There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
"Top engineering school" probably makes a big difference. I too went to a top STEM school (Caltech).
Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.
Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
>It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
There is a class of social behaviors where 1) the true fraction of people doing it is between 0.1 and 0.9, and 2) everyone who does it does it secretly.
For such social behaviors, which include watching pornography, media piracy, illicit drug use, relationship cheating, and academic cheating, it is common for people who do it to assume that the true fraction is near 1.0 and for people who don’t do it to assume that the true fraction is near 0.0.
If you do it, then you think: “I do it and I hide it and I’m perfectly normal and no one can tell, so of course most other people should be able to hide it as well”.
If you don’t do it, then you think: “I don’t do it, and I’ve never heard of anyone I know doing it, so it must be really rare”.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
In 99% of cases the stuff you learn in college is useless post college. You got lucky. You must have one of those jobs where every single class you ever took is relevant. That's a cool job, for example every engineer must've took physics, chemistry and history. You must using all three at your job. If you're a programmer then it's physics, chemistry, history AND programming. Holy shit you're amazeballs.
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
Maybe you should just get a better job that lets you use your knowledge, unless you're not qualified because you cheated your way through college and never actually learned that knowledge, which you're now trying to retroactivally justify.
You can't justify your own cheating by presuming and accusing everyone else of cheating. It's like saying "boys will be boys" because you acted that way too, instead of raising your boy not to be a misogynistic bully. You're just showing yourself to be a cheater, and limiting yourself to jobs for cheaters, of which there are many of course (especially c-level and MBA positions), luckily for you.
Sure a lot of what I learned is not relevant, but if you asked me to guess which parts would be relevant and which would not I would have guessed wrong.
Agreed, a good guesser would allocate his cheating more accurately by pinpointing the classes that are actually useless, IF his goal was just to learn what is needed.
There were always two types of people at college, those who want to learn things and those who want a certificate so they can get a better job. It was always pretty easy to distinguish the two.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
You're also 17 or 18 when you go. We were children. Alot of classes also end up sucking so you just power through it and get jaded about the whole experience.
It’s just saying the same thing differently. The point was never to “power through” classes. It is just checking the same boxes with a different colored pen.
Depends on how the hiring critera for the next stage go. If HR filters out everybody with less than a 3.5GPA right from the start then the C student who knows the stuff will never even get a chance, while the cheater will have the opportunity to bluff their way through the interview.
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
I didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them.
A cool project would be to go online finding syllabus and assignments from random CS classes that were posted online and have an LLM do them and post them to GitHub repos.
They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
That's a fair point, but I think real learning is still worthwhile, and employers have always had to vet candidates beyond just the credential by itself.
Name something with an incentive to cheat that has completely nullified cheating. I won't wait because you can't really. People have cheated in everything there is to cheat in. Chess, college, interviews, shareholder meetings, congressional hearings, whatever the hell it is, someone has tried to game, subvert, cheat, and defeat.
Does this damn the world? Maybe, if you are so obtuse you are a sphere.
Schools have long relied on an honor system, unless you can get really close to a 1:1 ratio with the students so the instructor can properly evaluate each and every one. But, as a society, we've decided that's too expensive so people cheat and get away with it pretty easily.
Difference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
I spent a lot of my life outside the English-speaking world, and this was a small sideline for a while.
I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid.
Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade.
My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI.
It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will.
The article certainly signals that we're supposed to feel sympathy for the folks in Kenya. But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right? The next thing, we'll be asked to feel sympathy for moms who kill their kids.
> But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right?
In the same way a mom and pop pizza joint willingly serving someone who is trying to be on a strict healthy diet is helping people cheat, yes, but if McDonalds then rolled in and took away all their business, is there no room to feel sympathy for mom and pop? It is not like sympathy is some big thing to begin with.
That doesn't make sense. If you want to take the food angle then the other serves homework. If you want to take the fraud angle then the other facilitates dietary fraud.
In fairness, I wasn't doing this for Americans. I would say the Anglo-American model of schooling, which treats students like customers, is very much to blame.
The industry wouldn't exist if students were result expelled for cheating. It's pretty obvious when someone's doing it.
> helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish their [degree]
What odd phrasing. Counterpoint: "Helping" them cheat actually harms them, by ensuring they get the degree without learning or demonstrating mastery of the subject. There's a good reason why students caught cheating are harshly punished.
82 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 4.8 ms ] threadIf everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/help
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.
Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
Much was learned today.
For such social behaviors, which include watching pornography, media piracy, illicit drug use, relationship cheating, and academic cheating, it is common for people who do it to assume that the true fraction is near 1.0 and for people who don’t do it to assume that the true fraction is near 0.0.
If you do it, then you think: “I do it and I hide it and I’m perfectly normal and no one can tell, so of course most other people should be able to hide it as well”.
If you don’t do it, then you think: “I don’t do it, and I’ve never heard of anyone I know doing it, so it must be really rare”.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
Before I went, I also made money selling essays/code to lazy students.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
Look at your boss, his job is "gainful to him". He likely cheated in college and learned to delegate work and lead people.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
Maybe they're just "donwvoting" your analysis or spelling...
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
You can't justify your own cheating by presuming and accusing everyone else of cheating. It's like saying "boys will be boys" because you acted that way too, instead of raising your boy not to be a misogynistic bully. You're just showing yourself to be a cheater, and limiting yourself to jobs for cheaters, of which there are many of course (especially c-level and MBA positions), luckily for you.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Suspect a correlation with stance on the subject.
He talked about the people getting their homework and bachelor's done.
Pretty much crushed my worldview. Cheating is, was and will be rampant.
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
https://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/07/john-waters-on....
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
Flattering, in a way.
As long as the Kenyans don't try and use AI themselves.
Does this damn the world? Maybe, if you are so obtuse you are a sphere.
I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid.
Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade.
My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI.
It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will.
A case of AI pulling the ladder.
In the same way a mom and pop pizza joint willingly serving someone who is trying to be on a strict healthy diet is helping people cheat, yes, but if McDonalds then rolled in and took away all their business, is there no room to feel sympathy for mom and pop? It is not like sympathy is some big thing to begin with.
The industry wouldn't exist if students were result expelled for cheating. It's pretty obvious when someone's doing it.
That's a bit of a weird jump, where's that come from?
Maybe more coop programs and less class time.
What odd phrasing. Counterpoint: "Helping" them cheat actually harms them, by ensuring they get the degree without learning or demonstrating mastery of the subject. There's a good reason why students caught cheating are harshly punished.