|
| To state something more on topic, I never once even
| considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered
| my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| People were cheating because they were expecting everyone else
| to cheat.
|
| In general, cheating isn't common in college.
|
| This was simple game theory during the pandemic.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I
| was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't
| really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared
| about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less
| about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much.
| This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste
| of time.
|
| I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely _love_ to go back to
| school to learn. Now I feel like I 'm in a position where I can
| appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand
| how they relate to the real world. Please give me those
| advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes
| that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-
| world experience.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| https://openlearning.mit.edu/courses-programs/mitx-courses
|
| There's good stuff there!
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| Thanks. I know that all the raw material is available to
| me, but it's just not the same. It's different when you can
| completely focus on studying, be part of a community with a
| bit of peer pressure, and have a social circle that goes
| through the same experience. You don't get the this from
| online courses, reading books, or MOOCs.
|
| I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also
| don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the
| middle of my career just to study.
| emodendroket wrote:
| On the other hand, if you study now, you can be surprised
| by how much the material is immediately applicable to
| your day-to-day work.
| teeray wrote:
| Yeah, I had a blast attending "lockdown university" during
| the deepest part of covid in 2020. Grades only for fun
| points and just taking classes and doing assignments that I
| thought would be beneficial.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| Us students would generally love to learn too. The problem I
| often encountered was engineering professors did research
| first and foremost with teaching a second priority. It often
| felt like if the teacher isn't putting in the work why should
| we? Conversely, my business teachers cared far more for us
| students and I believe people put far more effort in.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Exactly this. I've noticed in my classes there's less
| cheating when people respect the professor. It's honestly
| not hard to get that level of respect from your students;
| just clearly put in effort for your classes.
|
| Far too many have just been screwed over time and time
| again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated)
| course content and whose lectures don't actually add
| anything to the textbook or slides.
|
| Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python
| 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring
| '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in
| lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote
| all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed
| around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that
| class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently
| they've been published to every "student assistance"
| platform around.
| Aeolun wrote:
| As sad as it is, Python 2.7 is still relevant :P
| 1270018080 wrote:
| It's not a waste of time, only caring about grades and
| getting a job is the most efficient use of time. I would've
| loved to learn too, but when passing classes impact the rest
| of your life, cheating and taking easier classes to maximize
| GPA are the right choices.
| gmd63 wrote:
| The "right" choices? For who? It seems like engineering
| culture has suddenly become rife with this exploitative
| mindset with zero regard for honor.
|
| When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as
| CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you
| going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of
| society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the
| business and double down on your deception?
| paulcole wrote:
| > I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to
| school to learn.
|
| You love the idea of doing something you're not doing now. I
| see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea
| of learning from free online resources.
|
| If you were in your 30s and in school, you'd love to be able
| to go off in the and work with your hands -- or something
| else to distract yourself.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| I didn't dismiss the idea of learning from online
| resources. I constantly work through online
| courses/lectures and books. I only noted that the
| experience is inferior to going to college where you can
| completely focus on learning with a group of peers, and
| where you are held accountable.
|
| I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but
| this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on
| getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over
| learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I
| don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.
| kwakja wrote:
| I haven't read through all the other comments here, but
| attending class and learning the content aren't mutually
| exclusive.
|
| I sympathize with the reason _why_ students cheat, but I can 't
| see that those reasons are the same as what you say. You don't
| need to attend classes to learn the content nor display mastery
| - I appreciate a good syllabus for that reason where you know
| what is expected and can learn on your own time. I liked the
| approach the author of the article took for that reason. But
| none of this requires cheating.
|
| I can see why this would lead students to cheat, but this looks
| to me like a strawman in addition to victim blaming (on part of
| the prof).
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The exams were open book, open note and they had a week to
| complete them.
|
| When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they
| still cheated. And then plagiarized.
|
| He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off
| almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures,
| skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.
|
| Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't
| do reading, classwork, or study.
|
| This is not even remotely close to behavior of people
| participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-
| don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat?
|
| In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught
| cheating, you're out.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do they still? I had numerous friends caught cheating in the
| most blatant of ways (i.e. they forget to change the name of
| the assignment of the student they copied). Less than half
| even got a zero on the assignment. Plenty got a perfect grade
| and then were told to not do it again.
| lysium wrote:
| I find this f'd up at so many levels. The instructor seems to be
| more concerned about how to fill out forms to _report_ a huge
| amount of her own class and come up with (surprising the student)
| countermeasures than about how to teach her students.
|
| Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the
| whole system is flawed. This should have been the instructor's
| top priority. Instead, she chose to fail her students. I was in
| pain while reading the article.
|
| The moment she saw what she thinks was cheating, she should have
| confronted the students. And frankly: why _shouldn't_ the
| students help each other? Why did everybody have to learn in
| solitude?
|
| She herself told the students that the midterm would consist of
| the same quiz questions. _Of course_ you are trying to gather
| those along with the right answers.
|
| Apparently, she was short on resources (no TA) and put the burden
| of that problem on the self regulation of her own students. I am
| ashamed that this calls itself academic teaching.
| Sebguer wrote:
| Your unconscious bias is showing by the fact that you think
| this professor is a woman.
|
| Quick edit: Also, it's very obvious that the professor had no
| issues with the class 'helping each other', but what was
| happening was people literally just sharing answers to the
| exam, and being completely unable to succeed without doing so.
| This wasn't a factor of students sharing study notes - the
| Professor's example is people literally just posting questions
| from their exams and asking what the answer was.
| tornato7 wrote:
| The author didn't fail all of the cheating students. Did you
| read to the end? Many of them ended up with an A+. That's in
| fact the whole point of the article, to say that more engaging
| course material reduces cheating.
| brigandish wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe, the students - who are legally adults, by
| the way - should not cheat.
|
| > And frankly: why shouldn't the students help each other?
|
| Because they're not helping each other in a way that isn't
| cheating. You may as well say that stealing is borrowing.
|
| > Such a huge amount of cheating is a clear indication that the
| whole system is flawed.
|
| The system isn't _supposed_ to be defendable against large
| scale cheating because if there are that many cheats then those
| people should not be included in the system, which is why they
| should be failed (and probably kicked out). That _is_ the
| defence.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| At Princeton, this would have led to year suspensions for all
| students involved. At least when I was there 15 years ago. I know
| numerous people who had to take a year off. Not saying this is
| right. It probably is too punitive and disruptive.
| secretsatan wrote:
| As i was reading this, i kinda thought, the teacher could have
| jumped in sooner? As they waited longer and longer, more students
| would see the cheaters getting away with it, it would be harder
| not to join in.
|
| They're chastising the students for not reporting it, but then,
| it seemed to take a while for the teacher to do it as well
| user8139471 wrote:
| You have to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt for each
| case of cheating. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to
| document that.
| [deleted]
| jimmyswimmy wrote:
| As an undergrad I was heavily involved in the student-led
| academic integrity organization. This story reads so true to my
| experiences (from the last millenium, mind you - there was no
| whatsapp, etc.). My largest cases came from the computer sciences
| departments. Students thought nothing of copying programs and
| submitting them as their own.
|
| It turned out, of course, that structural similarities are so
| obvious. My worst case had 23 students accused of submitting the
| same program for a lower-level course. I held an event where all
| (or most) of them attended. Somehow they tried to explain how
| their use of not-just-similar-but-exactly-the-same variable
| names, structure and comments in a C or C++ (it's been a while)
| program. I mean, exactly the same. One spent an hour berating me
| on the phone (well before I figured out that I could just
| politely end the conversation and hang up) explaining that it was
| his work. It was not.
|
| I was disappointed over and over seeing how blatantly and
| cavalierly my fellow students would break the rules. It was
| unpleasant for everyone involved, despite a reasonably lenient
| punishment process - students, faculty and us alike. I didn't
| like lording over my fellow students, but felt it was important
| to hold a line of sorts. I wish very much that there was no need
| for this function but time and again students turned in work that
| was not theirs. I strongly suspected at the time that most
| professors only turned in the most blatant open-and-shut cases.
| It was particularly sad considering how very much money each
| class cost.
| [deleted]
| Fiahil wrote:
| Ah cheating ! I did a year abroad in California when I was
| studying computer science and I remember there was a huge
| difference between cheating there and cheating in my French
| school.
|
| In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver
| a working program with some constraints. This program is then
| tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would
| get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that
| would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students
| knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions
| about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not
| explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for
| detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises. As the
| exercises were harder than expected for a class and projects were
| long and difficult, students were encouraged to talk, discuss and
| exchange ideas. Ideas sure, code meh.
|
| Then, in the US, exercises were stupid checkboxes-style questions
| and graded on a curve. So of course everyone "cheated".. I must
| confess that I did it too. It was unworthy of my time and
| attention, as it was just about taking the course material and
| regurgitate it with different words. Of course, I can't imagine
| anyone learning anything from this way of working.
|
| Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them
| interesting and this problem will go away.
| sparrc wrote:
| What school in CA was giving multiple choice assignments in a
| CS class?
|
| What you describe in France is exactly how my classes in the US
| were (at UW Seattle) ~15 years ago.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I went to UW Seattle ~15 years ago, and some of the CS
| classes there were a fucking joke
|
| I got a 2.7 in my CS classes because I had perfect scores on
| the tests and homework, but the teacher decided to make a
| huge percentage of your grade consist of quizzes about random
| factoids from the book that had literally nothing to do with
| computer science. (Literally: "What color was the elephant on
| page 12?") The book cost like $200, so I decided to just
| study from other books and the lectures and eat the loss of
| GPA
|
| Man, I wish I could remember that professor's name so I could
| send him some hate mail..
| mahathu wrote:
| UC Santa Cruz for example
| [deleted]
| brigandish wrote:
| > Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them
| interesting and this problem will go away.
|
| and yet
|
| > Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of
| code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques
| far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs
| would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating
| review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It
| was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote
| their own exercises.
|
| So both courses have cheating, one possibly has less cheating,
| and that one has a more effective detection procedure, but
| cheating happens on both all the same. The problem does not go
| away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and
| not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened
| somewhat.
|
| Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would
| still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style
| one. Maybe it's simply that a course that appears more
| difficult to cheat on or is more difficult to cheat on attracts
| less cheating.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > The problem does not go away with a better course but is -
| based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better
| view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.
|
| I was a TA in France, and did a bit of TA-ing unofficially in
| the US. So, my view is based on both experience, TA and
| Student.
|
| While there was some cheating happening on both sides, it was
| practically non-existent in France after a few weeks of
| school. The abilities required to cheat and get away with it
| were extremely hard to master, and usually would carry much
| more risks than just complete the exercise. Successful
| cheating were, sometimes, rewarded if the problem solved was
| worthy enough. You could even get clearance from the
| professor in advance (not for copying code from
| StackOverflow, of course, but rather for using forbidden
| functions or libraries).
|
| Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to
| 5-6. Individual students putting a group at risk
| deliberately, would get caught extremely easily and carry a
| far worse sentence than just a bad grade: they would be
| excluded from other students groups and left to do their
| projects alone or with dropouts students. Finding back you
| way after this is very very difficult.
| ascar wrote:
| > Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2
| to 5-6
|
| Much less reason to cheat in group work too. It's much
| easier to just put in minimal effort and let someone else
| in the group do the work. That's just another form of
| cheating.
|
| In Germany we say "Team" in teamwork is an acronym for
| "Toll Ein Anderer Machts" (great someone else does the
| work) and especially in university there is a lot of truth
| to it. Especially so when there is a big difference in
| motivation in regards to the final grade.
|
| Not to say there aren't a lot of upsides to group work. But
| stopping people that don't wanna engage with the subject
| isn't one of them.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Always a pleasure to see a fellow Epitech alumni on HN!
| Fiahil wrote:
| Aye! We're quite a few ;)
| floucky wrote:
| Epita too :)
| painchoc wrote:
| I am lucky to have found this Debian package
| https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/similarity-tester (source
| https://dickgrune.com/Programs/similarity_tester/ ) to help me
| detect plagiarism in my students's C++ code. The tool is perfect
| as it gives side by side comparison of codes to help see if
| there's a really an issue. Usually, it is easy to confirm by
| spotting specific constructions or even the positions of
| punctuation in code. I have found something for Python though.
| carls wrote:
| I recently took a CS class at Stanford with an interesting policy
| on cheating. While cheating almost certainly happened during the
| course, at the end of the quarter the course staff made a public
| post allowing any student who cheated to make a private message
| to the staff admitting they've done so.
|
| If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic
| disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they
| would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals
| with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face
| consequences like expulsion or being on official academic
| probation.
|
| However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit
| their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater
| degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code
| through a piece of software to detect similarities between each
| other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by
| this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least
| one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether
| it seemed like cheating.
|
| I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school
| teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and
| have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance,
| or perhaps an overly permissive one.
|
| The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second
| chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.
| bhrgunatha wrote:
| > I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes,
|
| This kind of mistyping reminds me of those example of people
| whose names fit their job but it's rare to find such an apropos
| example.
|
| Sorry to derail your point but the juxtaposition of "ch" and
| "t" here is perfect.
| mkl wrote:
| Not juxtaposition, transposition.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/juxtaposition
| bhrgunatha wrote:
| Yes, my mistake, thanks.
| kurthr wrote:
| I noticed a swap in your prose (still comprehensible), but just
| realized that cheating and teaching are semi-spoonerisms
| (swapping the sound order of a single word)... how appropos!
| donkeybeer wrote:
| The results of checking against existing and other test takers
| solutions must be taken with a strong human judgment.
| Programming problems such as would be asked in tests are
| essentially like mathematical formulas/algorithms, and there
| isn't much variation in how a given formula or algorithm can be
| implemented.
| rrobukef wrote:
| There is a lot of syntactic variation possible, both for
| formula and algorithms. Even for something as simple as
| quicksort there is enough natural variation for a class of 30
| maybe even 100 (if no references can be used). Anything more
| complex and even with references it should be unique.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't think these techniques are often applied to problems
| in tests - there are other, simpler ways of catching cheaters
| there.
|
| They are much more likely to be applied to homework
| assignments, where the opportunity for copying is large, but
| the chance of two students producing the exact same >500-1000
| line program is slim to none. Perhaps once in a while a
| critical function will be copied and no one will realize or
| similarities in a trivial function will be unnecessarily
| flagged, but this will be relatively rare and quickly
| discovered in manual review.
| voiper1 wrote:
| It's not _just_ trying to be lenient and offer a second chance
| - it's a way to catch more cheaters. "Turn yourself in and
| we'll go easy on you... because we might not catch you."
| bhargav wrote:
| That sounds great and all but I honestly have doubts about this
| software that detects similarities... there's only so many ways
| to solve the bland questions that professors lift from books;
| kind of ironic. I'm assuming it's basicallly doing AST analysis
| and it's no smarter than eliminating things like variables
| being renamed.
|
| They are basically stating that this "software" is 100%
| accurate. Furthermore it's then left to whims of some TAs?
|
| No algorithm can detect cheating unless the number of
| permutations are very very large (I.e being struck by
| lightening). Maybe one way to offset would be to use data as
| the student is entering the solution but that was never the
| case for us; just upload the source code to their custom made
| Windows app.
| TheApexTheater wrote:
| From doing some cursory research, it appears the software in
| question is called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) and
| is currently being provided as a service [0].
|
| Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the
| source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS
| account"). According to the paper describing how it's used
| [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false
| negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was
| either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."
|
| Sources:
|
| [0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss
|
| [1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/si
| gmod...
| dskloet wrote:
| I used something similar when I was a TA 20 years ago and
| while your assumption seems reasonable, there are actually a
| lot of different ways to solve even quite simple tasks and
| most cheating is very obvious on manual inspection.
| Sirened wrote:
| Yep... If you're going to go through the effort of
| completely rewriting a piece of code to try and dodge an
| AST analysis algorithm, you've effectively just done 70% of
| the work and put your grade/position at the institution on
| the line. It's not worth it, and so people don't tend to do
| that. It's the same thing with plagiarism--students could
| very well resynthesize a stolen work in their own words. It
| would still be plagiarism, sure, but it's also putting in a
| large amount of effort while still being risky.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If you rewrite everything you steal (e.g. never
| copy/paste), it's no different from using an especially
| well written source.
| Sirened wrote:
| Well, no. It's still plagiarized if you fail to
| communicate that it isn't your original work. You can't
| just steal ideas from someone else's paper, even if you
| rewrite everything. If you rely on another paper for
| inspiration, you have to cite it. If a student submitted
| a paper that was just another paper entirely rephrased,
| that would not be acceptable in the least even if they
| cited their source because the expectation of writing a
| paper is that you contribute something novel and not just
| regurgitate someone else's argument
| bhargav wrote:
| If the problem is large enough, I do submit that there are
| multiple (even many) ways of solving it.
|
| I will also say that there's problems where that is not the
| case. For example, we were told to write simulators for
| scheduling schemes (RR, MLFQ). Other than using different
| data structures (even that's a bit of a stretch) not sure
| how much variance there will be.
|
| Using the right tool for the right job is important.
|
| Just above your post another author posted/cited results of
| a system that "never produced false positives".
|
| I think that cited number another author shared is probably
| correct but presumably, the tool is used in cases where
| problems are big enough to warrant it.
| lolinder wrote:
| I implemented the widely used MOSS algorithm (mentioned by a
| sibling) for my CS department in my senior year. That
| algorithm doesn't do AST analysis, it just looks at the plain
| text in a way that is resistant to most small refactorings.
| MOSS compares sets of k-grams (strings of k characters)
| between every pair of projects that are under test and
| produces the number of shared k-grams for each pair of
| projects. On any given assignment in a given semester,
| there's a baseline amount of of similarity that is "normal".
| You then test for outliers, and that gives you the projects
| that need closer scrutiny.
|
| On the test data we were given (anonymized assignments from
| prior semesters together with known public git repos), we
| never had a false positive. On the flip side, small
| refactorings like variable renames or method re-ordering
| still turned up above the "suspicious" threshold because
| there would be enough remaining matching k-grams to make that
| pair of projects an outlier.
|
| Our school explicitly did not use the algorithm's numbers as
| evidence of cheating and did _not_ involve the TAs--the
| numbers were used only to point the professor in the right
| direction. We excluded all k-grams that featured in the
| professor 's materials (slides, examples, boilerplate code).
| It also helped that they only used it on the more complex
| assignments that _should_ have had unique source code (our
| test data was a client _and_ server for an Android app).
|
| My sense was that this was a pretty good system. Cheaters
| stood out in the outliers test by several orders of
| magnitude, so false positives are extremely unlikely. At the
| same time, the k-gram approach means that if you actually
| manage to mangle your project enough that it's _not_ detected
| as copied, you had to perform refactorings in the process
| that clearly show you know how the program works--anything
| less still leaves you above the safe zone of shared k-grams.
| temp3738868585 wrote:
| Speaking from experience using similar software on students
| assignments, it is often blatantly obvious when cheating is
| occurring.
|
| To start with, at an undergrad level, most students had
| fairly distinct coding styles - usually with quirks of not
| "proper" coding. Some cheaters had the exact same quirks in
| multiple students assignments.
|
| Also, some cheaters had the exact same mistakes in their
| code, on top of the same code style.
|
| Yes the software picks up people that write correct solutions
| with perfect syntax, but those are the ones that you just
| toss out because there isn't any proof there.
|
| The people that get caught cheating generally don't know what
| correct solutions and good code look like, so they don't
| understand how obvious it is when they copy paste their
| friends mediocre code.
| cudgy wrote:
| Assuming that the software detects a similarity between two
| or more student's submissions, how do you know which
| students cheated? What if one of the students (the one that
| actually did the work) had their program stolen/copied
| somehow (eg left screen open in lab or print out of code)?
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| You ask them to do it again in front of you
| bjourne wrote:
| It becomes obvious when you ask them to explain the code.
| At my university I once overheard a boy and a girl
| presenting some code "they" had written to a TA. The TA
| asked them some basic questions on while-loops and
| function calls. It became obvious that the boy had
| written all the code and the girl had no clue. So the TA
| decided that the boy had passed but that the girl had to
| come back and present the code herself on the next
| session.
| einpoklum wrote:
| When I was a TA checking "Intro to programming" HW
| assignments, my brain was the similarity check software.
|
| Anyway, when I detected two basically-identical
| submissions, I would call in both students to my office.
| I would chide them, explain to them that learning to code
| happens with your fingers, and that if they don't do it
| themselves, then even though they might sneak past the
| TA, they'll just not know programming, and would be stuck
| in future courses.
|
| The I would tell them this:
|
| "Look, I have a single assignment here, with a grade, on
| its own, of X% (out of a total of 100%), and two people.
| I'm going to let you decide how you want to divide the
| credit for the assignment among yourselves, and will not
| second-guess you. Please take a few minutes to talk about
| it outside and let me know who gets what."
|
| Most times, one person would confess to cheating and one
| person got their grade. For various reasons I would not
| report these cases further up the official ladder, and
| left it at that.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I teach some courses with coding assignments and we just
| tell the students very clearly and repeatedly, at the
| beginning of the course and before each submission
| deadline, that submitting duplicate material means
| failing. It doesn't matter if A copied from B, B from A,
| both copied from an external source, or even A stole B's
| password and downloaded their data. The penalty is the
| same. We cannot go into such details because we just
| don't have the means to find out, and some students are
| amazing at lying with a poker face.
|
| It's a pity to have to fail students sometimes because
| they failed to secure their accounts and someone stole
| their code, but they have been warned and hey, securing
| your stuff is not the worst bitter lesson you can learn
| if you're going to devote your career to CS, I guess...
| cudgy wrote:
| Cheater Student enters the lab, turns on the video camera
| on their phone, walks casually behind other students
| recording their screens, reviews video for useful
| information. Other students fail. Seems like a poor
| outcome that is plausible and unfair to the student whose
| info was stolen to no fault of their own.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Indeed, it's plausible enough that I've actually caught
| students trying to do that.
|
| The problem is: what's the realistic alternative? Just
| letting cheating happen is also unfair (to students who
| fail while the cheater passes). And finding out what
| exactly happened is not viable because students lie. We
| used to try to do that in the past, but the majority of
| the time all parties involved act as outraged and say
| they wrote the code and don't know what happened. Some
| students are very good actors, many others aren't, but
| even when you face the latter, your impression that they
| are lying is not proof that you can use in a formal
| evaluation process and would withstand an appeal.
|
| So yes, it can be unfair, but it's the lesser evil among
| the solutions I know.
| bhargav wrote:
| I would let 100 people cheat if it meant I was sure 1
| innocent student wasn't punished unjustly.
|
| People that don't cheat may benefit in the future for not
| doing so.
|
| I said May here because I generally found university
| education to be useless for myself. Instead, I wish I had
| met folks I consider mentors at work, earlier in my life.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| > I would let 100 people cheat if it meant I was sure 1
| innocent student wasn't punished unjustly.
|
| This makes sense in the justice system, but in the
| justice system you often can find proof as to what
| happened, so the system still acts as a deterrent even if
| a fraction criminals get away with no punishment. In
| university assignments, most of the time it's practically
| impossible to find evidence of who copied from whom, so
| applying that principle would basically mean no
| enforcement, that everyone would be free to cheat and
| assignments would just not make sense at all.
|
| Also, failing a course is far from such a big deal as
| going to jail or paying a fine. At least in my country,
| you can take the course again next year and the impact on
| your GPA is zero or negligible. You will have an entry in
| your academic record saying that you failed in the first
| attempt, but it won't be any different from that of
| someone who failed due to, e.g., illness.
|
| If the consequences were harsher (e.g. being expelled
| from the institution, or something like that) then I
| would agree with you.
| xigoi wrote:
| Ask the students how their code works and how they came
| up with it. It shouldn't be hard to tell who actually
| wrote it.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| On the one hand, as we know from the P vs. NP problem (at
| least if we assume the majority opinion), explaining a
| solution is much easier than coming up with it... and
| even easier if they copy from a good student who not only
| writes good code, but also documents it.
|
| On the other hand, even if I am very confident that a
| student didn't write the code because they clearly don't
| understand it (which is often the case), this is
| difficult to uphold if the student appeals. For better or
| for worse, the greater accountability in grading and the
| availability of appeal processes means that you need to
| have some kind of objective evidence. "It was written in
| the rules that duplicate code would not be accepted, and
| this is clearly duplicate code" is objective. "I
| questioned both students and I found that this one
| couldn't correctly explain how the code works, so I'm
| sure he didn't write it" is not.
|
| Note that I _do_ this kind of questioning routinely (not
| only when cheating is involved) and take it into account
| in grades, because it of course makes sense to evaluate
| comprehension of the code... but outright failing a
| student on the grounds of an oral interview can easily
| get a professor into trouble.
| xigoi wrote:
| > On the one hand, as we know from the P vs. NP problem
| (at least if we assume the majority opinion), explaining
| a solution is much easier than coming up with it... and
| even easier if they copy from a good student who not only
| writes good code, but also documents it.
|
| You can ask "tricky" questions that someone who
| understands the material shouldn't have a problem
| answering, such as "if the problem required you to also
| do this, how would you change your code?".
|
| "I questioned both students and I found that this one
| couldn't correctly explain how the code works, so I'm
| sure he didn't write it" is not.
|
| Fair enough. But at least you can give a bad grade for
| not understanding the course material.
| chongli wrote:
| Put a security camera in the lab. Catch a student doing
| something like that and you have grounds for expulsion.
| rrobukef wrote:
| It doesn't matter, both violated academic integrity by
| letting the copy happen. (Submissions are never stolen)
| If you think letting copying happen is less severe, you
| ask them and rebalance based on the work. Most of the
| time 'they made it together'.
| tomp wrote:
| How is sharing knowledge "violating academic integrity"?
| Unless given specific and explicit instructions not to
| reveal working solutions, then sharing your code is
| literally just "helping" others, it's up to them to
| either study it and produce their own versions, or jut
| blatantly copy & cheat.
| lolinder wrote:
| In my time in college I helped a lot of fellow students
| work through a lot of assignments. I sat down with them
| and helped them to think through the problem and find
| examples to learn from that _weren 't_ full solutions to
| the assignment. I helped them find difficult bugs in
| their implementation by pointing them in the right
| direction or showing them debugging tricks I found
| helpful.
|
| What I _didn 't_ do was show them my implementation or
| even talk about how I solved it. Yeah, doing it the long
| way takes a bit more effort, but the result is that the
| students I helped actually understood the code they
| submitted and were better equipped to solve the next
| assignment without help.
| rrobukef wrote:
| Because each university has university-wide rules
| forbidding sharing assignment solutions. It is explicitly
| forbidden even before starting the course unless the
| syllabus or professor directs you so. You can't "help"
| others on their own assignments by giving your solution.
| You can't receive direct "help" either.
|
| Edit: here's the text of my alma mater: Any behavior of
| individual students by which they make it impossible or
| attempt to make it impossible to make a correct judgment
| about the knowledge, insight and/or skills of themselves
| or of other students, in whole or in part, is considered
| an irregularity that may give rise to an adjusted
| sanction.
|
| A special form of such irregularity is plagiarism, i.e.
| the copying without adequate source reference of the work
| (ideas, texts, structures, designs, images, plans, codes,
| ...) of others or of previous work of one's own, in an
| identical manner. or in slightly modified form.
|
| [https://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/oer/2021/?faculteit=50
| 0004... translated with Google]
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| I have the same policy at my uni in Poland. Admit to cheating
| without being called out? Depending on the professor mood, they
| either allowed you to retake exam (though the best grade you'd
| get was the lowest passing one), or you just fail the course
| and try again next year.
|
| Both they had less paperwork, and well, they wouldn't report
| that person.
| [deleted]
| qumpis wrote:
| In Germany (as far as I know), quizzes and homework are not
| graded, only some % of them needs to be completed in order for
| people to be admitted to an exam.
|
| Having a similar system would work well there, if one can make
| exams (and midterms?) either physical or less susceptible to
| cheating.
| t0b1 wrote:
| Depends on the university - and course. I'm currently at TUM
| (CS) and you don't need to submit any homework assignments to
| be admitted to an exam. Though there are some courses where
| part of or the complete grade are made up of homework
| assignments. Cheating is still a problem nonetheless and from
| personal experience and being involved with grading seems to
| have gotten bigger with online examinations (obv), closed or
| open book.
|
| One interesting approach I saw one course do to handle online
| exams is to have an unsupervised open book exam with some
| randomization in the problem statements and then inviting a
| random subset of students for an oral re-examination. Basically
| just a 10-20 minute conversation in which you should explain
| how you went about answering the questions. The idea seems to
| be to do that often enough and you will find the cheaters who
| will be unable to explain how they derived their answers. I
| wonder if that's an approach that could work generally and
| maybe even for homework assignments though the effort becomes
| quite considerable then.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I dunno, I never cheated, but I would never report other people
| for doing it either. It's not my job to detect and report other
| people cheating, and getting dinged for not reporting people that
| cheated would make me hate you very quickly.
|
| That said, I just don't see the point in cheating. University
| isn't _that_ hard if you have some basic level of skill. You go
| to the classes, you read the stuff the assign you, do the
| assignments, and you should mostly be able to pass the course.
|
| Cheating always seemed like a complete waste to me. I'd be paying
| a lot of money to learn nothing (aside from how to cheat better).
| If I'm going to be there anyway to get my degree, I might as well
| put in the work.
|
| And then later you have these instances where it turns out that
| because you actually paid attention in school, you know more than
| people from top universities that (apparently) cheated their way
| to a degree.
|
| Of course, they're also 2 levels above you earning twice what you
| make. Because that's the way these things work :/
| selfhifive wrote:
| The classes being online is a major factor. Those classes are
| engagement hell. Also research has shown video conferencing is
| much more fatiguing than a real meeting. Even if you start
| engaging one bad week can put you off the course for the
| semester.
| zerocrates wrote:
| His positive story in the epilogue of the students in the next
| class not cheating is in all likelihood actually a story of the
| students simply being forced to develop slightly better cheating
| tradecraft.
|
| The professor here talks about not wanting to enable the features
| that make it a worse experience to take the tests, but it's an
| unfortunate truth that there's just going to be cheating if
| you're giving assignments and assessments where it's easy to
| cheat.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| The author has a responsibility to out the cheaters. It's
| unacceptably unfair to the students in his course who didn't
| cheat, and cheaters should be shamed publicly and have their
| career prospects severely damaged. I really don't give a shit
| what excuses or justifications someone might have had for
| cheating, if you had to run away from home sleep under the bridge
| and suck dick for wifi after your dad killed your mom or
| whatever. I literally do not give one flying fuck. Cheating is
| not acceptable or excusable, ever, period.
|
| I'll go further and say that if you're not ready to out cheaters
| in your classes, you have no business teaching
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Unfortunately, life does not have a responsibility to be fair.
| Although we would sure like it to be, it is not universally
| possible.
| sam-2727 wrote:
| I think it is pretty standard practice to keep cheating
| confidential (indeed, I think for a lot of universities
| professors aren't allowed to publicize student names in
| incidents of cheating). I understand where you're coming from,
| but college can be an extremely stressful place that can lead
| students to do actions they otherwise wouldn't have done (or so
| goes the typical reasoning from universities).
| BonoboIO wrote:
| What if the test is not great at evaluating the capabilities of
| a person to do their future job.
|
| Maybe preventing a person that does not understand differential
| equations from being a doctor, English teacher, event manager
| ...
|
| ,,I literally do not give one flying fuck."
|
| The person who cheats, will give no f** about your opinion
| either.
| klodolph wrote:
| "Shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely
| damaged..."
|
| The prefontal cortex does not finish developing until age 25 or
| thereabouts. This is why it is logical and necessary to punish
| young people differently from the way we punish adults.
|
| "Cheating is not acceptable or excusable, ever, period."
|
| Children develop the ability to lie and cheat around 3 or 4
| years of age, although they are very unskilled at it and
| initially tell lies that are not believable. I think we agree
| that we can accept and excuse 4-year-olds who lie and cheat,
| because it will take much longer for them to develop ethics and
| morals.
|
| The question then is, how do we taper off the acceptance and
| excuses? Perhaps we agree that it's acceptable at age 4 and
| unacceptable at age 25, but what about 18? Perhaps people at
| age 18 still need to learn ethics and morals?
|
| It seems like such a shame to destroy somebody's academic
| career if there are ways to save it.
| xhrpost wrote:
| > Who knew I could automate pdf text entry from R.
|
| Interesting, wonder if this is easier than Lumin
| attilaberczik wrote:
| Wow, congrats author if you are reading this The epic case of a
| teacher who hunts down the cheaters and doesn't take revenge,
| instead does the right thing
| eimrine wrote:
| > If real life was about being monitored by proctoring software
| that spies on you at home and forces you to test under duress, it
| would be a sad real life.
|
| Welcome to real life with all kinds of proprietary software.
| zenmaster10665 wrote:
| I am surprised that harvesting quiz questions would be considered
| cheating?
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| It's been 20 years since I had a student plagiarise my assignment
| and I still remember how mad it made me to be falsely accused of
| cheating.
|
| This was before everything was automated - In our C++ course, we
| had weekly assignments that were done in the lab and we were
| expected to turn in a printout of the code (this will be
| important) along with a 3.5" disk with the source and executable.
| I never had any difficulty completing the assignments and would
| regularly help others debug their code. One day, a student I had
| helped previously asked if they could just have a copy of my code
| so they could compare it to theirs. I declined as kindly as I
| could and they left, slightly dejected, but not nothing that
| would have been an immediate red flag.
|
| Remember those printouts? Well, it was not uncommon for one to
| complete the assignment, prepare their printout and deliverables,
| then find a bug or two during some last-minute debugging prior to
| submission. So into the recycle-bin goes the printout.
|
| Well, turns out that this particular student had seen me drop a
| copy of my code into the bin and they proceeded to retrieve it
| and copy the code _verbatim_... bugs and all... And they then
| submitted it while I was still preparing my corrected submission.
|
| I was later called into the professor's office for a meeting with
| her and the program coordinator and accused of plagiarising the
| other student's assignment. I denied it, of course. They gave a
| long speech on the seriousness of academic integrity and said
| that if I came clean, they would go easy. I explained there must
| have been some mistake - you got the wrong guy! But they were
| quite confident with their findings, which they proceeded to
| share with me. To say I was shocked when presented with the
| evidence would be the understatement of the century. I knew
| immediately what had happened and I knew I could prove my
| innocence. But I was still beyond pissed. I was pissed at the
| student who cheated me, and I was pissed at the prof and admin
| for falsely accusing me.
|
| Fortunately for me, I still had a copy of the old printout in my
| binder as well as on my network drive - conveniently labelled
| "v.1.0". I was also able to produce my corrected "v.2.0" and
| explained exactly where the bugs were and how I fixed them. I
| then suggested they speak to the other student and ask them to
| explain how their code works and if they could identify the bugs.
|
| After being confronted with this new evidence, the other student
| confessed - they had taken my printout from the recycle bin
| because they knew I always got full marks on the code. But I
| guess they had also assumed I always got it right on the first
| try.
|
| The other student was offered the opportunity to drop the class
| and re-take it next semester rather than receive an F. However,
| it was later revealed that they had been pulling the same stunt
| in other programming classes as well. I don't know much about
| what happened after that but I didn't see them around next
| semester.
|
| I didn't expect an apology from the student - although that would
| have been proper. But the fact that neither the professor nor the
| program coordinator apologised, or even admitted any mistake,
| never sat right with me.
|
| This article was a great read. Prof seems like he did his best.
| Fuck cheaters.
| jl2718 wrote:
| I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I
| think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests.
| The answers were all way too uniform and done without correction.
|
| In the first course, there was a student who definitely didn't
| cheat and was objectively horrible at all tasks assigned,
| consuming a frustratingly large portion of my grading time. This
| student ended up with a massively impressive resume including all
| the best places, and became the founder of a billion dollar
| cryptocurrency.
|
| In the second course, the worst student also clearly didn't
| cheat, and sometimes I gave extra points for answers that were
| wrong but the only ones in the class that were invented rather
| than regurgitated. That student founded one of the most
| influential companies in modern computer science, and also a 10
| billion-dollar cryptocurrency.
|
| I'm not sure what the lesson is. I had honest and very good
| students that didn't do much of note, but there were only two
| honest but awful students, and both had superlative success. Just
| for reference, I was honest and pushed hard to land somewhere in
| the low middle, and I've had my share of ups and downs, but
| definitely no competition for the lanterne rouges.
| paulpauper wrote:
| they got into Stanford, which confers above average
| intelligence and also bestows connections, so that probably
| helped. Interesting stories.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| What do you mean by "confers above average intelligence?"
| anonymoushn wrote:
| They become more intelligent when they receive the
| admission letter.
| imtringued wrote:
| become recognized as more intelligent
| [deleted]
| janow wrote:
| Perhaps that shows that these students figured out they're not
| so great at computer science, but ended up knowing a lot of
| people who were - and how to use their skills to make a small
| fortune.
| paulpauper wrote:
| those who know, code. those who don't, find someone who can
| imtringued wrote:
| It sounds like they were occupied with something that isn't
| college.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect
| that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot
| of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of
| questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for
| larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and
| find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when
| things moved online that really accelerated but previously it
| was a grey area since it could be just a form of studying.
|
| It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and
| people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite
| putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other
| students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of
| the curve but might have actually fared better under different
| conditions.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Tests always get leaked somehow. The students that were hit
| by the curve were, like me in school, struggling honestly
| toward the middle. That method is probably not as good at
| knowledge acquisition as the various methods of cheating, but
| hopefully better at flexible problem solving. I think these
| unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the
| rules are made up and the scores don't matter; the curve
| probably did not affect them.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Tests always get leaked somehow.
|
| Tangentially, it seems incredibly unfair that self-
| plagarism is a thing because "if you're not coming up with
| new material then you're not engaging with the course" and
| yet professors aren't even taking the _incredibly simple_
| step of changing a few numbers between repeats of an exam.
| It 's basically self-plagarism from the professor, the
| professor isn't engaging with the course in the same way
| that a self-plagarizing student is not.
|
| The dead-simple answer to students who are looking at test
| banks is to produce semi-novel material for each course, in
| the same fashion that students are expected to produce
| semi-novel material for each course. In both cases, yeah,
| it's kinda trite, there's only so many novel takes you can
| have on the best way to factor an integer or the
| implications of shakespeare on russian 20th century
| literature, but that's the system we've agreed upon.
|
| It should cut both ways and the fact that professors suffer
| consequences and difficulty from not producing novel
| material is not really the student's problem. The solutions
| of forcing syllabus-level contracts-of-adhesion above and
| beyond the school academic policies is not a fair solution
| either.
|
| I realize there's usually a "and whatever the syllabus says
| goes" clause but that's shitty, a lazy professor should not
| be able to exempt themselves from academic diligence by
| adding a "and it's OK for this professor to be lazy" clause
| in a contract of adhesion.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > Tests always get leaked somehow.
|
| This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests
| cannot be leaked. Problem solved.
|
| Or maybe don't do stupid tests for computer science.
|
| This is a space where whiteboarding is a good idea, in
| fact, interactive whiteboarding with a whole class is a
| great way to teach and work through problems.
|
| Any type of interactive test is hard to fake.
| Jensson wrote:
| > This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests
| cannot be leaked. Problem solved.
|
| I have never heard of lazy teachers ever getting any
| consequences, so why should they stop doing these things?
| You could make it a part of their job, but of course lazy
| principals wont do that either. There just aren't any
| incentives to run a school properly.
| acwan93 wrote:
| Fun example about lazy teaching: Our undergrad's HKN
| chapter kept a test bank of past exams in Physics, CS,
| etc. When I was studying for my Physics final I went back
| to past midterms and realized the professor recycled
| questions from previous years with some numbers changed
| up. I ended up filling my entire cheat sheet with the
| questions that weren't already on midterms but were in
| the test bank.
|
| The result? The final contained a majority of questions
| from that cheat sheet. I still pose this scenario to a
| couple friends nowadays asking if this would be
| considered cheating, and the responses are actually a mix
| of "no, you're just taking what's publicly available" and
| "yes, you're manipulating the system to get where you are
| and taking spots from someone with academic integrity".
| beowulfey wrote:
| Just ask yourself. Did you learn the course well enough
| that you could have done as well without those questions
| saved?
|
| As others have said, we go to college these days for a
| fastpass to middle class. If you haven't needed the
| knowledge since, maybe you got what you needed out of the
| class and you worked the system in a legal way. Or maybe
| you paid a lot of money for that class and yet cheated
| yourself out of the knowledge you were paying to be
| taught. On some level it comes down to how you feel about
| it.
| acwan93 wrote:
| Since that class I've reached the conclusion that school
| is not the best way to learn concepts and materials but
| to learn how to work a bureaucratic organization to reach
| your own end goal (whether it's a job, ticket to the
| middle class, or simply knowledge), which in itself is a
| valuable skill. I think museums, seminars, and some NPR
| shows ended up being the best ways for me to really
| master the material I would've otherwise learned in
| school.
| imtringued wrote:
| I think anyone who is naive enough to think that school
| is about anything but conformance deserves to fail. I did
| some courses before college and got a high grade and when
| I went there for my bachelor's degree, they didn't count
| that course towards my credit points, I had to do it
| again. In other words, my knowledge means jackshit at a
| educational institution. The only thing that matters is
| whether I can navigate the bureaucracy. Get that in your
| head.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| >I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different
| game where the rules are made up and the scores don't
| matter
|
| you may be on to something with this one
| paulpauper wrote:
| this was a huge deal back in the 40s-70s. They were called
| 'bibles'
| medler wrote:
| Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It's not
| surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being
| able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely
| successful in his time, but he wasn't a prodigy either.
| ikt wrote:
| So by and by you're saying something like Cardano is
| definitely not a ponzi because it's extremely focused on
| doing everything academically?
|
| https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-
| research-p...
|
| If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be
| doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of
| a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything
| about making themselves richer at the expense of new users
| either, for some reason it's all focused on developing a
| great blockchain that is sustainable and is usable for dapps
| which ultimately provides utility for end users.
| jl2718 wrote:
| GP said uncorrelated. I don't think that's an effective
| counterpoint, although GP seems to be indicating anti-
| correlation. Either way, this is about undergraduate
| students, and I also don't think you can claim superlative
| undergraduate performance for that particular founder.
| Maybe crypto is where motivated underperformers found a
| place at the table because the overperformers are settled
| in more civilized places. Also, these research papers in
| cryptocurrency are probably not comparable to serious
| contemporary work in mainstream journals of pure math and
| theoretical computer science, but I am personally
| fascinated by the way that old research is slowly finding
| it's way into applications through the sometimes absurd
| financialization of these ideas, enough to get scammed and
| swindled a bit myself.
| headsoup wrote:
| That wouldn't be a 'billion dollar'+ cryptocurrency though
| would it
| noahmasur wrote:
| It's a 16 billion dollar market cap currently.
| headsoup wrote:
| Guess we'll find out which it is in the next few months.
| Proof of stake is just as vulnerable to Ponzi, especially
| if promising any sort of outsized interest returns
| through middle-men services. The 'scientific, peer-
| reviewed philosophy' statements appear as marketing, with
| peer review appearing to be crypto tech conferences (not
| itself a poor measure), not the classical 'peer-review'
| format the statements would allude to.
| bojo wrote:
| I know what Cardano is because I've heard of it through the
| Haskell community. I bet most people have not. How do you
| sift through the thousands of ridiculous coins out there
| and say to yourself, "Oh, _they_ probably have integrity "?
|
| This continues to be a mystery to me as it seems no one can
| put themselves in the common man shoes. The common man
| doesn't care about tech. They don't care about the
| integrity behind it. They care about whether it can make
| them money.
|
| List 5 coins I've never heard of and I'd probably say,
| "ponzi scheme" without hesitation. Do I actually know if it
| is? No. Does it matter? No. If the majority of shitcoins
| come off as a ponzi scheme, then why would anyone think
| something like Cardano isn't?
| willbudd wrote:
| You don't need to know or trust any underlying technology
| though. The only thing you need is a basic grasp of
| Darwinian natural selection.
|
| The "shittier" those "shitcoins" are, the quicker they'll
| die out. The ones that heavily incentivize early adopters
| might hang around longer, but they too will inevitably
| fizzle out if they don't offer any practical innovation.
|
| But if something has a steadily growing user base year
| after year, maybe it's worth some attention after all?
|
| Or you can just keep screeching "Shitcoins! Shitcoins!".
| I guess we can all settle for ourselves what form of
| discourse we consider more constructive and worthwhile.
| pryce wrote:
| From my understanding of cryptocurrency and the people in it, I
| don't have the premise that founding a billion dollar (or 10
| billion dollar) cryptocurrency is laudable.
|
| It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as
| a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as
| even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have
| just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey
| argument[1]"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey
| woah wrote:
| renonce wrote:
| If it were a 216B cryptocurrency then it would indeed be
| laudable. It's Ethereum and it is innovating in every aspect.
| jl2718 wrote:
| The first is not revolutionary nor a swindle. The second is
| on that level or more so.
| Salgat wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies were innovating in one particular aspect,
| solving the double spending problem for truly anonymous
| transactions. Beyond that it's not as innovative as people
| think. Even Bitcoin supports smart contracts, and the only
| real noteworthy achievement in the real world Ethereum has
| achieved is becoming a massive platform for gamblers in the
| form of speculation, which makes up almost the entirety of
| Ethereum's activity. No name engineers at companies like
| Google deal with far more complex and far more practical
| problems as part of their job. I say this as someone who
| has written their own block chain from scratch (not a fork)
| and understands how incredibly niche and overblown
| cryptocurrencies are.
| ditonal wrote:
| Just because you went through a "how to build a
| blockchain in 1 hour" YouTube tutorial doesn't make you
| an expert on the topic anymore than someone who "built a
| Twitter clone in 1 hour" is an expert on distributed
| databases.
|
| The idea that no name engineers at Google work on more
| interesting problems is laughable to me as someone who
| worked there for 3 years and saw the vast majority of
| them work on garbage Angular apps or borgcfg . Not
| exactly designing a zero knowledge roll up chain in
| complexity.
|
| The "cryptocurrency=bad" bros on hacker news are getting
| so tiresome. Many people think things like adtech are
| scams yet if every single time someone brought up Google
| we derailed into that conversation it would rightfully
| get moderated but with crypto, dang is asleep at the
| wheel.
|
| Actual cryptography experts like Dan Boneh and Silvio
| Macali are full time on cryptocurrency, but since your L4
| Google buddy thinks it's a scam, that settles it so we
| bring it up every damn time.
| ftlio wrote:
| There's cool cryptography going on in Ethereum, but it's
| not helping economize anything useful. At some point you
| have to notice that all of the "cool new stuff" in
| Ethereum for the last 7 years all seems to disappear once
| greater fool liquidity has been exhausted.
|
| Meanwhile adtech is making the internet awful, and thus
| stories increasingly show up about how bad Google has
| been getting as well.
|
| I used to read all the white papers for all the new
| coins, and was definitely on the side of Ethereum as an
| interesting experiment when it released, but nothing has
| happened to make me think a premined securities play
| hasn't turned out to be a scam.
| Salgat wrote:
| I did not use any guides or tutorials, it was truly from
| scratch with some of the cryptography concepts borrowed
| from bitcoin, but with a completely different auth scheme
| for transactions designed specifically for business
| application. https://github.com/Salgat/FangChain
|
| And not everyone at companies like Google are doing the
| same thing. Just because you didn't know them doesn't
| mean there wasn't brilliant work being done there,
| especially with regard to their scaling and machine
| learning. The folks at deep mind are doing far more
| brilliant and innovative work than Ethereum.
| tyre wrote:
| > it is innovating in every aspect
|
| Could you expand on what you mean here? What are the
| aspects?
| renonce wrote:
| EVM based deterministic execution has proven to be a
| resilient model for smart contracts. The other major
| inventions are not Ethereum itself, but it led to, to
| name a few, PoS consensus and zero knowledge proofs which
| I particularly admired. It has grown into a huge
| ecosystem of practical cryptographic schemes. Ponzi
| schemes are possible with just Bitcoin, and yeah Ethereum
| is full of crypto ponzis at the moment, but all these
| useful cryptographic inventions may not have been made
| practical without Ethereum.
| ikt wrote:
| Well decentralisation is hard, it's particularly hard
| when it's dealing with real peoples money, it's hard to
| scale and hard to maintain, Ethereum is getting closer
| and closer day by day to moving to an alternative system
| called Proof of Stake, it's a different system from Proof
| of Work, you may be familiar with Bitcoin and its energy
| use.
|
| You can read more about issues on Vitaliks website for
| example when Musk tried to become a blockchain expert
| overnight he looked a bit silly:
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
|
| Vitalik is probably the only Billionaire in the world I
| don't hate and ethereums innovations are incredible.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Ethereum is getting closer and closer day by day to
| moving to an alternative system called Proof of Stake
|
| At least this is honest and doesn't provide a date given
| how many times the planned date has slipped.
| omegalulw wrote:
| As a benefit to society? Not laudable IMO. But it does take
| hard work to swindle people into your crypto - that's the
| perspective I read OPs comment in.
| ascorbic wrote:
| That you should leave your cheating until you've left education
| because there are fewer checks, people are more credulous and
| the rewards are greater?
| [deleted]
| ffhhj wrote:
| > billion-dollar cryptocurrency
|
| > I'm not sure what the lesson is
|
| Gambling is a profitable business.
| willbudd wrote:
| Becoming successful requires a stubborn conviction that you can
| make your own ideas a reality. Doing well on tests requires the
| ability to re-enact the ideas of others.
|
| They're both valuable skills of course, but they should be
| recognized as being distinct from each other; and measuring
| "intelligence" as some one-dimensional modality is a
| spectacular failure to do so, IMO.
|
| This idea is also to an extent analogous to the tradeoff
| between exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning
| (AI).
| jl2718 wrote:
| I've known a fair number of very successful people, and the
| strongest theme among them is ignorance of the challenges
| they had committed themselves to, perhaps even a stubborn
| disability to heed warning that there is yet another layer of
| the onion after years of peeling. I really don't think it's
| some kind of dreamer attitude or deceptive nature; maybe just
| blissful ignorance. In most cases, it starts with a simple
| idea that everybody had, e.g. a CS50 class project that
| everybody else did, but they all saw the technical and legal
| and market and competitive challenges, and most importantly
| and predictably failed to answer the biggest question, "why
| me?". Somehow the person with the worst answer to that
| question is always the one that fails to ask it. Despite this
| observation, none of this has changed the way I see things in
| my real life. I have read that the parasympathetic nervous
| system causes people to pay attention to details and become
| overwhelmed by risks. Chronic pain or fear or lack of sleep
| or overtraining or infection can do that. I recently had a
| lidocaine injection into a painful joint deformity, and the
| rest of that day I experienced astonishing positivity. So
| something tells me that it's not really all that complicated,
| but simple things like happiness and good health and
| relationships are far more rare than we would expect, at
| least among those with curiosity for difficult subjects.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Was it Do Kwon?
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| The most disturbing thing of all is that they just let the
| threats of reprisals slide like that. They can do what they want
| about the cheaters, but the students making the threats should
| have faced immediate expulsion.
|
| It's the worst kind of corruption, because all other forms of
| corruption hinges on everyone staying silent and playing along.
| Anyone who espouses the "snitches get stitches" attitude needs to
| be socially ostracized, because they are a menace wherever they
| go, whether in academia, industry or public office.
| sircastor wrote:
| From the article, those threats were Sent to the school's
| judicial review:
|
| > If it has a crying face emoji does it mean the threats
| weren't serious? I don't know, wasn't going to take any
| chances.
|
| > I won't repeat the email exchange with the student who had to
| be contacted by judicial affairs.
| strix_varius wrote:
| Later, it clarifies that the student who made two clear
| threats to the supposed "snitch" got "a second chance."
|
| This was the worst decision in a series of somewhat-too-
| lenient decisions. I would not want to teach at, study at, or
| send my kids to school at an institution that lacks a zero-
| tolerance policy for such threats.
| sanderjd wrote:
| How is this kind of "cheating" any different than study groups?
| When I was in school we would have small study groups where we
| would collaborate on figuring out homework answers. Maybe this
| was also cheating, but I don't think so; it was among the most
| enriching experiences in school and certainly a hell of a lot
| more like the working world than it would be to toil in solitary
| silence.
| danpalmer wrote:
| There's a big difference between a discussion between a few
| people to figure out an answer that they all understand, and
| posting the answer to a multiple choice question directly to
| the whole class.
|
| To use the author's measuring stick, study groups typically
| engage with the course material. Learning that the answer to
| question 5 is "B" is not engagement.
|
| Also, anecdotally, the study groups I was a part of were almost
| all based around figuring out answers to publicly available
| past exam papers, _not_ marked assignments. I think the sharing
| of answers (vs understanding) would have felt quite wrong to
| those of us involved.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah just different experiences I suppose. Although I guess I
| can't really think of any classes I took that had simple
| multiple choice assignments. But yeah, my math and science
| classes had graded take home assignments with quantitative
| exercises and it was normal (encouraged, even) to work on
| them in groups. And yeah, there tended to be some free
| loaders, who I guess I wouldn't debate were "cheating", but I
| didn't and honestly still don't think it was such a big deal.
| Even those sometime free loaders learned a lot of stuff and
| went on to be successful members of society. It would have
| been pretty stupid to kick them out of school for it. Maybe
| these are unpopular opinions, I dunno, but I just kind of see
| this whole concern as misplaced.
|
| I do agree that cheating on exams would be bad. Maybe my
| perspective comes from not really thinking graded homework is
| that great of an idea to begin with.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This thread, more than any I have read on Hacker News shows the
| greatest variation of opinion, and the least ability for us to
| have common agreement upon terms, normative behaviours, standards
| of judgement or goals. Sadly, education really is a mess. I think
| it reflects the schisms within wider society.
|
| After 30 years in and out of "academia" I am exasperated and
| despondent at the state of affairs and what I consider the total
| bastardisation of the function of education.
|
| The OP story of rampant, shameless cheating is all too familiar
| and is simply grist for the mill. It's something to which most
| professors have grown thick skins. This is the ordinary
| background against which we have to teach, day in, day out.
|
| Despite being a optimist in so many areas of life I see little
| prospect of fixing this without extraordinary and radical changes
| in the governance, funding and mission of universities.
| 323 wrote:
| Kids cheating seems to be an universal behavior, it happens in
| very different educational systems (US, Europe, Eastern
| Europe).
|
| I remember when I was a student, cheating didn't seem that much
| of a crime, to me, or to my peers. We mostly understood that if
| you cheat you might (or not) have problems later because you
| just basically wasted time in that course. So it was an assumed
| risk.
|
| It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically
| fighting against (kids) human nature.
|
| Also, snitching on cheaters was unthinkable. And not because of
| retaliation, but it just felt like very scummy behavior. In a
| way, like how criminal law in most places doesn't require
| family members to snitch on other family members who committed
| a crime.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically
| fighting against (kids) human nature.
|
| Yes you're absolutely right. Wars on symptomatic abstractions
| like "drugs", "terrorism" and "poverty" are always failures
| and become ad-hominem, as wars on addicts, wars _of_ terror,
| and wars against the poor.
|
| As surely as thieving loaves of bread is a response to
| starvation, cheating is just another symptom - as you say, a
| naturally human response - to an unjust and impossible
| circumstances. That doesn't make it "right", but the context
| at least offers us some understanding.
|
| People will stop seeing "selfishly gaming the system" as
| acceptable social behaviour once our systems resume serving
| the fullest interests of the people instead of trying to
| control, manipulate and limit them to the benefit of the few.
| styren wrote:
| I've personally never witnessed any cheating, heard any friends
| or students even allude to doing so, I never cheated myself and
| I can't even comprehend how you would cheat at most of the
| coursework I did in uni in Sweden.
|
| Sure you could copy your friends code, but you still had to
| present it to a TA who would certainly get suspicious if you
| couldn't answer to what you had written. Ditto for exams and
| essays/reports.
|
| Cheating, or elaborating on how to cheat, just wasn't efficient
| use of my time as a student, disregarding the morality of it.
| Frankly, it seems to me the way these students are being tested
| is not appropriate as it's easy to abuse and creates incentives
| for students to cheat.
| bckr wrote:
| What was the average number of students in your classes, and
| the average number of TAs?
| styren wrote:
| IIRC 150 students and maybe 6-10 TAs per class
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I've personally never witnessed any cheating, heard any
| friends or students even allude to doing so, I never cheated
| myself and I can't even comprehend how you would cheat at
| most of the coursework I did in uni in Sweden.
|
| For most of my life I would've been frightened to even say
| so, or risk accusations of being a "swot", "teachers pet" or
| as the Aussies call it, "a tall poppy".
|
| But the attitude that it's "normal" to cheat is common within
| US/UK/AUS culture now. Truth is I always considered cheating
| beneath me and was simply _WAY_ ahead of every class I ever
| took - but you can't say that in "polite" US/UK culture - one
| cannot be too pious and clean-cut, one must seem little bit
| like "everybody else" - even if everybody else is not really
| like that, if that makes sense.
|
| So actually I've taught at universities in Sweden (Stockholm)
| and Finland (Helsinki) and notice similar attitudes to those
| you say. But those cultures aren't without dirty hands
| either. Here's the weird thing: Tall Poppy Syndrome is
| culturally closest to _Jante Law_ [1], a Scandinavian ethos
| of "Don't think you're better than anyone else" which is
| precisely the corrosive culture that means people cheat
| because everybody else is cheating and causes a downward
| spiral or race to the bottom. "When
| you've done your very best When things turn out
| unpleasant When the best of men take bribes
| Isn't it the fool who doesn't?" -- Human League 1978
|
| It wasn't until I became a professor that I even knew this
| dynamic existed, but now I see it everywhere, not just in
| school.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
| styren wrote:
| To clarify, I'm not saying I would never cheat. Rather that
| cheating meant more complications and risks than completing
| my coursework in the way it was intended.
|
| If we were given take-home multiple choice forms to be
| judged by I'm certain people would cheat. But I've never
| seen that, possibly because it feels like a pretty lousy
| (and lazy) way of evaluating and educating students.
| themantalope wrote:
| I'm curious, what changes in governance and funding to higher
| ed institutions would you change? What did you teach/study?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Thanks for asking. I am an international visiting professor
| of computer science (specialising in DSP, signals and
| systems). I'd submit that's given me a fairly wide experience
| of higher education at least around the north-western
| hemisphere over three decades. Enough that I write regular
| and quite popular features for the Times. Any sincere answer
| is surely the contents of at least one whole book, so my
| response here would disappoint you. Instead please read my
| more positive commentary here [1] and here [2].
|
| [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/andy-farnell
|
| [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/authors/andy-
| far...
| andai wrote:
| Also, how would that impact cheating? I don't see the
| connection.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Cheating is a consequence of unfair values that push
| otherwise morally upright, hard-working people to
| transgress. Governance determines the values of a system.
| Therefore rampant cheating may be seen as symptom of a
| failure of governance, so improving it would reduce
| cheating. Hope that helps you to see the connection.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| *For a semester. The author fixed the problem during the next
| time the course was taught.
| StillBored wrote:
| Anyway, I don't see anything in the article about what the
| academic office said when he turned all those reports in. I'm
| really curious, these kinds of situations tend to make national
| news when some prof brings a large number of students up on
| academic honor code violations. (ex:
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/20/least-100-nav...)
|
| I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out
| weight the positives and generally should be banned in college.
| Banging your head against a problem for hours at a time assures
| you understand all the wrong ways of getting the right answer.
| This means you have a far more detailed understanding, and there
| is always formal academic study/the prof/etc and the possibility
| of asking about difficulties in class.
|
| And finally, group chat is small potato's, I'm fairly certain
| there is a fair bit of 3rd parties basically doing
| assignments/taking tests these days for students. Primary because
| I was "mentoring" a student in a subject and found myself in a
| situation that I had to extract myself from because it crossed a
| line of mine.
| user8139471 wrote:
| > I'm fairly certain there is a fair bit of 3rd parties
| basically doing assignments/taking tests these days for
| students.
|
| I can confirm this.
|
| Personally, I have seen as high as 10 %, but those numbers were
| heavily skewed towards students who could only speak Chinese.
| Not sure what was up with them.
|
| I do not teach anymore, but I have heard that the situation
| became much worse in the last few years.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| The tuition rates paid by foreign governments on behalf of
| some International students is astronomical and hard to be
| ethical about.
| gfaster wrote:
| > I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study
| out weight the positives and generally should be banned in
| college
|
| That's a... strong opinion.
|
| I'm genuinely at a loss of how you can think that. If studying
| in groups was harmful enough to be banned by colleges, then
| shouldn't online classes have been tremendous boons to
| learning? On a personal level, I can barely straighten out two
| thoughts in my head unless I have someone I can talk it over
| with, I couldn't imagine collaborative study being outright
| banned.
|
| Am I missing something here?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| As a Spanish professor, it's interesting to read this because it
| highlights various cultural differences.
|
| - Here, it is always assumed that many students (maybe 50%?) will
| cheat if they believe they can do so without being caught. When
| the pandemic hit and we moved to online testing, basic anti-cheat
| measures like shuffling the order of questions in a test or not
| allowing going back to previous questions were taken from the get
| go, it's considered obvious here that you need to do that (just
| like, in an on-site multiple-choice test, you have to either have
| several shuffled versions of the test, or enough distance between
| students that they can't see each other's test, or really good
| surveillance). It's shocking to me that this professor is
| surprised that cheating happened under these conditions.
|
| - On the other hand, while cheating students are failed and/or
| otherwise penalized when caught, we would never penalize, or even
| scold, a student for not snitching. Snitching on your classmates
| is almost universally considered a bad thing to do here, and we
| would never demand that students do that, not only due to the
| fear of retaliation mentioned in the post, because... it's just
| not right, they're your classmates!
|
| - When I myself was a student (also here in Spain), I had a
| professor who spent some time in an American university and used
| to talk enthusiastically about how in America they had a very
| strict academic integrity culture and cheating just didn't happen
| at all. No students would even think about it, because it would
| be a dishonor, they would be deeply ashamed if they got caught
| and no one would want to talk to them anymore, or something like
| that. While this professor was a good guy and I'm sure he really
| believed what he was saying, I never really believed it. Accounts
| like this confirm I was right. I think he probably saw there this
| attitude of not accepting as a given that cheating will just
| happen when possible, similarly to the post author, and confused
| his American colleagues' thoughts with reality. I often wonder
| how many professors in America live in this bubble where cheating
| does not exist if you don't see it, and whether it's just naivete
| or hypocrisy.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It's shocking to me that this professor is surprised that
| cheating happened under these conditions.
|
| I think it's a bit of laziness and religious mentality. In US
| it is believed, I think, that making the rules, framing them in
| language of morality and harshly punishing the ones that don't
| obey them is as good as understanding and solving the actual
| problem.
|
| Holy word, sin, punishment.
|
| And when enough money is involved you my go light on punishment
| which is beneficial for enforcers and provides outlet for
| people who otherwise would bring down this system and replace
| it with something more reasonable. There's so much gray area
| everywhere under the overt strictness of the rules.
|
| This mentality is visible in so many systems in the US.
| tester89 wrote:
| > As a Spanish professor, it's interesting to read this because
| it highlights various cultural differences. > - Here, it is
| always assumed that many students (maybe 50%?) will cheat if
| they believe they can do so without being caught. [...]
|
| It really is a cultural difference. Spain and the UK have
| ticket barriers for their public transport, while Germany and
| Switzerland don't, preferring to rely on random controls.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > Snitching on your classmates is almost universally considered
| a bad thing to do here, and we would never demand that students
| do that, not only due to the fear of retaliation mentioned in
| the post, because... it's just not right, they're your
| classmates!
|
| Why exactly is it "not right"?
|
| I agree that the student should be compelled to police their
| peers. Both because everyone should be allowed to decide for
| themselves if they want to take the risk reprisals, and also
| because it may create perverse incentives.
|
| But I don't accept that it's "not right". College is a golden
| opportunity for young people to participate in building the
| kind of society they want to spend the rest of their lives
| living in. Do they want one where corruption and other
| injustices are exposed in the open, or one where they are swept
| under the rug and allowed to perpetuate themselves?
|
| A quick cheat or bribe for a shortcut to meet your goal feels
| good when you can get away with it, but how will it feel down
| the line when you're the one who have fallen victim and nobody
| will speak on your behalf? Because this is the precedent you're
| setting for your students here.
| gauddasa wrote:
| randusername wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone mention grade inflation yet, which I've
| always thought was deeply related to cheating. Obviously
| undergraduate GPA is a useful metric for aspiring academics, but
| I don't understand why everyone else is encouraged to care so
| much about it. I would rather our undergraduate institutions
| acknowledge that most students are busy learning a variety of
| lessons inside and outside the classroom and present those
| students with honorable paths to lesser commitment. Maybe systems
| split along mastery, competence, and familiarity (and failure). A
| world where it is perfectly normal for a future web dev to phone
| it in on a surface-level track for algorithms, but a future civil
| engineer is completing oral exams in statics to prove mastery.
|
| Nobody _wants_ to cheat. Personally I really regret all the
| shenanigans I pulled in college to clear hurdles when I felt I
| had no other option. I wish I would have spoken more frankly with
| the professor and worked out some way to write some papers or do
| a project for an honest (and interesting!) C rather than keep
| killing myself gaming the problem sets for the B+ that was
| expected of me in classes I wasn't a good fit for.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| This is a bizarre post. The author is disconnected from reality.
|
| When cheating is easy, and especially if the grades are curved,
| non-cheaters are harshly punished.
|
| The author intentionally created such an environment and is
| surprised cheating is going on.
|
| The only possible solution I can see is that the majority of the
| grade is derived from non-online exams held under strict
| conditions:
|
| * IDs are checked
|
| * Randomized seating that is announced just before entering the
| class.
|
| * Enforced distance between test takers.
|
| * Outside proctors that have no sentiments towards the students.
|
| * Even going to the bathrooms should be regulated.
|
| * Smart devices are deposited during the exams.
|
| * Swift harsh punishment to cheaters, and policy violaters (e.g.
| use of smartphone during exam)
|
| * Constant vigilance in adapting to new methods of cheating.
|
| Without all the above, non-cheaters are effectively punished.
|
| Nothing is perfect, but such steps limit cheating and reduce the
| incentive for cheating.
| kaimalcolm wrote:
| To say the author "intentionally created" an environment where
| cheating is commonplace I think may be a little unfair to them.
| Whether they run a given course online or in person is almost
| certainly well above their pay grade. While the situation was
| far from ideal and I believe he may have been too lenient in
| some situations (the plagiarism on the academic integrity
| assignment for one), at the end of the day he made the best of
| a very bad situation. No doubt, in-person exams as you
| described are the most cheat-proof way, but in a scenario where
| the author has no say in this, it's not a terrible outcome.
| Look at the semester following the one with widespread cheating
| - he made significant changes based on the past issues and in
| the process managed to eliminate a lot of the issues.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I like your line of discussion so I will add some more thoughts
| regarding the author's need for self-reflection. I have
| recently graduated so may provide some perspective:
|
| * They read comments about their teaching, and shrugged it off
| as "a vocal minority". I cannot guarantee it's the case, but
| it's not a "minority" it's most likely the median opinion that
| most students are too shy to share. And then the online course
| evals are sent out the last week of the semester and most don't
| care anymore to share what they really think.
|
| * The author made no discussion of the add/drop deadline which
| is usually around Midterm 2. If I was a student not cheating
| but in the group chat and realized the professor was running a
| sting operation (instead of reporting cheaters when they
| discovered them?) I would probably be inclined to drop.
|
| * The Author explains their love of R analysis, then gives no
| data or statistics on students who were in the chat and still
| did well on Midterm 2 (still learned material).
|
| * I prefer the weekly quizzes that are basically homework, with
| free discussion / question compiling on google docs, but then
| have very strict exams. To claim something is "open notes" but
| then also that discussing the questions afterwords is cheating
| seems silly.
| djm_ wrote:
| Did you miss the whole pandemic bit or are you too
| "disconnected from reality"?
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Much of the world returned to offline teaching "last
| semester".
|
| It was like that before the pandemic. If you expect academic
| integrity in an online class, you are deluded. The students
| here were just dumb enough to do it in a class-wide chat.
| Smart cheaters do it in small, trusted, cliques.
|
| I have pre-pandemic experience as a student and as a TA in
| both an Israeli university and a top American publish
| university.
|
| The Israeli systems does it as I described above, and the
| American university does not. The US university held an exam
| for 350 students in a single conference hall. The proctors
| were the TAs. We could not check IDs, students seated
| themselves, and there were no effective supervision. The
| easiest way to cheat was just to switch the exam forms with a
| friend.
|
| We intentionally created a massive incentive to cheat. Worse,
| we curved the grades, punishing non-cheaters.
|
| I tried to protest, but was completely ignored because it was
| always done like that.
|
| The pandemic only made this worse.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Quite sad that nothing came out of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.
|
| Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about the education paradigm
| and why it should be changed, and in what ways. He appeared on
| TED[1][2], too, since then, and probably elsewhere as well.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
| jahewson wrote:
| Sadly he passed away in 2020.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oh wow, I just remembered now. :( That's really upsetting! He
| was the only person giving me hope. :/ Thank you for the
| reminder.
| imglorp wrote:
| Here's how another professor, Richard Quinn, dealt with
| widespread cheating in his class at UCF. He had noticed a bimodal
| distribution in the scores, uhoh! Never cheat in a class where
| the professor knows more about stats than you do.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > There were 100+ students in the class
|
| > I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online
| lectures.
|
| > It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was
| blatantly cheating the entire time.
|
| How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of
| money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1
| of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class?
|
| To be clear, I'm not blaming the teacher here but the system has
| continually failed students. It's become a stupid game that you
| pay a lot to play because you have to. When I was younger I used
| to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a
| foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is
| no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to
| exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and
| seek to exploit the system whenever you can?
|
| Consider the counter position: what would an incredibly
| passionate, engaged and hardworking student get from this
| situation? This experience for that type of student is scarcely
| better than just teaching yourself from a text book and free
| online lectures (in fact, all of the material for this class is
| free online)... only you don't get a degree doing that.
|
| My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough
| empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to
| catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have
| gotten a raw deal. Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra
| hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a
| shit (if there are any left).
| catjam25 wrote:
| > When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I
| realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to.
| The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts.
| The university is trying to exploit you the student so why
| would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system
| whenever you can?
|
| Two wrongs don't make a right. Yes the university system has
| its issues, especially through the COVID pandemic. But that
| does not justify this behavior.
|
| > Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-
| on-one with the students that actually give a shit
|
| Actions have consequences. You can't just ignore them.
| goelbab wrote:
| You can definitely ignore them if you think that ignoring
| them and putting work elsewhere is a net benefit to everyone.
| Not every action merits a response.
| catjam25 wrote:
| People who cheat in university deserve consequences.
| AngryData wrote:
| For the amount of money most universities cost, it would
| be stupid and irresponsible not to cheat and risk failing
| a class. Struggling and failing legitimately has no
| upsides and only downsides, big financial downsides,
| along with possibly a delayed or no graduation if it cuts
| their funding.
|
| I would agree with your position if college was either
| extremely cheap or free. But as a money making endeavor
| it serves more as a roadblock to prosperity or in
| numerous other cases a potential pit of debt.
| catjam25 wrote:
| It's a sad reflection of our societies failures to
| provide higher education as a right. Either way, that
| doesn't justify cheating.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| Would you support an alternative scheme where cheaters
| just receive the degree directly after the offer? It
| would save four years.
| Sirened wrote:
| Ah but there's still a huge inefficiency here! Why bother
| with the offer? Just let them include their four years of
| tuition to $65 application fee and make the rest of the
| application optional. You wouldn't want them to waste all
| that time writing bullshit essays about their passion for
| their major if they're not going to study it anyways :)
|
| Supporting a "benign neglect" model of cheating is how
| you get a very expensive degree mill. The perception of
| others that your institution is a degree mill both
| degrades the value of those who already graduated with a
| degree from there _and_ it devalues the research put out
| by the staff ( "oh, look at this paper that came out of
| that sham university down the road").
| tomnipotent wrote:
| You do realize that universities are just businesses?
| catjam25 wrote:
| And that justifies cheating how?
| chris_wot wrote:
| The teacher in this case gave them plenty of opportunities for
| learning engagement and redemption.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| There is absolutely shame in cheating, you just don't feel any.
| Not the same thing.
| electrondood wrote:
| It's clear to me from the writing that empathy was abundant.
|
| Even if you find it demoralizing, the cheating behavior was to
| basically half-ass the entire course and not try at all. We
| already have an intellectually lay and pervasive culture of
| "just tell me the answer."
| chrisco255 wrote:
| What a terrible piece of advice. If you ignore a problem like
| this it only gets worse for everyone. The cheaters included,
| who go through life with that mindset.
|
| The best teachers I had in university were very tough and very
| strict. They taught me to study harder. They taught me how to
| learn difficult material. They taught me to understand things
| at a deep level. They would give 10 minute pop quizzes designed
| to fail you if you did not know the material (no time to even
| look up an answer or pass to a friend) ahead of time.
|
| Fail the cheaters. It's for everyone's own good. No one grows
| up if you never make them.
| quacker wrote:
| _My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough
| empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying
| to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students
| have gotten a raw deal._
|
| I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for
| the students. That's pretty clear from the lengths they went to
| individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so
| on.
|
| I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching
| cheaters? I'm not sure. They've written code to detect
| plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz/exam structure that's
| ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long
| windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and
| exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify
| students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second
| chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still
| occurred. Then they wrote this article.
|
| So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of
| time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.
|
| Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to
| restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at
| a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-
| use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but
| it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing
| reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I went to a top ten ranked cs school for what it's worth. I
| graduated pre-covid. Every single cs class has minimum 100
| students. The department recorded classes so that they could
| increase attendance without getting bigger rooms. By the time I
| was an upperclassmen less than half the students showed up to
| lectures. Having 25/200 students present was common. It really
| was demoralizing to realize that the department didn't see a
| problem with many if not most students graduating without
| having actually spoken to a professor once, since you had to
| show up a couple hours early for office hours if you wanted to
| be seen. It's clear that the undergrads were nothing more than
| moneybags to my institution, so naturally students saw their
| education as the transaction it was. Most students were there
| because they figured graduating from a top school is what is
| required to get a FAANG job as a 21 year old.
| paulpauper wrote:
| when businesses do it, it's called delegation, efficiency, or
| collaboration, but when students do it, it's called cheating.
| it's unfair in that sense.
| catjam25 wrote:
| This has nothing to do with fairness. It has everything to do
| with integrity. You justifying these actions is part of the
| problem. This is the attitude that these businesses you are
| accusing take themselves. "Others are doing it so why
| shouldn't I?" It is a direct lead to societal decay.
| stale2002 wrote:
| The justification here, is that focusing on individuals
| does not solve the problem, and instead only helps you feel
| better about yourself by how evil you think other people
| are.
|
| Instead of focusing on why you think other people are more
| evil than you are, instead people should focus on ways to
| actually solve the problem, instead of satisfying their
| internal need for moralization.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm curious what you call it when, say a car company programs
| their vehicles to notice when they are on an emission test
| stand and will operate differently to get the best test
| result possible. Because regulators call it cheating and
| society as a whole suffers from it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| maybe the regulation or test is not necessary?
| bumby wrote:
| Except society as a whole has deemed it necessary for
| lots of reasons. Even strict libertarians tend to think
| one of the better roles of government is to regulate
| negative externalities.
| paulpauper wrote:
| has society also deemed it necessary that all undergrads
| must take anthropology? I was not aware that this was put
| to a vote.
| bumby wrote:
| Depends. If the hiring group has said, for example, you
| need an ABET degree to be qualified and ABET has said an
| anthropology course was part of the required curriculum,
| then yes.
|
| In other words, groups (society and otherwise) have
| created standardized curriculums for a reason. You may
| not agree with their decision, but the reasonable
| response is to remove yourself from consideration, not to
| lie in order to get the outcome you want.
| bitwize wrote:
| Hello! What do you think you're doing? Only me and Garth get
| to talk to the camera.
| junon wrote:
| This is a preposterous comparison of apples to oranges.
| readme wrote:
| you're radicalized against the system
|
| the system is not rigged, going to college at all is a
| privilege that many don't get
|
| i can't imagine trying to justify cheating with this logic
| while simultaneously there are more honorable people scavenging
| their lunch from the trash
|
| i get it though, online school that resulted from covid is some
| of the worst instruction. fortunately that's coming to an end
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| The price of tuition, the necessity of loans, large
| student/teacher ratios ...
|
| Increase the price, decrease the cost, and also the balance
| of power is against the student.
|
| That looks rigged to me.
| readme wrote:
| it's not rigged for a simple reason: you don't have to go
| usrn wrote:
| You don't have to pay rent either.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Indeed. But that's not how it's presented to high
| schoolers. Parents, secondary school administrators, and
| post-secondary school employees are all complicit.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm went to school at a time where everything was curved.
|
| In that environment, you had to fight for every GPA point and
| were at a disadvantage of you were a stickler for academic
| integrity. In a 500 person lecture, ~25 were getting a 4.
| It's easy to be on a high horse at an Ivy school, where
| people who don't show get gentleman's Cs and the average GPA
| is like a 3.6.
|
| Obviously this situation in the article wasn't that. But I
| think the professor did a good job of empathizing with the
| students and accepting that there are varying types of
| motivations.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > not having a enough empathy for these students
|
| Are you fucking kidding me? After the absurd lengths he went to
| to give them chance after chance after they kept cheating, lied
| to his face about it, possibly threatened each other with
| violence, and repeatedly plagiarized their apologies for
| plagiarizing? After all this, you have the gall to claim he
| doesn't have _enough empathy_? What does it take, in your view?
| kubav wrote:
| I do not want to defend cheating but I see 2 big issues which
| promotes this behavior.
|
| 1. Course was created to scale so cheating is super easy and
| harder to spot without side channel (common pool of multiple
| choice questions).
|
| Author fixed this, which deserves huge thumbs up. Also making
| course more interesting is great and I would love if all teachers
| reflected this. Punishing students without changing course would
| probably did not solve anything.
|
| 2. Technical course students have zero clue about technology they
| use but they completely trust it.
|
| It looks like they do not care about learning how thinks work.
| Probably they are there just for a degree. Imagine hiring someone
| like that, freshly from college, without experience and not
| willing to learn anything.
| [deleted]
| gauddasa wrote:
| Fomite wrote:
| One of the most interesting things that comes out of Academia
| StackExchange when students are asking about what to do about
| academic dishonesty violations is how quickly they go to the
| "Cell Block Tango" defense.
|
| "I didn't do it, but if I done it..."
| milkey_mouse wrote:
| There are a couple reasons why I think it's important for
| cheating not to be widespread. I've seen The Case Against
| Education, signalling theory, and all the usual stuff along those
| lines (well, maybe it's only usual if you have a particularly
| contrarian friend who never stops talking about it) and while
| it's made me jaded about where The True Value Of A College
| Education lies, it didn't make me think "well, it's pointless, so
| I might as well cheat!"
|
| There are sort of three groups at play here, although the
| boundaries are fuzzy. Some are truly there to learn, in which
| case there's not much motivation to cheat. Some are there to get
| a degree because of its implications in the job market, but don't
| cheat (for better or for worse). And some are there for the piece
| of paper and will do whatever it takes to get it. I don't fault
| these people: maybe they have to maintain a certain GPA for a
| visa or scholarship, or maybe they got COVID and an inflexible
| professor told them as of 2022 it's "policy" not to offer
| extensions "just" because of COVID. At least, I wouldn't fault
| cheaters were it not for the knock-on effects.
|
| Part of me says the faster we dilute the value of a degree (by
| granting them to people who cheat their way through) the faster
| we get rid of the wasteful, cost-disease-ridden, elitist status
| quo for universities (at least in the US) as the amount of
| entropy afforded to a prospective employer by the presence of a
| degree drops to zero. But I also want all the work (and $$$) I
| have put into getting a degree to mean something. Every time
| someone cheats their way through a course and, despite their
| degree or GPA, is less competent on the job because of it, they
| marginally decrease the school's reputation: if the last person
| with those credentials wasn't actually that good, why would the
| next? I'm not sure how much this is happening yet, but I think it
| will increase in the future if cheating remains easy and common.
| Even discounting "degree seigniorage", if a professor grades on a
| curve, obviously students that don't cheat will be at a
| disadvantage. It's not really correct to say "cheaters don't
| affect you, just focus on your own work."
|
| So why not have everyone cheat? First of all, some people
| actually want to learn something. Second of all, I think most
| people would like it less than I if universities and their
| degrees lost their cultural and economic cachet. Finally, I can't
| believe I have to say this, but cheating is inequitable: some are
| better at cheating than others. In the past (and probably still
| today, but what do I know) this was frats with banks of past
| assignments and tests. In the last few years, it goes as in the
| article: someone makes a group chat, though if they have an ounce
| of sense they won't post a link to it in a chat the professor is
| monitoring, at least if they intend to cheat through it. Invites
| spread organically from student to student or from DNS-like "hub"
| chats where people can ask for invites to any class's group chat.
| It would be really bad for cheaters if professors were on the
| "hub", able to join every class's group chat, so invites to the
| "hub" are guarded more zealously. Obviously they'd never be
| shared in a Zoom chat or other official platform, so online
| students (most of them, in 2020 and 2021) are left out. Offline,
| less socially connected people are less likely to get invited.
| Personally, even putting morals aside, I would not have been able
| to cheat if I wanted in the past few years. Cheating was
| everywhere, but I was anxious enough as it is actually doing the
| work; the added anxiety of cheating and maybe getting caught
| (especially in such a dramatic way as in this post!) would have
| been untenable. Maybe I should demand exam answer keys as a
| Section 504 accomodation...
| paulsku wrote:
| First of all, I'mm sorry you had to endure something so
| emotionally straining.
|
| Please consider the the students perspective. I, myself, went
| through academia with a one single goal - to obtain a piece of
| paper for future employment reasons, which I endured, with
| gritted teeth
|
| I have no idea how it works on your country of residence, but I
| had a curriculum that consisted of about 20% of classes, of
| absolute irrelevancy to my primary field of study. I have no
| regrets cheating on those classes, just to get it over with.
|
| I urge you to entertain the idea, that some students,
| unfortunately, were there not by choice, but merely "passing
| through".
|
| Consider this a problem with the educational system itself, not
| students having a personal grudge with your subject or self.
|
| Finally, no offense intended, but I urge you to reconsider your
| strong loyality to the (sprry, probably misquoting) "academic
| code of conduct" and filling out reports about your misbehaving
| students. Replacing idealism in favour of pragmatism might suit
| everyone's needs better :)
|
| P.S. Sounds like yur students would gratly benefit form some
| education in the field of OPSEC :)
| ascar wrote:
| > Please consider the the students perspective. I, myself, went
| through academia with a one single goal - to obtain a piece of
| paper for future employment reasons, which I endured, with
| gritted teeth > > I have no idea how it works on your country
| of residence, but I had a curriculum that consisted of about
| 20% of classes, of absolute irrelevancy to my primary field of
| study. I have no regrets cheating on those classes, just to get
| it over with.
|
| The point of academia isn't to prepare you for your future
| profession. It's not supposed to teach you the on-the-job
| skills. It's about learning to learn, about getting equipped
| with a toolset to tackle novel problems and give a broad
| theoretical basis for that in your field of study. Also to
| demonstrate you can learn and work through a subject that's not
| (or you think is not) directly relevant for you.
|
| That and more are the qualities future employers attribute to
| that piece of paper and letting cheating slide is certainly not
| pragmatic.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If anyone still wonders why companies give leetcode interviews,
| this is why.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Leetcode interviews are _also_ easy to cheat on.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not if you have to do it in front of the interviewer.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's still just as easy to cheat, because it just becomes a
| matter of increasing your question surface area. Hop on
| LeetCode, memorize the more popular questions (because
| inevitably companies can and do reuse questions), pretend
| you've never seen it before and you're golden. It's the
| exact same way students would cheat on a closed book exam.
|
| Leetcode just incentivizes people to play the Leetcode
| game. It does not signify skill or ability or anything of
| the sort. It at most filters for candidates that cheat or
| candidates that end up particularly lucky that day.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Memorizing how to solve hundreds of leetcode questions
| isn't cheating, it's _learning_. One can 't help learning
| how to code doing that.
| paleotrope wrote:
| I wonder what the equivalent of a Leetcode interview for
| someone with a Bachelors in Psychology is.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| "How does your mother feel about this interview?"
| nradov wrote:
| Cheating is routine in remote interviews.
|
| https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-friends-who-cheated-in-int...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Just come up with my own questions that aren't answered on
| google.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| I was assigned a class to shadow when I flirted with being an
| anthropologist.
|
| (My now deceased PhD committee member griped that I "appropriate
| the ethnographic gaze" -- that's probably why I raise my eyebrows
| so much lately.)
|
| The entire class was being lectured on plagarism. They were
| almost entirely internation students, almost entirely from a
| specific country, and they almosty entirely manage to
| misunderstand things only to their benefit.
|
| (It was always an American, not someone from... there... I had to
| do things like go into my apartment and retreive a Louisville
| slugger because they were walking off with my neighbor's bike.
|
| (I'm not required to call the police. I can deal with you and let
| YOU call, get a report number, and hope a detective or whatever
| decides it's worth the attention of the law. Fool around and find
| out that even full on cryptoanarchists[1] will step away from
| they keyboard if you piss them off enough, and if that makes you
| feel threatened, don't touch physical goods that don't belong to
| you unless you're willing to risk dying for them.)
|
| [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/crypto-anarchist-manifesto/
| WalterBright wrote:
| In my day at Caltech, it operated on the honor system, meaning it
| was trivial to cheat and get away with it.
|
| An interesting consequence of the honor system is since the
| students liked it, they hated cheaters. Any student who was
| cheating was well advised to not tell _anyone_ about it. Wanna be
| ostracized? Brag about cheating.
|
| I remember one Physics midterm which most of the class failed.
| Not what you'd expect if there was significant cheating.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I remember that cheating was considered very serious and anyone
| caught would be expelled.
|
| Surely the reputation and integrity of the institution comes
| before the rights of a dishonest person.
|
| Perhaps more effort should be in catching the cheats and removing
| them?
| frozencell wrote:
| This will only increase with AI.
| iandanforth wrote:
| This was handled very very poorly by the professor. Their first
| mistake was putting policy before education. It simply does not
| matter that students violated a school policy or that the school
| process required forms. If you cheat in Candyland you have to
| remember it's still Candyland, don't get so full of yourself that
| you think your academic bubble and its processes _matter_.
|
| Secondly they delayed what really mattered, pointing out that
| students were putting in a lot of effort to accomplish something
| just as farcical as what the teacher was doing. Passing a course
| without learning anything. Because of the self importance off
| professors and institutions students are given the impression
| that grades matter. Then they do stuff like this.
|
| Instead the Prof could have immediately said holy crap everyone I
| just realized I've been logged into chat all year, most of you
| have been cheating _badly_ , and some of you are getting
| _nothing_ from this course.
|
| So now we're going to talk about online privacy, security
| hygiene, and time effort tradeoffs. My goal is for you to be less
| stupid and better informed when you leave this class.
|
| Then they could go back and find the students who hadn't done any
| work (other than cheating) and drop them from the class.
|
| FFS teach kids don't play games.
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| It's outrageous that students who logged into the chat but didn't
| share answers were punished. What is a student supposed to do
| when literally everybody else is cheating? Take a C because the
| course is graded on the curve?
|
| These chats exist in every course in every college course and the
| students who don't join them either because they're honest or
| don't have the right friends have no chance of graduating with a
| decent GPA.
|
| The problem is lazy professors and TAs creating assignments and
| quizzes that are easy to grade. Essays and papers are harder to
| grade than multiple choice quizzes but they also prevent students
| from cheating.
|
| Do your damn job and cheating won't be a problem.
| user8139471 wrote:
| As a TA, I can tell you that there is no form of assignment
| that can not be cheated on. For example, essays and papers will
| usually contain sections copied straight from literature or
| from other students.
|
| Another common proposal is to give individual assignments to
| each student, but it is usually impossible to make equally
| difficult assignments, so this approach is not very fair. It
| also does not work when students are paying other people to do
| the assignments for them, which has become a huge problem over
| the last few years with the commercialization of cheating
| through various platforms.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry
| into the middle class.
|
| This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese
| students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well.
|
| Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only
| cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational
| opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-
| to-earth: Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you
| spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard
| choice.
|
| Once you have the piece of paper (regardless of how you got it),
| you're in the club. So the goal is to obtain that piece of paper
| by any means necessary.
| proc0 wrote:
| > Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend
| the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice.
|
| Yes, but the assumption is you're passing with the knowledge in
| your head. Having the career knowledge is what in theory allows
| you to get the job, and then not flip burgers. I'm not sure how
| students end up thinking it's literally the number of your
| grade that makes the difference.
|
| Maybe it differs from career to career, because I guess some
| careers it's a matter of getting your foot in the door and
| that's it. With more technical careers it's already the case
| your grade is not as important as demonstrating expertise in
| the first few months on the job.
| kstenerud wrote:
| > I'm not sure how students end up thinking it's literally
| the number of your grade that makes the difference.
|
| Because it literally is true. Students aren't stupid; they
| know that higher education is largely a sham, and that the
| number they get and the prestige of the institution is what
| makes the difference (beyond simply having the paper - which
| is the most important part of course) in their entry level to
| the middle class or upper-middle-class workplace. The actual
| content of their education is largely irrelevant for most
| places that require it. Only the number matters.
|
| And cheating isn't the only symptom of this problem; grade
| inflation is another. Both students and faculty are
| responding rationally to the unspoken truth. To NOT cheat is
| to increase the risk of living a life of poverty. To NOT
| inflate grades is to condemn more of your students to that
| life. Honor codes only mean something in places where
| everyone is of similar privilege.
|
| As the metric becomes less indicative of reality, the smart
| people find more creative ways to game it.
| proc0 wrote:
| Yeah fair point, and it's unfortunate it is that way. I
| wonder how much the Internet has contributed to this
| because schools used to be the only source of information
| in many cases but now a lot of that is easily searchable.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > as important as demonstrating expertise in the first few
| months on the job.
|
| But you must get the job first and you generally get a job
| with a resume. Doesn't matter what is in your head. You
| better have enough on a one page piece of paper to make
| people believe you know it. A grade is one piece of evidence
| you can use for that.
| [deleted]
| quacked wrote:
| This is the simplest and most accurate summary I've seen so
| far. Unless you're a wolf or extremely lucky, without a degree
| there is no way to get into a 40-50 hour per week job where you
| can get paid a car, a nice apartment, and vacations at no risk
| to your own finances. Middle-class jobs are the pinnacle of
| non-aristocratic luxury.
| [deleted]
| rapht wrote:
| Call me an elitist but this is where I like the French "Grandes
| Ecoles" system: - public educations gets you a 2 year intensive
| training leading up to a competitive exam with one branch
| towards engineering schools and one branch towards business
| schools - the competitive exam is the real deal, and it's not
| really "cheatable": you get your chair in a room with ample
| space for a few days, a few hours/day on row, and a guy in each
| room monitoring the exam, no cellphones, until you have taken
| all subjects - the results allow you in one or more schools,
| and of course accessing the really best schools implies
| outstanding level in the exam - ... and indeed, after that, you
| get the sesame and no-one cares if you chest while in school,
| actually nobody cares about your grades there, just that you
| get the diploma ...
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Great summary. Might have to save this.
| User23 wrote:
| > This has been going on for decades in Asia
|
| I'm no sinologist, but isn't this off by at least an order of
| magnitude if not two? The imperial civil service exam is famous
| after all and the Chinese culture is millennia ancient. The
| incentives for cheating have been around for a very long time.
| refurb wrote:
| No, none of this is new and it didn't start in Asia. People
| have always cheated and always will.
| lostcohort wrote:
| vikingerik wrote:
| This is not statistically significant. There are 130,900
| public schools in America. Roughly 130,880 of them have never
| been shot at. It sucks for the ones who have, but they are
| 0.015% of the total.
| grosswait wrote:
| Nor is it even relevant.
| Bud wrote:
| Your math isn't very good. Maybe at least make sure you are
| within an order of magnitude, next time, especially when
| it's so very Googlable.
|
| You're saying 20 schools have experienced shootings, total,
| ever?
|
| Nope. There have been 119 just in the first five months of
| this year. It's around 1,369 total since 1970.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-
| sh... https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-
| rankings/school-shoo...
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Just like college loan forgiveness, cheating just screws those
| who follow the rules.
| bgro wrote:
| Students are cheating on tests, yet technical interview tests are
| still the standard. How does memorizing a question so you can
| regurgitate it benefit anyone? I consider even that to be
| cheating.
|
| You're not thinking through the problem like the interviewer
| implies and asked for. You're replaying inputs, like a bot
| programmed to beat a level in Mario.
|
| If they're looking to hire a good Mario player, you're
| misrepresenting yourself with that technique. The pixel perfect
| glitch you nail on every screen has nothing to do with your
| actual ability when you get the role.
| tomerv wrote:
| I had to stop in the middle of the article due to all the
| annoying animations.
|
| But something that stood out to me is this:
|
| > For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are
| out rule.
|
| and then
|
| > I wasn't ready to inform them about what was going on until I
| had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the
| lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and
| emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But,
| I couldn't get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I
| knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating.
|
| So basically, this professor know about "low-impact cheating"
| (cheating in quizzes, where "[t]he quizzes were low stakes"), but
| instead of saying anything just kept pushing forward.
|
| I wonder if anyone even told those students up front in clear
| terms that sharing answers on the quizzes was not allowed. In
| school we're often told to co-operate in assignment. Where is the
| line between an assignment and a quiz?
|
| Just letting the whole group slide gradually into cheating
| territory is a lose-lose strategy.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| This is a college course, right? Do you really not understand
| what it means to cheat by the time you get to college? A quiz
| especially--you should not be sharing the answers to questions
| with other students. It's just about the most basic
| understanding of cheating you can imagine.
|
| You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless
| the teacher/professor says you can do so.
|
| And finally, read your school's handbook for a proper
| definition of cheating.
| jrumbut wrote:
| The professor sets up the expectation they are going to come
| down hard on everyone but ends up putting in an obscene amount
| of work to give almost everyone a chance to succeed.
|
| After the halfway point they tilt strongly from justice to
| mercy and ethics education.
| atoav wrote:
| He was curious how far rhis would go, and enjoying this
| undercover cop thing a little too much.
|
| A course should tell you what works and what doesn't early on,
| just like a good computer game. If people go down the wrong
| path early on, it means early on something failed.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Give me a break. The professor went above and beyond to be
| understanding. The mental gymnastics from many on this thread
| seeking to blame anyone but the students lack of integrity is
| pathetic. It's from the Boris Johnson school of 'I didn't know
| it was a party'.
| sosull wrote:
| I mean, the man was ambushed by cake.
| john1633 wrote:
| This was aggravating to read. The immaturity of these students is
| astounding. There are too many universities and too many
| university students.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| It strikes me as odd that the very qualities that we value in
| engineers (efficiency, outside the box thinking, finding
| solutions that make the most of the constraints of existing
| systems) are the ones we detest in engineering students. This is
| even more true for jobs that are meant to exploit inefficiencies
| in existing systems, such as entrepreneurs.
| geysersam wrote:
| It's not the only quality we value. We also want people to be
| able to learn new things, and be hardworking when needed. I'd
| personally prefer bridges in the future not being built out of
| paper-mache just because it was easier than using concrete.
| crayboff wrote:
| If you're using that as an argument for why cheating should be
| allowed, you're missing the key part of what what education is
| supposed to be about: understanding the fundamentals well
| enough that you can think of of the box and find solutions
| without relying on someone to always be there.
|
| Would you really want to work with a software developer who
| doesn't understand how functions, loops, etc work?
| Psychlist wrote:
| I have, it was pretty awful. At one stage I did a 3-4 week
| mad panic crunch to fix a system where he managed to hide the
| problems until it was almost too late. He was the "reverse
| talent" sort of person, prone to coming up with insane
| solutions that took more effort to unwind than it would have
| taken to write it in the first place. But only 20% of the
| time, so we'd often be left with 80% usable-but-bad code, and
| 20% WTF code. The crunch was me re-writing everything except
| the user interface.
|
| Apart from that one incident when I copped it, mostly I felt
| bad for my team leader who had to babysit the guy all day
| every day. After the incident above it was changed from
| "supervise experienced guy" to "babysit".
|
| That company really struggled because they were using a niche
| language to solve a very niche problem. It was the right
| language for the problem, but it was very hard to find
| developers who had used it, let alone who were good at it to
| the point of being useful in their first year with us. So
| throwing out Captain Useless took a couple of years.
| braingenious wrote:
| I feel so bad for whoever invited him into the chat. That must
| have been mortifying
| stefan_ wrote:
| That's the best part, the group invite was just posted in the
| official class chat. Those are some braindead cheaters.
| braingenious wrote:
| Talk about a woopsie daisy!
| Sirened wrote:
| I am also baffled that people were so brazen as to openly
| cheat in a group of 70+ people. Did they honestly believe
| that 70 people would all keep your secret and not try and get
| you failed out of spite? Like, I don't condone cheating but
| that's just shit ops.
| rockzom wrote:
| Further evidence that they didn't necessarily even realize
| they were cheating - aside from the exams - and that the
| professor should have spoken up sooner instead of playing
| undercover cop.
|
| He got off to the power here, and you can tell.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| My sister works with an institution that gives professional
| development and certification courses for financial institutions.
| Being the heavily regulated industry that it is, and that fact
| that in some places you can't sell mortgages unless your staff
| are certified, you can imagine the exams are scrutinized for any
| cheating.
|
| Anyway, last month, some ditzy 20-something banker posted up on
| TikTok her scheme to cheat on the test, and referenced the
| institution. This got back to my sister and her colleagues before
| the exam, and when time came, the cheater was exposed, and
| ultimately sacked from what promised to be a lucrative career.
|
| Probably more often than not cheaters prosper, but it does
| gladden the heart to see the odd one get their just desserts.
| vxNsr wrote:
| It's so odd to see people expose themselves on Tiktok like
| that. It's very clearly a public forum, I don't use it but
| based on all the videos that have been shared with me off-
| platform I assume there isn't even a way to set privacy
| settings, so all videos are all public.
|
| And yet people regularly share things they've recorded
| themselves that they are then embarrassed by or claim they're
| being doxxed when the video gets shared widely. Why would you
| publicly state that you're gonna cheat? Why would you publicly
| state that you're gonna break the law? Why would you publicly
| record and share yourself breaking the law? Using an app made
| by a regime that sees privacy as an inconvenience.
|
| 100% of Tiktok users are not anonymous to Tiktok, which means
| with a simple subpoena are not anonymous to anyone.
| lou1306 wrote:
| This is also what hit me while reading the OP. The students
| were cheating on a Whatsapp group _their own teacher_ was a
| member of.
|
| I could perhaps turn a blind eye to the gross lack of
| integrity (I wouldn't, but I could); it's the sheer
| ineptitude that drives me up a wall.
| yardstick wrote:
| I'm surprised at the number of people here justifying or
| supporting cheating.
|
| It's not a victimless crime.
|
| Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg
| Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will
| result in people who didn't cheat missing out on, or having less
| chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they
| worked honestly for, without cheating.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own
| risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating _vastly_
| outperforms on average compared to the risk /reward of not
| cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not
| cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know
| these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action
| will make any sort of meaningful difference.
|
| And why should any young person think that? Just observing the
| world around them definitely says the opposite.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| The process you are discussing is better summarized as: "a
| Nash equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto optimal, and vice
| versa." That's the issue with making it about ethics versus
| success: most successful people just aren't ethical. Entire
| companies are built around "cheating", and it is often seen
| as a good business strategy (e.g., Walmart running a store at
| a deficit to put competitors out of business).
|
| Want people to stop cheating? Fix the incentives. Stop using
| a points evaluation system, and curves. The professor in this
| article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less
| make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a
| problem. Imagine that!
| brigandish wrote:
| > The professor in this article managed to redesign his
| assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and
| suddenly it was less of a problem
|
| The students on the next semester used DMs, as the end of
| the article points out, and the professor didn't care,
| which means that the amount of cheating for that semester
| was unknown and hence, not less of problem. Unless that is,
| you're the professor and seem unwilling to punish cheats,
| or you're one of the students who cheated.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Yes, if you exclude ethics - issues of right and wrong -
| there's little reason not to cheat. But excluding ethics from
| the picture is more than just "look at it this way", but
| being amoral. You know, like a psychopath. I hear that's also
| rewarded in the business world, but doesn't mean you
| personally have to like it or be that way yourself.
|
| Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon
| etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but
| because they know what they're doing.
| kqr wrote:
| Wow, that went quickly from what could have been an
| interesting discussion on ethics to accusations of
| amorality and labelings of psychological problems.
|
| Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull
| exercises that seem practically designed to kill their
| curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?
|
| In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to get
| past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging way
| possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in life?
|
| Or is doing exercises a moral obligation, regardless of
| their ill effects on the student?
|
| That's a discussion worth having. "You know, like a
| psychopath" short-circuits that.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull
| exercises that seem practically designed to kill their
| curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?
|
| You mean like what they are going to have to do when they
| actually start working?
|
| You can always discuss the fact that the exercises are
| bone chillingly boring with the professor, and
| potentially you don't even have to do them because all
| your score comes from the test.
|
| But at the end of the day, if your professor/boss tells
| you to do the boring stuff, you either do it, quit, or
| get fired.
| cudgy wrote:
| They are students attending a university to learn new
| material from a professor who is an expert in the
| material and has taken the course themselves. The "inane,
| dull exercises" may be what is expected in the career
| path chosen.
|
| Cheating only kicks the can down the road to a failed
| career and possibly even criminal behavior. Best path for
| a student with that attitude is to drop the course or
| push through it and reevaluate their educational choices.
| yardstick wrote:
| > In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to
| get past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging
| way possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in
| life? Or is doing exercises a moral obligation,
| regardless of their ill effects on the student?
|
| If you only care about yourself and not the impact on
| others. Cheating is not a zero sum game. You are
| depriving others, and are committing fraud.
|
| Perhaps the least damaging way would be to seek
| professional help to better yourself so you can cope with
| any "ill effects" you get from doing "inane, dull
| exercises".
|
| Or finding a course or career that doesn't require you to
| endure activities you don't want to do. Running your own
| business maybe.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I feel like you're the one unhelpfully flinging
| accusations. Apparently I'm not allowed to respond in the
| way I did? Your comment itself seems to "go quickly" from
| ethical discussion to short-circuiting that with feigned
| surprise - "Wow". Your first and last paragraphs do
| little but accuse/label, and your comment would be far
| better without them. But then it would just consist of 3
| apparently rhetorical and rather loaded questions. It
| seems they're actually making a statement - so why not
| actually make that statement, actually say what you
| wanted to say, instead of letting the unspoken do all the
| work, and making me guess what that statement is.
|
| What I was saying was amoral and psychopath-like was _the
| act of "excluding ethics from the picture"_. You have
| reacted as if I'd said that the person I responded to had
| those qualities. Sorry I wasn't clearer, to avoid that
| apparent misunderstanding.
|
| Your questions seem puzzled, irritated, as if I obviously
| have no common sense or understanding of what life's
| like, and you've had to instruct me in the basic
| realities, like a condescending teacher to an unlearning
| novice. I'm not sure what I said that suggests that. I
| would've thought it would be uncontroversial, a mere
| repeating of the dictionary definition, to suggest that
| to exclude ethics from the picture when acting in life is
| amoral, and like a psychopath.
| comex wrote:
| Personally I see it as a moral imperative to be honest, and
| that includes not cheating on tests. This isn't rational in
| the sense of being a logical consequence of some other, more
| fundamental principle. But it's also not irrational. It's
| just a different set of goals.
|
| ...On the other hand, a big part of the reason I ended up
| with that set of goals is that it worked well for me when I
| was young, for both practical and emotional reasons I won't
| waste your time with. So I won't claim to be holier-than-
| thou. And I don't feel entitled to judge people for having
| different principles.
| yardstick wrote:
| Based on this logic we should all be criminals so long as we
| can easily get away with it? I'm not ok with that. That is
| not a civil society.
|
| Cheating is a form of fraud, and fraud is a crime.
|
| Doesn't this logically lead those that don't want crime and
| cheating to clamp down hard on these acts to discourage them?
| Ie should we have harsher punishments? Expel students?
| Convict students?
| danschuller wrote:
| Also the people who cheated, if successful, get credentials
| that mean they may be involved in the design and implementation
| of software or processes with extremely serious real world
| consequences. It also seems if you're willing to break rules to
| cheat, you're probably willing to break rules in other ways
| such as being open to bribes or cutting some corners where
| there's some benefit to you at the cost of others.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| From my own experience as a TA
|
| Prestigious University A: More classes pr. semester,
| quizzes/homework every weekend. Cheating was rampant - and well
| known. It was aptly called "cooking", as in "cooking the books".
|
| The classes usually had established lecturers, who'd done the
| same classes for YEARS, and often re-using the problem sets over
| and over again. Students would compile a compendium of these
| problem sets + answers, and hand them down to the next class.
|
| I think the cheating was simply a result of the heavy workload.
| Students would have 4 problem sets to solve every weekend, and
| then lab work, project work, and what not. These were smart kids
| to begin with, as getting admitted to the Uni. was a feat in
| itself - but there's just so much time.
|
| Regular University B: This Uni. followed a much more
| "traditional" sciences program. You'd get the syllabus on first
| or second lecture, the due dates to 1-3 assignments, and date for
| final exam. Sometimes it was only a home-exam + final exam. Also
| fewer, but more in-depth classes.
|
| The assignments were much more involved, and each would probably
| take 2-4 weeks to finish. But cheating was much less common.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Not everyone in the class cheated. But, everyone who cheated
| failed miserably. I guess the wisdom of the crowd doesn't count
| for much when the crowd didn't go to class or read the textbook.
|
| That's so much "average college student" it hurts.
|
| And all the quizzes were open book, etc.
|
| > The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just
| go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the
| textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers
|
| That's cringe
|
| Forget about the cheating, I'm angry they can't even cheat
| properly!
| RappingBoomer wrote:
| in my differential equations class no one could understand the
| prof...most everyone cheated
| gnicholas wrote:
| What would you tell your child to do if he/she were in this
| class, and were aware of the massive cheating happening in the
| chat?
|
| Should the student report the cheating to the professor? Assuming
| there was a curve in the class, how do you deal with the "but
| everyone else is doing it" argument with regard to benefiting
| from the cheating (even passively, by seeing the
| questions/answers posted)?
|
| I have wondered about similar issues involving ADHD meds, which
| seem widespread as well.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I would tell my children not to leave a digital record of
| cheating and that they should choose a more useful major than
| psychology.
|
| Lots (probably most) of people are in college for the
| credentials. Most of the rest are there because they feel they
| are supposed to be there. They do the work required for the
| credentials. Most of what is taught in college has little value
| or applicability and is quickly forgotten. Cheating is often
| rational.
|
| Bryan Caplan once gave an example I found memorable and
| persuasive. For most university courses, even at elite
| colleges, you could just show up and attend the course without
| enrolling. Not like "auditing" the course as a student, but
| just as someone who lives nearby, you could walk into the class
| and sit and listen. Nobody is checking IDs, nobody would
| notice, and, if they did, the professor would, more than
| likely, be willing to let you sit in on the course provided you
| asked nicely and didn't cause problems.
|
| Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause
| what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
|
| If you were to sit somewhere and hand out free bottles of
| Gatorade you would quickly run out of Gatorade. Many people
| would take you up on that. Conversely, colleges effectively
| hand out free lectures (since they don't control who attends)
| and approximately nobody takes them up on that. This makes me
| think that the average value of a college lecture is less than
| a bottle of Gatorade.
|
| With this perspective on the value of college the issue of
| cheating is reframed as a question "Why would people skip the
| boring useless work and more easily obtain the valuable
| credential they are seeking?"
| bsder wrote:
| > For most university courses, even at elite colleges, you
| could just show up and attend the course without enrolling.
|
| This has never been true at any college I have attended. You
| _absolutely_ got booted if you were not on the class roster
| after the enrollment period was done.
|
| At California community colleges, it seemed it's also a
| matter of insurance liability. They were remarkably
| aggressive about enforcement.
| gnicholas wrote:
| How was this enforced? A professor would notice in a class
| under 30 or so, but beyond that I'm not sure it would be
| apparent (assuming the attendee looked more or less like a
| student).
| bsder wrote:
| > A professor would notice in a class under 30 or so
|
| That describes practically every college class I have
| ever taken--even at community colleges.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Wow! I went to a very small liberal arts college, and
| even there we had classes over 30. I remember a friend at
| a larger Ivy told me there were 900 students in her intro
| Econ class...which would have amounted to the entire
| freshman and sophomore classes at my school, and then
| some!
| yardstick wrote:
| > Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders?
|
| Because freeloaders want quick wins. A lecture is a lot of
| time consumed, without an immediate financial gain, where
| they could be collecting multiple Gatorades instead.
|
| Ie Physical, immediate gains are greatly preferred by
| freeloaders. They don't see the long game.
| bstpierre wrote:
| This is a poor analogy. It doesn't take any effort to drink a
| bottle of Gatorade, and it tastes good too.
|
| On the other hand, attending a semester's worth of lectures
| and engaging with assignments takes a lot of time and effort.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| First, I compared the Gatorade to a single lecture, not a
| single semester. Second, regardless of effort, there is a
| net value, and the net value of your average college course
| (what you learn less the effort and time required to learn
| it) is less than the net value of a Gatorade.
|
| Finally, you can just change the thought experiment a bit.
| If you offered to pay someone twenty dollars to attend a
| random college lecture, would they? Probably some people
| would. And that fixes the upper bound of the value of the
| average lecture at less than twenty dollars, since, if it
| was that high, many people would be freeloading.
| bo1024 wrote:
| > Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders?
| Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
|
| Ha, as a prof, this is a fun thought experiment. But notice
| your same argument would apply to textbooks at the library.
|
| Why aren't all the library textbooks checked out all the time
| with huge waiting lists? Because their content isn't
| valuable?
|
| Only a small part of university learning involves reading a
| textbook (or watching a lecture), there is also the
| scaffolding of assignments, assessment, feedback, guidance,
| and externally enforced deadlines and requirements. Instead
| of free gatorade, a lecture is more like free tomato seeds.
| They're valuable but people won't take them because they
| aren't willing to plant and water them over the course of
| months.
|
| > Most of what is taught in college has little value or
| applicability and is quickly forgotten.
|
| I think this is generally wrong, and obviously both of us are
| entitled to our own opinion, but I'll point out that putting
| your brain through exercises and experiences that stretch it
| will permanently alter your brain, even if you forget many of
| the details that make up those experiences. For example if
| you put together 50 puzzles, you can forget the details of
| all of them but still be much better at puzzle-solving.
| [deleted]
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious that a textbook that gets
| checked out a lot has a better claim to value than a
| textbook which is checked out seldom or never. Maybe there
| is some topic that is really useful to know. I bet a good
| book on this topic, that teaches it well, is checked out
| more often than a book on some useless subject or one that
| teaches poorly. Similarly, there are lectures on YouTube on
| valuable topics with tons of views and lecturers with lots
| of subscribers. If your content was available and
| accessible to large numbers of people would lots of people
| access it? If so, then your content is valuable, and if
| not...
|
| Bryan Caplan's book, The Case Against Education, discusses
| defenses of education along the lines you present here. For
| example, he goes over surveys of college students to see
| what information they retained after graduating, and finds
| they retained almost nothing.
|
| Maybe learning and studying is good for your brain and will
| enhance your ability to learn and study. But, this is an
| argument to learn and study, not to attend or try hard in
| college where learning and studying are very much optional.
|
| This post is a great example. 70% of the OP's students were
| in this one particular cheating group. How many were
| cheating in other ways? Why are the majority of the
| students cheating? After all, aren't they only cheating
| themselves? Are they are irrational? Or, maybe, they are
| there for the credential which is the vast majority of what
| you get from college.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Ha, I actually know an old guy who went to a prestigious
| university to sit in on classes as we was phasing into
| retirement. He was the kind of person who didn't care that he
| was 3x the age of everyone else in the class, but I imagine
| one of the reasons adults don't attend uni classes in person
| is that it could be seen as weird/creepy.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Assuming there was a curve in the class, we could begin by
| asking the teacher why they want to punish people who engage in
| non-cheating group studying that actually causes their peers to
| learn the material.
| hkon wrote:
| This has to be the longest blog post I have read in years. Quite
| enjoyable.
| [deleted]
| thecleaner wrote:
| Okay, this guy is at CUNY, a good enough school. How dumb are
| these kids ? The professor is really going out of his way to make
| sure people engage with the material.
| usednet wrote:
| The best class I ever took in uni had 3 examinations taken by all
| students simultaneously, with variations between each exam making
| cheating nearly impossible. There was no attendance taken, all
| course materials were posted online, and the only grading for the
| entire class was the exams. I showed up to 2 classes the entire
| semester yet still learned all of the material and obtained an A.
|
| At least for certain STEM classes, I think this should be the
| norm.
| dleslie wrote:
| I had a few classes like that, decades ago; and I agree that
| they were the best in terms of curbing cheating. Stressful as
| all hell for those with anxiety issues, but the format also
| made some honors students become exposed for the frauds they
| were.
|
| In retrospect, I think the format is still the best but I would
| remove the narrow time limit. Give the students a whole day to
| try; and so not artificially filter out those with anxiety.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Our CS major's main weeder class had two unusual examinations.
| The first one was to recreate a small project that you'd done
| recently as an assignment within a few hours, on-site in a
| computer lab. It could be one of three possibilities, which
| makes raw memorization a bit harder (though not impossible).
|
| The second was after the first big project, a project that's
| usually a few thousand lines of code; relatively large by the
| standards of a student. This exam was a bug fixing exam: the
| TA's randomly insert three bugs into your project's source, and
| you have to find and fix them within a few hours. Not terribly
| challenging if you really did the project by yourself, but if
| you cheated I imagine you'd have a hell of a time.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| This reminds me of the time that I had to drop a class
| because my ADA code returned a generic "program error" upon
| compilation and even though none of the professors in the
| department could figure out why, and even though the
| algorithm looked perfect to them, the professor for my class
| refused to hear any of it.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| This was a completely gripping read. The teacher sounds
| absolutely incredible, and I would undoubtedly take a class from
| them. The optional side quest assignments is an interesting
| strategy.
|
| But at the same time... My goodness. Plagerizing the plagerism
| essay? That's so brazen, I'm not sure I could give a student a
| second chance after that. Like... You've got to learn a hard
| lesson at some point. The sooner the better.
| kubafu wrote:
| > If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for
| being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward;
| and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is
| not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow
| into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world,
| and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to
| himself. -- Immanuel Kant
| leokennis wrote:
| I think it's pretty widely established that, as far as raising
| children goes and the "infractions" are minor (throwing with
| toys, screaming), the correct strategy is to reward good
| behavior and ignore (as in: not acknowledge or react to) bad
| behavior.
| renlo wrote:
| These are college students (ie, legal adults), not children.
| This professor went way too easy on them, he should have
| failed them, especially the person who plagiarized the
| "repentance essay". If I'd had taken the course I'd not be
| happy knowing I'd done everything the right way and those who
| cheated still ended up with an A+ (he mentioned this
| happened). If anything it would make me lose trust in my
| education.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531298
| xpe wrote:
| I've read the entire article. The cheating was rampant. This
| part, however, jumped out at me:
|
| > At my most mystified, I proceeded to release a class
| announcement warning students not to plagiarize the academic
| integrity assignment.
|
| To cheat on the very assignment that is giving you a second
| chance is ... stupid and/or brazen and/or pitiful.
|
| So, why warn the students again? This _was_ their second chance,
| right?
|
| I'm open to many reasonable definitions of justice, ethics, and
| fairness. However, at that point, given the context, reporting
| the offending students seems the most just thing to do.
| sounds wrote:
| You're right.
|
| I am curious though what the frame of reference is for someone
| who _cheats_ on the assignment where they _promise not to
| cheat_.
|
| Perhaps there are people who make it through life with a sense
| of learned helplessness or even possibly a cultural mandate -
| basically, something that represents a higher authority to that
| person than the Western standard of justice, ethics and
| fairness.
|
| I'm fully in favor of true justice, shared ethics and fair and
| compassionate treatment - that's a conversation for another
| time.
|
| If that's not reality for that person, then to have a teacher
| attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have an impact
| on their success in a Western society. I'd guess that failing
| them and possibly expelling them would not.
|
| I'm curious what you think?
| xpe wrote:
| > If that's not reality for that person, then to have a
| teacher attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have
| an impact on their success in a Western society. I'd guess
| that failing them and possibly expelling them would not.
|
| An excellent point.
| xpe wrote:
| > I am curious though what the frame of reference is for
| someone who cheats on the assignment where they promise not
| to cheat.
|
| It seems likely their notion of a promise is non-binding.
|
| P.S. W.R.T. promises and ethics, Kant has an interesting
| point of view. For example: https://open.library.okstate.edu/
| introphilosophy/chapter/the...
| smiley1437 wrote:
| >It seems likely their notion of a promise is non-binding.
|
| They pledged it
| karpierz wrote:
| Sure, and people make performative pledges all the time.
| See EULAs, and any other document which says "sign here
| to get the thing you actually want".
| Nition wrote:
| And that assignment was only 150 words!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my
| students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from
| my students than they learn from me. There are more students than
| me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although
| I don't condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students
| sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going
| on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we
| were all in a major life stuff happening moment.
|
| > I was also weirdly empathizing with how hard it would be to
| cheat in my course. I was sad and angry about the cheating, but
| in terms of the process they would use to cheat, I knew it would
| be harder than normal and I could empathize with the difficulties
| they were experiencing.
|
| > I don't like cheating in my classes, and I respond to it when
| it happens. This was the first time when 75% of the class was
| cheating way beyond the pale for half a semester. My first
| inclination was to fail everybody. Aside from all the ways that I
| can be empathetic, there was a lot of evidence in the chat that
| students were blowing off the course and making a mockery of the
| whole thing. But, the brash language in the chat could also be
| covering up difficult issues students were facing in their lives
| that were preventing them from committing to their studies.
| Cheating isn't an answer, but it happens. Just like how playdough
| goes through the extruder when you make pasta with the toys from
| fisher price. Metaphors.
|
| > ...
|
| > The point is I had no intention of zooming into class, failing
| 75% of my students, and calling them all a bunch of cheaters in
| the middle of a pandemic...even though a bunch of cheating
| happened and all that. And, no I'm not that soft. It's just, I'm
| not the police. Education isn't a form of punishment. I'm trying
| to get students to engage in my course. Failing them all isn't a
| solution.
|
| This person sounds like they have perhaps an excess of empathy.
|
| This wasn't a case of people getting behind on one or two things
| and cheating to catch back up, in which case I could understand
| the leniency. It was 75% of the class trying to cheat their way
| through essentially the entire course.
|
| That said, there's certainly worse qualities to have in a
| professor than the patience of a saint. Their alternative
| syllabus idea later on is neat, though to me it feels weird to
| respond to what's essentially a lack of effort with a massive
| effort of your own.
|
| > The first category of student emails was the "I did it email".
| There were also "I did it and I'm sorry I did it emails". And,
| stuff in between, like not necessarily sorry. All of these emails
| contained students pleading with me not to ruin their GPA, or how
| they have never done any thing like this before, and they were
| really stressed out, and they would never do this again. Some of
| them seemed heartfelt.
|
| Well, I'm sure they were very heartfelt about being sorry they
| got caught. How many do you think would have been feeling sorry
| if they'd gotten away with it scot free?
| w0mbat wrote:
| This professor seems very pleased with himself but I think he
| handled this in the worst way possible.
|
| He should have said on the WhatsApp group, right at the
| beginning, "I am your professor,and I monitor this gc. You can
| use the gc to discuss the class and ethically help each other,
| but if you engage in exam and quiz cheating on here I will see
| it, and I will fail you. If you open or join a new secret gc to
| circumvent this, I will find it and I will fail you. Do the
| work.".
|
| If they cheated after that, immediate ban. Cut them from the
| course. Stop wasting everyone's time.
|
| Instead he got off on spying on them for months, buffing his ego
| with how good he was at using tools to measure the cheating, had
| to actually change the course and the final because he was
| letting the level of cheating get out of hand.
|
| He's like a boss who gives you zero verbal feedback all year,
| maybe only positive feedback, then sticks you with a bad annual
| review, listing behavior that would have been easily corrected
| had it been mentioned.
|
| Yes everybody knows they are not supposed to cheat, but he let
| cheating become the way things worked "in practice" for his
| class, and then punished them after wasting a lot of their time
| and money.
| reledi wrote:
| They would continue to cheat but more discretely. It's a cat
| and mouse game. For example, they can easily start a new gc and
| invite everyone but the instructor via DMs. Or invite everyone
| but add a verification phase. They love a challenge when it
| comes to outsmarting the system.
| mightybyte wrote:
| "A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my
| students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from
| my students than they learn from me. There are more students than
| me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although
| I don't condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students
| sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going
| on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we
| were all in a major life stuff happening moment."
|
| The world needs more people with multi-dimensional empathy.
| whymedude wrote:
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| Use discord?
| vehementi wrote:
| Do college discord servers usually enforce ID? i.e. how would
| they know this isn't yet another student? Who organizes it like
| that? Presumably a cheating discord is under the radar and
| probably not full of people who can/care to properly enforce ID
| on everyone who joins for this particular class's cheat room.
| rockzom wrote:
| So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the
| rug out from under your students?
|
| If a professor joined a group chat, without any corrections to
| what was being shared, "no news is good news" would be the
| assumption.
|
| Trying to read this was embarrassing.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| After leaving the mormon church, I lost much of the attitudes
| that had been ingrained in me there, but one thing I didn't
| lose was a hatred for cheating.
|
| > So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull
| the rug out from under your students?
|
| They pulled the rug out from themselves. Don't wanna fail? Then
| don't cheat.
| rockzom wrote:
| Not all of what is going on here is cheating. The exams?
| Sure. The rest? If my professor was in a group chat, I would
| assume that what was going on was kosher if nothing was being
| said.
|
| If my professor (now, seemingly) anonymously stays in a group
| chat without providing input...how can that be considered
| ethical, either?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Not all of what is going on here is cheating.
|
| Sure, and they had no problem with the non-cheating
| discussion going on.
|
| > If my professor was in a group chat, I would assume that
| what was going on was kosher if nothing was being said.
|
| Okay? I don't see how this conflicts with the article.
| rockzom wrote:
| An undercover cop, dressed as a skateboarder, watches
| dozens of others skate for months - unimpeded - in a
| location where trespassing is a gray area.
|
| What should have happened?
|
| A. The cop tells the skateboarders, "just so you know,
| you're technically not supposed to be doing this. If you
| do it again, I'll have to take action."
|
| B. He suddenly arrests the skateboarders for trespassing,
| much like a sting operation.
|
| The professor needed to say something. Period.
| mac-chaffee wrote:
| A large part of any syllabus is a description of the
| academic integrity policy. Most universities even mention
| it during orientation. Most all my exams had "by signing,
| I agree to..." next to where you write your name.
| Universities care _a lot_ about cheating. It even makes
| the news.
|
| The cop is always visible, the sign is clearly posted,
| but they still trespass. Most got less-than-minimum
| sentences anyway.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > B. He suddenly arrests the skateboarders for
| trespassing, much like a sting operation.
|
| I mean, sting operations are a real thing, so...?
|
| In your example it sounds stupid because obviously
| trespassing to skateboard is such an inconsequential
| crime. A cop should either should immediately tell people
| or just not give a shit, because who cares?
|
| Within the context of a university, students cheating
| their way through every exam is obviously a bigger deal
| than trespassing for the purpose of exercise.
|
| That said, I agree that just immediately telling people
| (and then paying closer attention to possible cheating
| thereafter) is probably the better route, but in the
| article, they stated they didn't notice the cheating
| going on until it'd been going on for a while, because
| they just hadn't paid attention to the chat group.
|
| The professor could've handled things better if they'd
| been more aware and responsive from the start, but still,
| the lion's share of the blame rests with the people who
| chose to cheat.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| To stay engaged with a lot of interesting material I would have
| otherwise forgotten after college or at that time I didn't fully
| grasp, and because "teaching" actually teaches you the most
| (close second after "applying"/"creating"), I'm a private tutor
| as a sideline and as such get an honorabe mention by the OP:
|
| > _Or, students can hire people to do their assignments (cough,
| help them with their homework as a legit tutor)._
|
| I totally get his point about moral integrity from a bird's eye
| view: cheating, plagiarizing and any fraudulent behavior
| especially in a academic setting has immense destructive
| repercussions by affecting the credibility of whole fields and
| with it all the academic careers around it and must be
| stopped/discouraged at the outset. OPs perspective:
|
| > _Let's start with me, I'll be the category. I have prior
| experience with pre-pandemic academic integrity violations.
| There's no time for a prequel. But let's say I've been called an
| obsessive plagiarism detective. Plagiarism really irks me. It
| irks me so bad I wrote my own R package to detect plagiarism._
|
| My radical approach to that was early on to stay clear of any
| form institutionalized teaching despite some lucrative job
| offerings.
|
| Of course a lot of students contacting me are looking for a quick
| fix, outright asking me to solve their assignments or in some
| cases ready to pay me royally for just being available online on
| their exam. The amount of effort, thought and resources put into
| "cheating", "finding easy ways" ... is vastly and comically
| disproportionate to the simple tasks given to them. As an entry
| point to conversation, now, I really enjoy hearing those stories
| and every student has unique tales to offer.
|
| Because I encourage my students to be brutally honest about their
| learning progression without fear of shame, judgment etc. in this
| light they get at least a chance to realize that ultimatley in
| the long run "cheating" is first and foremost a disservice to
| themselves and once it is internalized it is difficult to get rid
| of (paraphrasing: you yourself are the easiest person to fool).
| But instead of moralizing at this point (mea culpa ...) I
| actually offer them ways to transform and invest some of their
| habitual cheating impulse/energy into actual _wit_ [0](deep
| entrenched into the culture). This part is tricky and highly
| dependent on their current level of understanding, attention span
| and motiviation. Basically I trick them into _math tricks_ (i.e.
| "novel ways" to solving/reframing problems) finetuned to their
| response this ideally evolves to a ping-pong game, even if it is
| just say 5min out of 45min, we are now actually gaining momentum
| ;)
|
| There is no way I could pull that off in front of a class of more
| than 5 people and I have to be picky because some really are
| highly resistant to open themselves up for learning and prefer to
| find "easier ways": memorizing, cheating ...
|
| Given the circumstances, incentives, set up of the tests/exams
| and the teacher himself being able to be in the group, I mean
| with a bit of game-theoretical reasoning: the undertow of
| cheating is pretty irresistible. This makes up for a great story
| with second chances, human motivations and insights about our
| current state of affair regarding the educational system.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
| paulsutter wrote:
| Cheating matters little. The folks who cheat will spend their
| whole lives pursuing meaningless petty goals and will end up with
| average lives .
|
| And that's fine, maybe it's all they want
| curiousgal wrote:
| Not necessarily. During Covid my school (in France) shifted to
| online quizzes. Students would start by screenshoting the
| questions, which would then get automatically uploaded to a
| shared Dropbox folder. Students would then run a program that
| would cluster the screenshots and outputs the names of students
| who had the same questions and then they can collaborate
| directly. This is brilliant of course and solves all of the
| communication issues the students in this post faced but
| hearing about after it the fact (I was an international student
| and didn't know anyone in my class at the time) made me sick
| and salty. Most of those students are now workingnin high
| paying engineering jobs lol I am too but yeah, realistically,
| cheating works.
| dzink wrote:
| Part of the problem is that higher education in the US is used to
| both give knowledge and rank students and the latter is very much
| NOT conducive to giving knowledge.
|
| Society has demand for X trained software engineers as long as X
| is higher than the available number (X - Y), you have higher
| salaries which flashes a bright light drawing more people to
| Software Engineering. To fill that gap, the current educational
| system draws in the [talented with luck to have gotten the
| freedom to learn and play with code early] + [people who are
| talented at anything and pick SE for because of the lifestyle] +
| [the people who are in it for the money but not necessarily the
| inherent talent for it] + [the confused or misled who want to try
| things]. There is a massive missing pool of people who are
| talented or have the brain to be excellent in SE but never get to
| try it in an approachable way at with a good teacher or
| educational tool before they get pulled into something else. The
| truly talented SE people are often more interested in the Tech
| and less in teaching, and those who teach may not always have the
| love for the field an obsessed SE has. The Education system is a
| very brute tool - spray a little bit of many fields among many
| kids and see who catches on and then squeeze any love for the
| field out of them with as much pressure as possible to surface
| the gold nuggets of aptitude (talent) and attitude (persistence)
| who are the only ones sent on to train properly. If you want real
| outcomes, expose every child to a great Software Engineering
| program that is fun (maybe online, maybe via a textbook, maybe by
| video + a piece of software like scratch), then let them play
| consistently for their entire educational career without
| judgement but with rewards for talent and persistence (only
| upside, like computer games). Then start filtering only at the
| career level - when applying for jobs, or judging open source
| contributions after graduation. You would have a much broader
| pool of candidates and much higher quality at all levels.
| knolan wrote:
| This gave some interesting insight into what a lot of my
| colleagues and I were thinking was going on as we rapidly
| transitioned to online delivery for our lectures. Certainly we've
| seen shared IPs and similar results within cohorts...
|
| Traditionally we used closed book exams where mechanical
| engineering students have to solve series of problems. Stressful
| and encouraging of learning a lot by rote, these have never been
| liked any anyone. But they offer a level playing field for
| students in a perverse way. Many new students have not sat
| similar state exams either and were given estimated grades.
|
| Many of us switched quickly to lecturing on Zoom and giving
| midterm exams via online quizzes with Brightspace or Blackboard
| VLEs. That meant open book exams where we have no ability to
| proctor (due to GDPR apparently).
|
| The capability of setting up complex randomised exam questions
| was limited too. Brightspace only supported numerical questions
| based on simple algebraic expressions and would silently truncate
| an moderately long equation that previously passed checks.
|
| The use of WhatsApp groups is extremely common in general by
| students and we all knew this would allow easy cheating on exams.
| So while we randomised question order and used random variables
| where possible, most academics felt preventing students from
| moving back and forward through questions was cruel and was
| typically avoided. Where it was used was vocally opposed by
| students.
|
| As we look back at what worked and didn't I think the consensus
| is that midterms will remain online and we will return to big
| exam hall finals.
|
| This year I ran my online exam on campus. I booked a few sizeable
| rooms and split the students across them. It seemed to limit non-
| independent work.
| randombits0 wrote:
| pasdechance wrote:
| I am a professor too. It has taken me about 15 years to realise
| that my job is not plagiarism hunting.
|
| My institution has almost no ability to enforce plagiarism rules.
| Many of my colleagues plagiarise. When I do catch students
| cheating I have to be sure. I just submit a grade, usually 0, and
| then it is someone else's job to follow up.
|
| The new generation is particularly sensitive and
| expects...exceptions. They roll up with parents and lawyers and
| parents who are lawyers and swing their...suitcases around. We
| end up giving a second chance or a third.
|
| Luckily, I have only had one major case of plagiarism, the rest
| have been bad but easily dealt with.
| soared wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of how the author handled the situation, but
| it is clear they care about their students and want them to
| learn. But when the second semester begins and the author
| silently joins the new groupchat... I feel like that is a lack of
| integrity.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Can you explain further what you mean by "integrity"?
| soared wrote:
| IMO as a teacher the correct action would be to try and
| resolve the issue of cheating at its core. I feel that
| staying in the new gc and waiting to see if students cheat
| again is a lack of integrity - he is waiting to see if
| students cheat rather than teach and grow them.
| vehementi wrote:
| Dude is not going to solve "cheating at its core". Read
| some of the shit going on in this thread even. He's not
| going to solve the "I am a proud cheater because not
| cheating means you're stupid" guy. He's not going to solve
| the "I need this piece of paper because companies are dumb
| and require a piece of paper instead of proof of
| competence" guy.
|
| You still haven't really shown how this is a problem with
| his integrity, you're just using the word in a sentence.
| buttocks wrote:
| He was invited.
| soared wrote:
| And stayed with the intentions of seeing whether the students
| would cheat again, rather than addressing the root of the
| problem.
| Heyso wrote:
| In chinese, copying and learning are the same word.
|
| Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel"
| (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste
| it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your
| neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and
| "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is
| better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar
| to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or
| service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
|
| I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school
| (and society):
|
| 1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or
| Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ?
| (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
|
| 2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by
| himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion
| myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care
| about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need
| (all Maths lover will condemn me).
|
| The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They
| don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like
| evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade)
| memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
|
| To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview
| and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
|
| Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type
| of evaluation.
|
| "I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" -
| evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it
| means learning phase is completed. The main differences are that
| : - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else
| (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). If
| you cheat, you have 0 gain out of it. Cheating in a pure learning
| environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your
| environnment contains more than just learning.
|
| Testing yourselves, to know for yourselves, if you have got an
| understanding of a notion. Is part of learning.
|
| Without grading, a test become just a way to confirm to
| yourselves your knowledge. This is part of learning, and cheating
| on that make no sense, because you fool only yourselves.
|
| School mix both learning and grading, it shouldn't.
|
| In chinese, copying and learning are the same word.
|
| Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel"
| (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste
| it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your
| neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and
| "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is
| better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar
| to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or
| service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
|
| I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school
| (and society):
|
| 1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or
| Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ?
| (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
|
| 2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by
| himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion
| myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care
| about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need
| (all Maths lover will condemn me).
|
| The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They
| don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like
| evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade)
| memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
|
| To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview
| and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
|
| Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type
| of evaluation.
|
| "I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" -
| evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it
| means learning phase is completed.
|
| When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves,
| not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher,
| parents, certification organism). That is called intresic
| motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but
| only you care about grading.
|
| The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he
| send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he
| need. And grading is just a means for that.
|
| Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a
| good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can
| contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than
| employable).
|
| What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused
| on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly
| forgetting exams and grading "means to".
|
| In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose
| is to give a learning status indication to the student.
|
| In school (in France national education), they also serve to give
| you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social
| status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
|
| Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If
| students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than
| just learning.
|
| When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it
| override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing
| the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is
| punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning
| opportunity.
|
| Schools (I am still referring to France national education)
| believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves
| learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and
| painful.
|
| If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because
| authentic learning is fun by itselves !
|
| (I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question
| if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been
| designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq :
| have there been malicious intention ?)).
| johndhi wrote:
| Wow.
|
| Kinda want to plagiarize this response to bring it full circle
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Cheating doesn't seem to be punished any more in the UK because
| universities need the fees. I witnessed an egregious case of
| cheating in an MSc exam which was caught, and as far as I can
| tell, the perpetrator just had to resit.
|
| One of the first year courses in an undergraduate degree ought to
| be in academic integrity.
| blindmute wrote:
| Am I the only one disturbed by how many students are texting in
| ebonics? I'm not sure when that began, but my millennial friends
| always use correct grammar and such in texts
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