grades matter for your futureHere’s the real problem. Grad programs and&#x2F;or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.

“and the grades matter for your future”There’s the key problem.A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE&#x27;s Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitality_curve" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vitality_curve</a>

How do you know if grades matter for your future? In my first uni year, I had no idea I&#x27;d get a job before my studies were over.If there&#x27;s an actual correspondence (eg you get next year scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above X), that&#x27;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&#x27;s what happens past university too, so it&#x27;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.

&gt; cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homeworkI feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on drugs did put in the work and the effort, after all.

&gt; Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheatersAre 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&#x27; favor.

Any professor who has to grade on a curve is a professor who shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to make tests or assignments.

&gt; 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&#x27;s no objective criteria for what students should be &quot;expected to master&quot; in a particular course. it&#x27;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&#x27;t try or understand at all. but it&#x27;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.

I always share the exams I set (and the solutions) with my students. Inhace necer understood the idea that keeping them “secret” is somehow useful.Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.

I agree with your opinion on curves (which aren&#x27;t even a thing where I&#x27;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 &quot;steal&quot; your job&#x2F;PhD&#x2F;etc., curve or not.

&gt; sharing a curveIt&#x27;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.

I always felt that my score was my own, and didn&#x27;t care about comparing against others.Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them.I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful.I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.Open to counterarguments.

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&#x27; 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&#x27;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.

The goal of college is to receive a degree to unlock job postings.I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.

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.

college is voluntary like taxes are voluntary

Another thing is that college is voluntaryYou voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s a human trait to care about things that should not really bother us.What I am saying is that it shouldn&#x27;t.

&gt; 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&#x27;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 &quot;obvious&quot; 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.

Quite a read, indeed.As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn&#x27;t care about comparing against others.Perhaps that&#x27;s why I didn&#x27;t care?Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it&#x27;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&#x27;s a moral value that&#x27;s beyond some random teacher&#x27;s ability to teach adult students — so I don&#x27;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&#x27;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).

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.

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.

I&#x27;d argue that&#x27;s exactly what they&#x27;re for.If it&#x27;s for &quot;pure&quot; education or something with no grades, it&#x27;s just a glorified library that sells expensive books.

How? Do you have any realistic proposal how to achieve this? Or would it require a minor revolution?

Universities shouldn’t be credential factories.Get rid of grading and nobody cheats.Have a separate entity do the verification or make graduation more like PhD defense.

The honest students actually value being told if they understood correctly. I guess the most inveterate cheaters wouldn&#x27;t care, but most students are at least somewhat hopeful they&#x27;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&#x27;s true, but of course the main reason we&#x27;re watching isn&#x27;t to catch cheaters but to anticipate problems the room&#x27;s invigilators are about to call us about. Are we watching to see if that girl is wearing a short skirt because she&#x27;s written notes on her own thighs? Are we watching to see if the Fitbit on that guy&#x27;s wrist has been modified to display relayed multiple choice answers? No, we&#x27;re watching because the room has 85 green &quot;OK for this exam: BIOL1024 Genetics&quot; screens and one orange &quot;Pre-check failed. DO NOT USE&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;t trying to actually fix it, because that&#x27;s likely to take hours, and we have minutes or sometimes seconds.One of the most valuable uses of those cameras doesn&#x27;t actually involve seeing anybody, cheater or not, student or not, at the end of the day if there&#x27;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&#x27;s still people stood in the room looking at the PC, well, radios work both ways, lets find out why the hell they aren&#x27;t finished.

(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.

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&#x2F;capability tests.

I grew up in East Asia and (B) just isn&#x27;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&#x2F;the family a better quality of life, but the &quot;benefits&quot; part stops here. People don&#x27;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&#x27;t care about the process, but the outcome, evaluated by the momey in our bank account.

&gt; (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.

Vivid memories of my high school literature teacher reading Cliff’s Notes and ensuring her tests covered things not discussed in the notes…

&gt; (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&#x27;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&#x27;s worth of education seems like it&#x27;d be near impossible though.

Kinda agree though B seems impossible.I used to study at an &quot;elite&quot; 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 &quot;normally&quot; at first but they&#x27;d then get shafted in the exam because they&#x27;d have spent lots of time on material that&#x27;s not graded in the end and would inevitably switch to the meta approach since understanding the material better doesn&#x27;t mean much if you&#x27;re barely surviving.

The guiding principle behind B evaporated. People don&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;blamlab&#x2F;status&#x2F;1297270051746258945&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;blamlab&#x2F;status&#x2F;129727005174625894...</a>

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&#x2F;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&#x27;m very good at projects and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn&#x27;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.

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.

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&#x27;re probably teaching it for &gt;10 years. If every year you create 20 multi-part questions (&quot;We have a factory producing boxes, what&#x27;s the optimal size of box for X when Y&quot;). 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&#x27;ll likely be in the same grade bin so this makes sure each cheater doesn&#x27;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 &quot;friendly&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d say it was a reasonably cheat-proof class. I don&#x27;t know how applicable that model is to calculus though.

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.

And in most courses will just reward cheaters who succeed in not being caught.

This.Putting a multiple choice test online and expecting students to not take advantage of this examination method is very naive.

When I did Physics in the UK, all of my non-labs modules were 100% exam

IIRC, in European universities, university courses tend to be much more heavily exam-weighted than American ones. I&#x27;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&#x2F;yr)... maybe you can make this work.In the real world, where a teacher has 3 sections of 30 students, &quot;just make exciting and engaging material!&quot; is honestly an asinine statement. You can&#x27;t spend 2 hours evaluating each student&#x27;s homework assignment.

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”.

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&#x2F;social pressure) that has surprised pikachu face when they cheat so they can pay off that debt.The system is absolutely fucked.

Do you mean that you&#x27;re incredibly past careing about arbitrary constraints on someone&#x27;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.

&gt; No, a subgroup of students surround themselves with cheaters and believe everyone else is cheating.It&#x27;s exactly this. I didn&#x27;t cheat in college, I&#x27;ve always hated cheaters, plus obviously I didn&#x27;t want the risk of potentially being caught. People I was friends with in my CS degree, to my knowledge, didn&#x27;t cheat either. Maybe they were cheating and I just didn&#x27;t notice or something, but I think it&#x27;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&#x27;s because it&#x27;s BYU, where the level of honesty is higher (I&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t part of the study&#x2F;social groups that devolve into cheating.

&gt; Just about everyone performs some amount or cheating in high school and collegeThat&#x27;s awful and not my experience.&gt; To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupidWhat&#x27;s the point of waiting four years to give cheaters a degree? If they&#x27;re not going to learn anything it&#x27;s a complete waste, just hand it to them when they pay the lump sum.

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.

But then 1 person ends up doing most of the work on the team

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.)

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.

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&#x27;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.

Online exams without proctoring are a recipe for disaster, and I think that should be pretty obvious to any instructor.

thank you haha, they just want that degree at the end.

Students are mostly not that interested in learning

This smells like a cop out for the cheaters.Is the system perfect? Obviously not. Are the rules of the game laid out in advance? Yes. Do you agree to them as a student? Yes. Is there a clear path to success on your own merits, through your own effort. Yes.

Exams and cheating are just parts of the same problem. It&#x27;s unfortunate that academia can&#x27;t wrap its mind around this and design better learning experiences for students and teachers.

Oh wow, I just remembered now. :( That&#x27;s really upsetting! He was the only person giving me hope. :&#x2F; Thank you for the reminder.

Quite sad that nothing came out of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U</a>.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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wX78iKhInsc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wX78iKhInsc</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY</a>

Further evidence that they didn&#x27;t necessarily even realize they were cheating - aside from the exams - and that the professor should have spoken up sooner instead of playing undercover cop.He got off to the power here, and you can tell.

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&#x27;t condone cheating but that&#x27;s just shit ops.

That&#x27;s the best part, the group invite was just posted in the official class chat. Those are some braindead cheaters.

I feel so bad for whoever invited him into the chat. That must have been mortifying

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.

This reminds me of the time that I had to drop a class because my ADA code returned a generic &quot;program error&quot; 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.

Our CS major&#x27;s main weeder class had two unusual examinations. The first one was to recreate a small project that you&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s randomly insert three bugs into your project&#x27;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&#x27;d have a hell of a time.

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.

&gt; 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&#x2F;is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we were all in a major life stuff happening moment.&gt; 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.&gt; 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.&gt; ...&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s essentially a lack of effort with a massive effort of your own.&gt; 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&#x27;m sure they were very heartfelt about being sorry they got caught. How many do you think would have been feeling sorry if they&#x27;d gotten away with it scot free?

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?

After leaving the mormon church, I lost much of the attitudes that had been ingrained in me there, but one thing I didn&#x27;t lose was a hatred for cheating.&gt; 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&#x27;t wanna fail? Then don&#x27;t cheat.

So you join the chat, say nothing for months, and then pull the rug out from under your students?If a professor joined a group chat, without any corrections to what was being shared, &quot;no news is good news&quot; would be the assumption.Trying to read this was embarrassing.

And stayed with the intentions of seeing whether the students would cheat again, rather than addressing the root of the problem.

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.

Can you explain further what you mean by &quot;integrity&quot;?

I&#x27;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.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this &quot;investigation&quot; should be encouragedIt resulted in a large amount of the students finally engaging with the material and ultimately caring about the course, though. I don&#x27;t believe it is healthy to expect that of a professor, but it seemed to work out here.

&gt; this article is really a character study about the author, and not at all about cheatingYeah 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&#x27;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&#x27;t like it at all.Talk to the students or fail them all and move on. I don&#x27;t think the impulse to invest so much time and technique in this &quot;investigation&quot; should be encouraged.

&gt; 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.&gt; 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&#x27;t give a good goddamn as long as the students wounds are self-inflected and their checks still clear.&gt; 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&#x27;s trying to find a murderer while constantly trying to convince himself that whoever he was, he didn&#x27;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&gt; 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.

I&#x27;ve heard a lot of the same from the professors I&#x27;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.

&gt; Honestly if they couldn’t do 150 without plagiarizing it, what’s the chance they could do 2000?You&#x27;ve lumped too many people together in your use of &quot;they&quot;.In the author&#x27;s own words:&gt; 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.

I think a poster above suggested 2000 words because it would require more thought and reflection than only 150.Whatever the word count, the instructor seems motivated to discover plagiarism.

Honestly if they couldn’t do 150 without plagiarizing it, what’s the chance they could do 2000?

&quot;In at least 150 words, demonstrate your understanding of what it means to behave according to a high standard of personal and academic integrity&quot; -- should have made that 2000 words, minimum.Great write-up, more than fair teacher who wants only what&#x27;s best for their students.

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&#x2F;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.

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

I think there&#x27;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&#x27;t world famous - including myself. I don&#x27;t feel at all threatened by self taught people, honestly I was not a great student and consider myself partially self taught anyway.

Since a plurality of the population has higher education degrees and since that segment of society enjoys greater respect and privilege, I&#x27;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 &quot;real engineers&quot; 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.

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&#x27;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 &quot;qualification preferred&quot; and &quot;qualification required&quot;.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&#x27;s what we want for cardiologists and structural engineers.

I respect anyone who does heart surgery on themselves

This is just partially true.University education has lost a lot of its appeal, that&#x27;s correct, some sort of tragedy of the commons. But that part of &quot;Self-taught people with impressive portfolios &quot; is hilarious, navel gazing to the max. Nobody would deal with a self-taught cardiologist or structural engineer.

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.

&gt; they are only cheating themselves.I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.

&gt; 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&#x27;s gotten really bad, I can&#x27;t imagine how bad it&#x27;s going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I&#x27;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.

&gt; only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careersFor 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.

if a good job pays 100-300k&#x2F;year, does it matter if you eventually get filtered out if you already made good $ and keep expenses low.

&gt; It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves.&gt; 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&#x27;t cheated, I wouldn&#x27;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.

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.

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 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&#x27;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 &#x27;Required Course Materials&#x27; or &#x27;Recommended for Review&#x27;. These suckers couldn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t all that special, or smart, get so many A&#x27;s. Even in spite of the quality of instruction.The answer was always the same - read the textbook!

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&#x27;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.

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.

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&#x2F;off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful information.So as a result, it&#x27;s not that you don&#x27;t see the big picture. It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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

, they don&#x27;t know the value of money, and are just going because their parents just want them to.how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass.they don&#x27;t even know what they really want to do with their livesor maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.

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 &quot;signal value&quot;.To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its educational value, maybe that doesn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

The reason I think a lot of people cheat is because they just don&#x27;t appreciate the value of a good education, they don&#x27;t even know what they really want to do with their lives, they don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents&#x27; money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - &quot;my parents want me to go&quot;. &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot;. 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&#x27;re asking of late teenagers and young adults.

I.e. any car can perform like a Ferrari just by painting it red and putting on some badges.

&gt; You’re paying so much money for these coursesI 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.

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&#x27;re going to have to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching are two different things, and what you&#x27;re describing sounds more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.

It&#x27;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&#x27;s necessary to pass or the investment in the degree is null and void. And you&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s of screening.I&#x27;m currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I&#x27;m in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don&#x27;t wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t care about knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get a masters or doctorate.

My boss was gleeful at getting someone with a 3.9 GPA recently. It counts for something, I can say that much.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. But there are endless ways to make money, pick something you actually like.I&#x27;ve counseled many kids: Draw two circles, one around what you like, the other around what makes money. Do the things in the intersection.

&gt;I&#x27;m just going to cheat to save time and effort.I totally understand the pressure, and the idea that these choices are a means to an end. And this isn&#x27;t meant to sound condescending so please don&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;yeah, I won&#x27;t do it when it matters&quot; but these types of choices tend to become habits, and as the saying goes, habits become one&#x27;s character and character becomes one&#x27;s fate.

&gt;I don&#x27;t wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it&#x27;s a good job and I want money,I see this a lot in computer science &#x2F; SWE too. I realize you don&#x27;t have the life experience to answer these questions well so maybe they&#x27;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&#x27;ve seen in having spent about as many years out of school as in it, it&#x27;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 &quot;good career,&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s a &quot;simple&quot; move like going from IC into management.

&gt; I do it because it&#x27;s a good job and I want moneyI 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:&gt; …are people who have never had the experience of being a &quot;bad student&quot;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&#x27;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&#x27;s GPA in the job market. &quot;Research courses&quot; 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&#x27;t want to report it, though, because it&#x27;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&#x27;t. They understand that the course is required, so you&#x27;re going to get a B or a C if you don&#x27;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&#x27;t underestimate what you&#x27;re giving up.

&gt; I don&#x27;t wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB.How on earth would an electrical engineering degree help you get a good job?

One thing I want to tell you is that, if you don&#x27;t like what you do every day for decades, the extra money you make by taking that job won&#x27;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&#x2F;yr is good, but it&#x27;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&#x27;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 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.

I feel like people who say that &quot;it&#x27;s so much money, so try and get something out of it&quot; are people who have never had the experience of being a &quot;bad student&quot; and have an immense passion for learning. I really can&#x27;t say the same.I&#x27;m currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I&#x27;m in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don&#x27;t wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t related to my major) and yet I&#x27;m supposed to feel incredibly enthralled showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I&#x27;m just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t actually good to begin with?

Maybe they aren&#x27;t paying for those courses. They&#x27;re almost always spending someone else&#x27;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&#x27;d not be a strong correlation.Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is somewhere in the basement, I&#x27;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&#x27;t want to buy the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift.I didn&#x27;t care about the diploma. I only cared about the education. If I only wanted a diploma, I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t look good...So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t paying for the courses though, they&#x27;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.&gt; if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpaTons of employers require transcripts, especially for new grads.

Many don&#x27;t pay money for the courses themselves, they&#x27;re paying for a degree. Why do people want a degree? To pursue high paying careers because it&#x27;s difficult for many (at least here in America) to find any decent paying job (that allows for the &quot;American Dream&quot;) without one. Now it would be nice if every student was passionate about all the subjects required for their degree of choice and&#x2F;or if every professor had both passion and clarity in their lecturing but that&#x27;s not the world we live in.Students aren&#x27;t always passionate about the required subjects for their degree , potentially because these subjects won&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t, it shouldn&#x27;t be hard to imagine why someone would.

What field are you in?This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but professionally I work in software development.I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code I wrote for my side project, since I didn&#x27;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 &quot;huh&quot; 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&#x27;t imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.

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.

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&#x27;t interview me because I didn&#x27;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&#x27;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 write up explains a lot, and is pertinent to this particular issue.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;lesson.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;lesson.html</a>There&#x27;s also an article around here somewhere on signaling theory that I don&#x27;t have on hand.

First job out of college (July 2013) was w&#x2F; an employer (Bay Area company whose name rhymes w&#x2F; 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&#x2F; 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 &quot;forgot&quot; 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 &quot;prestigious&quot; their employees &amp; hiring practices are.

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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

My school had an endless stream of Saudi students only there for government cash and they&#x27;d cheat nonstop.

Most people who go to University for the first time aren&#x27;t doing it because they &#x2F;want&#x2F; to. It&#x27;s just an extension of the regular primary&#x2F;middle&#x2F;highschool education they were doing previously, none of which was optional.They&#x27;re also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either they&#x27;ve taken out loans that they haven&#x27;t really considered the long term impact of, or their parents are covering some&#x2F;all of it.

&quot;... so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?&quot;I&#x27;ve been a TA, and I&#x27;ve talked to some students who cheated or considered cheating.The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind cheating. Students don&#x27;t actively make a decision that &quot;I&#x27;m just gonna apply to a university and cheat&quot;. That&#x27;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 &quot;get everything out of it anymore&quot;. So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the bad grade (which they should).

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;ll try to save time in the class and reapply that time to better learning resources (my morals won&#x27;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&#x27;t reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2 sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions aren&#x27;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&#x2F;4 can get me deported. Looks pretty incentivized to me.

Actually, it&#x27;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.

The college system serves three purposes: (1) Education, (2) Credentialing, (3) Networking.The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better &amp; cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.

Not everyone is paying a lot for courses.My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. 
Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)

The cynic would say the money they paid for school are just easy student loans that will be forgiven.  What&#x27;s their skin in the game?

People go to university for the credential, not to learn. Surprisingly little learning happens at university.The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is.Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…

I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this…Bryan Caplan&#x27;s book concerns precisely this subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-case-against-education-bryan-caplan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-case-against-educatio...</a>

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&#x2F;scholarships, or your parents are paying for it and care, or you want to get into certain programs. If they aren&#x27;t meaningful after school then they are revealed as a farce. So why not cheat. And they&#x27;re made even more farcical if other students are cheating.And then, culturally, we don&#x27;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&#x27;re learning in school.I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You&#x27;re paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what you&#x27;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&#x2F;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.).

Grades get you internships and internships look extremely good on a resume. It&#x27;s that simple.

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&#x27;re probably closer to the truth).

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 &amp; full of potential? You don’t trust anybody and nobody trusts you.

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?

I completely agree with this view. However, I think it&#x27;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&#x27;t have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we&#x27;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&#x27;t essential...i.e. it&#x27;s not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there&#x27;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?

&gt;&gt;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&#x27;t get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion&#x2F;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&#x27;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.&gt;&gt;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.&gt;&gt;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;ll probably be horrified of how little they got for the $2000 the class cost.

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.

It&#x27;s on my cv but never a requirement in a job description.

Do you mean that it&#x27;s not on your CV, or that you don&#x27;t send out CVs?

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 &quot;more&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a competitive place.It&#x27;s not that I think cheating is good, I just wonder if these students peers in this class&#x2F;other schools who had better outcomes did things the right way, or maybe they just didn&#x27;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.

I&#x27;d be bothered with my own stupidity if i did not cheat. And nature does not care for what you are repulsed by. Otherwise, cockroach wouldn&#x27;t exist.

You show me a &quot;great&quot; man who died with endowments and charities named after him, and I&#x27;ll show you a man who spent his life cheating the system.

Integrity suffers when you know what&#x27;s right and still do otherwise. If you dismiss the institution entirely, integrity doesn&#x27;t suffer. Not giving money to the Church is a sin, but if you aren&#x27;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 issue is the perception society doesn&#x27;t reward integrity.Those with integrity are very clearly perceived as the handicapped in modern America.Nowhere is this more clear than cryptocurrency and gun reform.

I personally find cheating repulsive. Are you not bothered by the lack of integrity?

&gt; it&#x27;s got enough wealth in it to withstand a fewFor how long? I assume you&#x27;re in the west. Look around and tell me – how long?

the only way to deal with parasites is to parasite them.

We&#x27;ll always have parasites in the system, it&#x27;s got enough wealth in it to withstand a few. Thankfully in the systems most of us interact within. Which country are you in?

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&#x27;d be a fool if i didnt trick the system.

Depends on the university - and course. I‘m currently at TUM (CS) and you don‘t need to submit any homework assignments to be admitted to an exam. Though there are some courses where part of or the complete grade are made up of homework assignments.
Cheating is still a problem nonetheless and from personal experience and being involved with grading seems to have gotten bigger with online examinations (obv), closed or open book.One interesting approach I saw one course do to handle online exams is to have an unsupervised open book exam with some randomization in the problem statements and then inviting a random subset of students for an oral re-examination. Basically just a 10-20 minute conversation in which you should explain how you went about answering the questions. The idea seems to be to do that often enough and you will find the cheaters who will be unable to explain how they derived their answers. I wonder if that‘s an approach that could work generally and maybe even for homework assignments though the effort becomes quite considerable then.

In Germany (as far as I know), quizzes and homework are not graded, only some % of them needs to be completed in order for people to be admitted to an exam.Having a similar system would work well there, if one can make exams (and midterms?) either physical or less susceptible to cheating.

Here&#x27;s how another professor, Richard Quinn, dealt with widespread cheating in his class at UCF. He had noticed a bimodal distribution in the scores, uhoh! Never cheat in a class where the professor knows more about stats than you do.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4</a>

This is a preposterous comparison of apples to oranges.

This has nothing to do with fairness. It has everything to do with integrity. You justifying these actions is part of the problem. This is the attitude that these businesses you are accusing take themselves. &quot;Others are doing it so why shouldn&#x27;t I?&quot; It is a direct lead to societal decay.

I&#x27;m curious what you call it when, say a car company programs their vehicles to notice when they are on an emission test stand and will operate differently to get the best test result possible. Because regulators call it cheating and society as a whole suffers from it.

Hello! What do you think you&#x27;re doing? Only me and Garth get to talk to the camera.

when businesses do it, it&#x27;s called delegation, efficiency, or collaboration, but when students do it, it&#x27;s called cheating. it&#x27;s unfair in that sense.

The price of tuition, the necessity of loans, large student&#x2F;teacher ratios …Increase the price, decrease the cost, and also the balance of power is against the student.That looks rigged to me.

I’m went to school at a time where everything was curved.In that environment, you had to fight for every GPA point and were at a disadvantage of you were a stickler for academic integrity. In a 500 person lecture, ~25 were getting a 4. It’s easy to be on a high horse at an Ivy school, where people who don’t show get gentleman’s Cs and the average GPA is like a 3.6.Obviously this situation in the article wasn’t that. But I think the professor did a good job of empathizing with the students and accepting that there are varying types of motivations.

you&#x27;re radicalized against the systemthe system is not rigged, going to college at all is a privilege that many don&#x27;t geti can&#x27;t imagine trying to justify cheating with this logic while simultaneously there are more honorable people scavenging their lunch from the trashi get it though, online school that resulted from covid is some of the worst instruction. fortunately that&#x27;s coming to an end

You can definitely ignore them if you think that ignoring them and putting work elsewhere is a net benefit to everyone. Not every action merits a response.

&gt; When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?Two wrongs don&#x27;t make a right. Yes the university system has its issues, especially through the COVID pandemic. But that does not justify this behavior.&gt; Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shitActions have consequences. You can&#x27;t just ignore them.

The teacher in this case gave them plenty of opportunities for learning engagement and redemption.

It&#x27;s clear to me from the writing that empathy was abundant.Even if you find it demoralizing, the cheating behavior was to basically half-ass the entire course and not try at all. We already have an intellectually lay and pervasive culture of &quot;just tell me the answer.&quot;

What a terrible piece of advice. If you ignore a problem like this it only gets worse for everyone. The cheaters included, who go through life with that mindset.The best teachers I had in university were very tough and very strict. They taught me to study harder. They taught me how to learn difficult material. They taught me to understand things at a deep level. They would give 10 minute pop quizzes designed to fail you if you did not know the material (no time to even look up an answer or pass to a friend) ahead of time.Fail the cheaters. It&#x27;s for everyone&#x27;s own good. No one grows up if you never make them.

I went to a top ten ranked cs school for what it&#x27;s worth. I graduated pre-covid. Every single cs class has minimum 100 students. The department recorded classes so that they could increase attendance without getting bigger rooms. By the time I was an upperclassmen less than half the students showed up to lectures. Having 25&#x2F;200 students present was common. It really was demoralizing to realize that the department didn&#x27;t see a problem with many if not most students graduating without having actually spoken to a professor once, since you had to show up a couple hours early for office hours if you wanted to be seen. It&#x27;s clear that the undergrads were nothing more than moneybags to my institution, so naturally students saw their education as the transaction it was. Most students were there because they figured graduating from a top school is what is required to get a FAANG job as a 21 year old.

&quot;threats of violence&quot;...........seriously ?? haha

&gt; not having a enough empathy for these studentsAre you fucking kidding me? After the absurd lengths he went to to give them chance after chance after they kept cheating, lied to his face about it, possibly threatened each other with violence, and repeatedly plagiarized their apologies for plagiarizing? After all this, you have the gall to claim he doesn&#x27;t have enough empathy? What does it take, in your view?

My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal.I agree, except that this teacher did have tons of empathy for the students. That&#x27;s pretty clear from the lengths they went to individualize the repercussions, offer second chances, and so on.I suspect this teacher has perhaps a bit of fun catching cheaters? I&#x27;m not sure. They&#x27;ve written code to detect plagiarism in the past. They use a quiz&#x2F;exam structure that&#x27;s ripe for cheating: multiple chances for quiz retakes, long windows for exams, and question re-use between quizzes and exams. They wrote code to archive the chat log daily, identify students, and determine instances of cheating. They gave second chances, creating a new syllabus, after which cheating still occurred. Then they wrote this article.So I agree - the teacher spent a disproportionate amount of time on the cheaters, which is unfair to the honest students.Why not use cheat-resistant course material? They were able to restructure the second midterm exam this way - one question at a time, no backtracking, randomized order, and no question re-use. I suppose this is also time sink to combat cheating, but it seems more efficient than spending additional time filing reports and writing chat analysis code and so on.

&gt; There were 100+ students in the class&gt; I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures.&gt; It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time.How demoralizing do you think it is to be paying a fair bit of money (or more likely taking on a fair bit of debt) to be just 1 of 100+ students in a poorly functioning online class?To be clear, I&#x27;m not blaming the teacher here but the system has continually failed students. It&#x27;s become a stupid game that you pay a lot to play because you have to. When I was younger I used to very anti-cheating, but I realized with time that was a foolish principle to hold on to. The game is rigged and there is no shame it taking short cuts. The university is trying to exploit you the student so why would you not return the favor and seek to exploit the system whenever you can?Consider the counter position: what would an incredibly passionate, engaged and hardworking student get from this situation? This experience for that type of student is scarcely better than just teaching yourself from a text book and free online lectures (in fact, all of the material for this class is free online)... only you don&#x27;t get a degree doing that.My only critique of the teacher here is not having a enough empathy for these students and spending far more energy trying to catch cheaters than address the fact that these students have gotten a raw deal. Ignore the cheaters and spend those extra hours chatting one-on-one with the students that actually give a shit (if there are any left).

My students cheated... a lot