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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Some people simply have better things to do, or don't care about learning a specific thing. For example, I care about learning programming in my CS classes. No, I don't care about learning who died in 1938.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're basically saying that college is completely pointless except as a way to rank a meritocratic society.
Except college/testing doesn't rank meritocratically. It reproduces our existing structural hierarchies in the next generation. It would be simpler and more honest to give the kids of rich parents fast track internships.
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.
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.
They're two different roles, but universities have traditionally done both and it has been effective. It's no use teaching Scientists how to think if they don't learn how to collaborate effectively and communicate their ideas to a wider audience.
I'm not sure what you mean by "old ways". The setup you describe is the one we already have. Family connections and money are key to getting a leg up.
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?
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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 &q...
> (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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
-There usually isn't a prep course available, nor are there other prerequisites.
-When there is a prep course, it is usually called remedial as if being failed in high school, being an older student who left high school years ago, or just never being exposed to a subject makes you, as a person, deficient. (And, of course, these legally have to be included in a person's transcript.)
-Universities are under pressure to push people through quickly, so they don't want students taking extra prep courses early on.
-Universities/parents/students all want to see good grades and frequently prioritize this over education (which is probably the fundamental problem of education: how to evaluate and what to do with those evaluations)
-There are no ways, difficult ways, or arbitrary ways to drop out of an intro course.
-A syllabus is fundamentally a contract, but you (usually) don't get to see it until you have registered, paid, and been to the course.
...
etc.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
"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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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").
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"... 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.).
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).
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?
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.
I highly doubt there is a strong positive correlation between social anxiety and cheating. If anything people with social anxiety are less likely to cheat simply because they don't have any social connections to cheat off of.
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?
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 423 ms ] threadAs 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).
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.
Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on drugs did put in the work and the effort, after 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.
It is depressing when I hear from people otherwise, I can't imagine missing out on the joy of learning.
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.
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.
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.
What I am saying is that it shouldn't.
(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.
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.
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.
Get rid of grading and nobody cheats.
Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.
If it's for "pure" education or something with no grades, it's just a glorified library that sells expensive books.
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.
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.
Testing is a distraction from their core values. And a crutch for handling the poor student to teacher ratio.
Except college/testing doesn't rank meritocratically. It reproduces our existing structural hierarchies in the next generation. It would be simpler and more honest to give the kids of rich parents fast track internships.
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.
> 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.
I'm not sure what you mean by "old ways". The setup you describe is the one we already have. Family connections and money are key to getting a leg up.
The only people who actually care about your college grades are HR reading resumes for your first job, literally that’s it.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 &q...
When I was in college, the rule in our department was that if you failed the final, you failed the course.
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.
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.
A goal directed attitude has taken over, as described by Erwin Chargaff.
https://mobile.twitter.com/blamlab/status/129727005174625894...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Putting a multiple choice test online and expecting students to not take advantage of this examination method is very naive.
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.
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.
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.
The system is absolutely fucked.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, these kind of multiple choice tests just suck, and OP shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take this stuff serious.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
In my degree, object oriented programming came in later semesters, often paired with courses on symbolic computing, discrete mathematics, and computability and complexity.
In any case, you've shifted the goal posts from:
> the sense that degrees have softened their content density is palpable.
Having low level content come later isn't "softened content density".
-There usually isn't a prep course available, nor are there other prerequisites.
-When there is a prep course, it is usually called remedial as if being failed in high school, being an older student who left high school years ago, or just never being exposed to a subject makes you, as a person, deficient. (And, of course, these legally have to be included in a person's transcript.)
-Universities are under pressure to push people through quickly, so they don't want students taking extra prep courses early on.
-Universities/parents/students all want to see good grades and frequently prioritize this over education (which is probably the fundamental problem of education: how to evaluate and what to do with those evaluations)
-There are no ways, difficult ways, or arbitrary ways to drop out of an intro course.
-A syllabus is fundamentally a contract, but you (usually) don't get to see it until you have registered, paid, and been to the course. ... etc.
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.
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.
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.
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
He got off to the power here, and you can tell.
At least for certain STEM classes, I think this should be the norm.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
If my professor (now, seemingly) anonymously stays in a group chat without providing input...how can that be considered ethical, either?
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.
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.
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.
The cop is always visible, the sign is clearly posted, but they still trespass. Most got less-than-minimum sentences anyway.
You still haven't really shown how this is a problem with his integrity, you're just using the word in a sentence.
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.
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.
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.
Many of them just ended up cancelling the results for those exams outright.
Great write-up, more than fair teacher who wants only what's best for their students.
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.
Whatever the word count, the instructor seems motivated to discover plagiarism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
(It has nothing to do with "in the context of computer science").
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.
What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
> 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.)
The MLE job market is booming.
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.
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!
You literally just studied and worked ahead. That is not cheating...
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.
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.
Do you mind elaborating on this or providing a link if you've discussed this before?
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
Writing is how you promote yourself through articles, presentations, etc.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a college education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
what. the. hell.
I hate that mindset with passion.
Folks, just skew the odds.
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
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.
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
Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain GPA even 5-10 years into my career.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
*Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I learned about nonlinear differential equations, where Laplace transforms don't help.
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.
Why are you solely responsible for this?
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?
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.
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.
And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself. You won't have anyone else to blame for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How on earth would an electrical engineering degree help you get a good job?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Starting 15 years ago was different than starting now.
http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
There's also an article around here somewhere on signaling theory that I don't have on hand.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.
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.)
The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is.
Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…
Bryan Caplan's book concerns precisely this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
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.
Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).
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).
[1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short term?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those with integrity are very clearly perceived as the handicapped in modern America.
Nowhere is this more clear than cryptocurrency and gun reform.
For how long? I assume you're in the west. Look around and tell me – how long?