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.
The reason I think a lot of people cheat is because they just don't appreciate the value of a good education, they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives, they don't know the value of money, and are just going because their parents just want them to.
I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary, but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do, and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could have dreamed of in highschool.
At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most common answers.
People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness. Some people need some life experience, some people will never gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and young adults.
See I came out of college learning the exact opposite lesson. I optimized for learning as much as possible, and didn't care at all about grades.
Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste and GPA matters quite a bit.
There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least from having a bad GPA.
There are lots of different perspectives on education in this thread, yours included, and I respect that. It's a complicated issue, and no two people have the same experience. This is why I always tell people not to just blindly follow my path because it worked for me, that's the same as just taking the path your parents want or worse.
I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into College, and that something clearly needs to change.
This relates to one of the weird effect of going abroad: nobody cares, except if you’re from an elite world renown school.
For some visa application the criteria was to have graduated from college, and a printed paper saying “this student graduated in 20xx” was enough. No job cared to ask what school it was, how it’s ranked or what grades, as it was out of their social ranking and they wouldn’t be able to pin it in the hierarchy. It was a good school and I enjoyed the curriculum, but really nobody cares.
It's not impossible to overcome, but it does take time. Time your earning less money than you would be.
Time to build up a competitive resume so you get an interview despite a lower GPA, and time to study so that when you do get the interview you leave a better impression to make up for the poor GPA.
Generally the whole "GPA" importance concept is crazy to me, because in my country I've never heard anyone ever being asked about it
I don't even remember my GPA because I've seen it maybe twice - once when I received diploma and second time when I've been going thru my documents and just wanted to check out of curiosity
It's so flawed metrics that I'd never even consider it as reasonable when interviewing people
In my early career I've had several recruiters who were very interested in me based on my resume, had several conversations and then when they found out my GPA said they couldn't place me.
Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain GPA even 5-10 years into my career.
To your point, college is a path to education for some and a signal for others (and, probably more accurately, some mixture of both). I think the issue is when both groups (those that cheat and those that do not) both get the same credential. That means the credential has lost its "signal value".
To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its educational value, maybe that doesn't matter. But to many, especially HR, the degree is valuable for its signaling capability and watering that down has real and lasting consequences.
I went to university to get the mandatory piece of paper. Sometimes I had enough time between courses to actually learn how to program, amid the UML and ethics in CS.
I still don't appreciate the value of a good education. You could have replaced mine with pre-recorded Stanford lectures, set coursework, work placements, and Saturday morning coffee with a senior engineer to go over the week with our laptops out. It would have been 10% of the cost or less and it would have taught me more.
My dude, I make a quarter million a year. I found out how useless college was after I accrued $2,944 in student loans (I attended college after 2001). The value to me was, and continues to be zero. College is not for everyone, and this applies even in countries where higher education is free.
The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a college education.
Were it possible; employers might screen candidates on the results of a test of critical thinking, as opposed to a degree. However, this has been illegal since Griggs vs. Duke.
Wasn't the intent of Griggs v. Duke that the testing needed to apropos to the job? Meaning that "critical thinking" tests could be part of the job filter as long as they related to the job at hand?
many make that because of massive information asymmetry. they are players in a giant con game that is engulfing the world. to some, there is more to life than bartering.
>if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass.
If you care about not wasting money, why risk everything you've spent and not even gain the education that you've purchased while you're at it?
>or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
If they truly already have the skills they need to skip to their life of choice - why cheat? If they don't have this capability, their feeling that they should just be able to skip over education is wrong.
I feel like people who say that "it's so much money, so try and get something out of it" are people who have never had the experience of being a "bad student" and have an immense passion for learning. I really can't say the same.
I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.
I pay a fuckton of money of classes that I'm forced to take on subjects that I learned in the freshman year of my highschool that I really do not care about (and aren't related to my major) and yet I'm supposed to feel incredibly enthralled showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I'm just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don't care about the subject at all, I just care about the GPA that I get at the end of the semester.
And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?
My experience was the complete opposite. I loved learning that stuff. It was like somebody turned the lights on. Like I was handed the keys to the universe. In my mind I could see the electrons flowing. With the math I could figure out how and why.
I am sad for you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. But there are endless ways to make money, pick something you actually like.
I've counseled many kids: Draw two circles, one around what you like, the other around what makes money. Do the things in the intersection.
> They want to pay me a ton of money for this? I'd do it for free!
Happy to see that other's found this too :) This was my experience with CS—I always loved it and I am, to this day, still surprised that they pay me so much because I used to do this exact same stuff at home for fun. I feel like I got exceptionally lucky that my passion just so happens to be something exceptionally profitable because I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.
The German Bundeswehr solved that problem by not letting their pilots fly and instead promote them to some managerial office jobs. That is still cheaper than paying for real flight hours.
It's so frustrating for me to read things like "I am sad for you". I don't have the option to do what I want; someone has to pay to feed the children and keep the lights on at my village back home. Another commenter said something like "I would do this for free!". Great, you did it for the love of doing it and had the privilege of coming from a background where you can go through college without thinking of money, but I can't, and being talked down to condescendingly about it is infuriating.
You're trapping yourself into a 30-40 year career that you clearly can't make yourself care before you've even started. What exactly do you think is going to happen to you 10-20 years into your career? Growth and advancement are continually expected for an engineer over the course of their career. And the engineering professions aren't large communities; get a reputation as "that mediocre guy that doesn't care about his profession" and it's game over.
And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself. You won't have anyone else to blame for it.
What do you want to do? If I put together a list of things it'd be hundreds of lines long and at least some of them would be profitable.
I think people aren't baffled by you choosing a high-paying career, but by you not having anything that's both high-paying and interesting. Why electrical engineering and not CS or nuclear or something? Is there nothing at all that both interests you and pays well?
This is the thing that I have the most passion for. I like computers and electronics. But it's dwarfed by other passions that I have that I would much rather be doing. No bills are being paid by me wanting to bike or write in my journal.
And I know it's a sentiment that isn't unique to me, since a lot of my friends from similar backgrounds share this feeling. You choose the major that you can tolerate and also pays well.
>I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money,
I see this a lot in computer science / SWE too. I realize you don't have the life experience to answer these questions well so maybe they're just rhetorical: do you think you will be successful when you get a job laying out PCBs and designing schematics? What will your competence level be given that you cheated your way through the relevant schooling? How long until you burn out?
Part of the reason colleges force you to take a lot of courses irrelevant to your major is so the students like you have a slightly higher chance of finding something they ARE passionate about.
And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?
Yup...this is not the 80s or the 90s. Employers got burned enough times, and now check that shit closely..lot's of screening.
I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.
Agree..ppl just want that certificate which acts as a ticket to the middle class lifestyle. they don't care about knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get a masters or doctorate.
When I was in school, I inadvertently realized that the biggest cheat code was not cheating. Professors will open doors wide open for you if you are honest with them and engage with them, and it's actually usually easier than going to all that effort to cheat and not get caught.
During college, I focused on learning a ton from the few courses that I found interesting (and where I learned new material), and I passed the rest with a B- average. As a result, I got to work with several professors on research and as a TA, and that totally overshadowed my low-3's GPA in the job market. "Research courses" with no requirements other than work I found interesting let me pad my GPA. I graduated in the bottom 30% of the class having done two years of research and taught a course (as the instructor, not a TA). I left for a position with the highest salary of anyone in my class, and I had a company literally begging for me to interview after I turned them down for asking about my GPA.
These are opportunities which you cannot get if you do not engage honestly with the material you are learning. Professors usually know when you are cheating, and professors talk - they may know that you are a cheater the moment you step foot in their classroom. They don't want to report it, though, because it's a lot of work to gather evidence and go through the process.
Some professors of required courses are happy to help you if you are honestly not very engaged with the material in their course. Some have egos that are too big for that, but a lot of them don't. They understand that the course is required, so you're going to get a B or a C if you don't cheat and you want to focus on other things. All they want is for you to learn something from them, and you will still learn a thing or two by doing half their homework honestly.
The back door in the job market is a lot bigger than the front door - a lot of people get jobs from referrals rather than the traditional application process, and most of the really great jobs are found that way. Cheating at school almost completely shuts the back door in the entry level job market, since your professors and fellow students will know you are doing it. Don't underestimate what you're giving up.
I totally understand the pressure, and the idea that these choices are a means to an end. And this isn't meant to sound condescending so please don't take it that way, but please PLEASE do not take this attitude into industry. Especially into a safety-critical industry. Believe it or not, it's more prevalent than you may think and humans are always good at rationalizing taking the easy way out.
I know the knee-jerk reaction will be "yeah, I won't do it when it matters" but these types of choices tend to become habits, and as the saying goes, habits become one's character and character becomes one's fate.
This might be a dumb question, but what does this even look like in industry? I'm honestly not sure how I could "cheat" my way through my job. I have to design features, argue why they're good/worthwhile tradeoffs, and then implement them. Sure, I can steal features from competitors but I can't lie about their impact or fake implementing them because people will surely notice when the feature ships and simply doesn't work. Like, you can't cheat at design verification of a chip. If the chip ships and doesn't work, your ass is getting canned so fast.
There are all kinds of ways to cheat verification and validation. In my personal experience, it usually comes down to "cheating" to avoid missing a schedule milestone. It usually comes down to misrepresenting a system. One example that comes to mind was a programmer who created an artificial flag to avoid static analysis tools reporting some errors; passing static analysis was a requirement for their system to be cleared for use. When confronted, the team's reply said they did so because if the report identified issues, they'd be forced to fix them and they needed to meet schedule. I have lots of other examples, some more egregious, some less. Sometimes they border on being silly, such as when a team said they didn't need to validate their software because, since the system operation required a human to turn it on, it wasn't considered "software" in their definition of the word.
For context, these were a safety-critical systems. A lot of times when something went wrong on a research effort, people can cover their tracks by calling it an "anomaly" and avoid further digging to press forward. But a lot of the "anomalies" can be traced back to avoiding requirements or equivalently lying about test outcomes, most of the time due to schedule pressure or just a simple lack of expertise. And because many safety issues are low probability events, people can get lulled into complacency where this behavior becomes normal since it's still rare for something bad to happen.
Another example further down in the discussion was VW's cheating of emission tests by changing their vehicles operation when it was connected to a test stand.
I don't know what to tell you, except that I just read some guides on how to code on the internet and make 6 figures now. I'm a high school dropout. This seems like a profound waste of your time and money, and people are lying to you about what you need to get a good, easy job. I doubt some stranger on the internet is going to persuade you of anything, but there are definitely other ways to make money if that's all you care about.
> I do it because it's a good job and I want money
I wonder what you think will happen after you get that job?
(Either go in a different direction now, or else you might as well start learning how to keep your head above water in your EE career now.)
edit: I should add: I posted the comment you’re replying to and in regard to this:
> …are people who have never had the experience of being a "bad student"
Nah… I’ve been a bad student — just based on averages, likely worse than you. My only “special” skill is that after multiple crushing failures I realized, “hey.. maybe I should think more than zero steps ahead” when considering my many pressing life problems. In retrospect, I’ve found it’s like a superpower because it seems like almost no one bothers to do it, so you can get ahead in almost any circumstance.
From everything I've seen in having spent about as many years out of school as in it, it's way more likely that you make it a few years in and then burn out without fully paying off the debts. Is your plan really to spend the next 30+ years hating your workday, then bringing the bad mood to the dinner table?
I say that having also been the cheater who hated the material and got the grade. Why did I do that? Parents wanted me in a "good career," same as everyone else. They saw a script and they kept pushing in that direction. So I convinced myself into it, at least for a while. It was phony baloney given that in my actual career the majority of my money has been made by crypto speculation and miscellaneous random opportunities, not anything that ever needed a credential. Fortunately I pushed myself onto a path that actually worked for me along the way and graduated right when I was actually starting to appreciate the coursework. Some people make it all the way through medical or law school and then immediately quit the field.
My advice is this, basically - don't try to win at your career, just try to survive; winning is a temporary thing that you can get by pushing harder for a short period, but surviving is a matter of doing everything at a viable level, forever. If you really think this is the best shot you have under the circumstances to achieve a decent life for everyone concerned, then sure, by all means. But aim to exit towards something that actually fits you as soon as possible, even if it's a "simple" move like going from IC into management.
I 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.
Yeah, well, in my experience the ones with the high GPAs were better at designing circuits, too. They'd use math to derive the optimal values for the components. The ones with low GPAs would spend a great deal of time randomly trying different component values until the circuit kinda sorta almost worked.
One thing I want to tell you is that, if you don't like what you do every day for decades, the extra money you make by taking that job won't make you happy. I have friend who took EE and CS major in college, got job in SV, making 300k annually, and feels depressed every day because he needs to work on things he has absolutely no interest in. You might think 300k/yr is good, but it's SV so the cost is also high. Many times he regrets that he should have chosen photography and film making when he had the chance. Unfortunately we are not longer young, so there is no easy way back.
I'm not sure how many young people made the choice to study what they study in college by themselves. But if you did, ask yourself if you are willing to make the sacrifice.
He can pursue photography and film-making as a hobby. Lots of people work to get paid and spend their spare time pursuing hobbies which might not be profitable.
eh, for digital circuits/RTL it's largely been my experience that they will simply not look at you unless you have an EE/CompE degree It's bizarre but not exactly a novel problem
Employers are setting GPA cutoffs and checking transcripts for some of the competitive jobs for fresh grads and interns. Not unusual to see a hard GPA cutoff of 3.7, and the employer wants a copy of your transcript sent directly from the university.
As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.
Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.
I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.
First job out of college (July 2013) was w/ an employer (Bay Area company whose name rhymes w/ Crisco) who marketed all of these things (GPA cutoffs, checking transcripts, etc). My college transcript was....less than exemplary but I made a point not to mention my GPA anywhere and bet on the interviewers not asking about it (they didnt). Got the job by speaking w/ a recruiter at a career fair despite not having the degree they were looking for.
Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email.
My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.
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.
Lots of students switch majors after taking classes in other subjects. Besides, if you laser focus on one specialty, you lose all the serendipity that comes from knowing multiple fields.
I was trained as a mechanical engineer. Yet I write compilers. And yeah, a lot of things I learned from ME have made it into the seemingly utterly different compilers. I see a lot of mistakes SE's make because they are completely unaware of other fields.
I agree. I hated bad professors all throughout my college career. They were the bane of my existence. Especially for the same courses you list and even more for the ones my degree focused on.
These bad professors would take forever to grade, if not that then they would do what you describe and give us irrelevant information and odd spiels about whatever thing was bugging them in the politics world, or maybe even something their dog or cat did the week before that totally delayed them getting us our grades or assignments. I remember in my statistics course the guy spilled coffee all over our written mid terms! How careless.
I, not much unlike yourself would try and find any easy way to get ahead of the curve. Now, a common theme among these bad professors is definitely giving irrelevant information, being lazy, or even completely disorganized to no hope. With all these mistakes, they end up making huge mistakes in their own syllabus. You have no idea how many terrible things these people would do in their own work!
A neat little thing I found that nearly all bad professors do is list the exact material they would cover throughout the course, maybe not always week by week but an overview of the material we would touch on. How silly of them.
That's not even the kicker, these bad professors would even list the exact place where they took things from. Hilarious indeed. It was usually under some strange section called 'Required Course Materials' or 'Recommended for Review'. These suckers couldn't be any worse at their job, practically giving us the answers.
When I figured this out, I started going all in with the cheating. After getting the syllabus I would get this thing and read it from the beginning to the end, trying to cover as much material going topic by topic to be covered in the schedule. I could finish the course in practically 2 weeks, didn't even have to wait for these lectures that were pretty much a waste of time after going through it. By the 3rd bi-weekly lecture, I would have learned the entire course. Those fools never knew what hit them either, I would ace their assignments and finish exams before anyone else. I would even stop showing up to class with how adept I was at cheating. No one even suspected that I was cheating.
I would try and get others to follow my path. They would always ask how I did it, how did I, who really wasn't all that special, or smart, get so many A's. Even in spite of the quality of instruction.
The answer was always the same - read the textbook!
Yeah, I agree that if the professors have plagiarized their course materials, then they shouldn’t be disappointed about the students doing the same…
By the way, I don’t think you really cheated (in an academic integrity sense), you thoroughly read the course material to get these grades. You deserve to get these grades since you already know how to study on your own.
Except for professors who didn't list everything out and had lecture specific material. It's hard for me to believe no one had professors like this when I have friends from places like Stanford and MIT (schools some people would think is filled with all great professors) who can attest to some of their own experiences being like this.
statistics is pretty useful in computer science...and as someone has has worked in biotech on the software side...chemistry can be as well. Heck even anthropology and philosophy were pretty relevant when I took my courses on NLP years ago.
I’m sure there are 10y SWEs (and 1 yr) that use it every day.
Obviously it’s going to be irrelevant to compilers or something, but not to heuristic approaches or anything with some quantifiable (and actively quantified) nondeterminism.
You change an optimizer pass. Looks good on a microbenchmark. But then you try it out on some samples of real code. Turns out, it probably makes some real code a little bit faster. No difference on other real code, but the data are noisy, so it's hard to tell. And on one piece of code, it seems to actually cause a regression - but again, the data from multiple runs are noisy.
Should you enable the optimizer change by default, or not? Or do you still need to collect more data? How much more data? What data - more runs or more different code samples? How confident do you want to be, and how confident can you be?
These are questions you will face in your real day to day work, and a few statistics courses will be incredibly helpful to you in answering them.
I knew someone would say something like that, but I've never seen that sort of thing done personally and I really doubt lack of statistical knowledge is even close to the biggest obstacle to writing faster software. For micro-optimizations so subtle you need fancy techniques to even tell they work, non-quantitative factors (code impact, will it enable other optimizations, etc.) are more likely to be decisive. Techniques to reduce noise are either non-statistical (warming up caches) or unsophisticated (average many trials, best of three).
The amount of programming jobs (out of all possible programming positions available) that require proper statistics or chemistry for that matter are so low that it doesn't make sense to learn those subjects (in the context of computer science) preemptively. Even if people who take and succeed in subjects like Chemistry who do end up in a job that may use it down the line probably won't remember what they learned anyway.
The jobs don't require it, but the people who are not aware of statistics or chemistry are unable to recognize when it would help them. I.e. it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(It has nothing to do with "in the context of computer science").
I imagine they'd either have coworkers who are more involved in those domains (if actually needed for the job) who can guide them on the right path or can just google their problems and end up on a path of self-discovery that leads them to those subjects. Prematurely surveying other subjects not pertinent to the job one is going to university in the first place for seems silly in that regard. I'm sure many would rather focus their time on learning more of the things that are shared in the majority of the job market (or at least more things that actually interest them).
For example, in mechanical engineering, I know how to make reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Software engineering is still focused on a hopeless quest to make software perfect. How to do it assuming unreliability has been slowly seeping into software engineering the hard way, bit by bit, over my entire career.
One example: running the brake software on the same computer that is connected wirelessly to the internet.
I have to disagree with that. One obvious example is Google, who made a fabulously reliable and fast machine out of cobbled-together ultra cheap commodity hardware, and conquered the world with it. That was in the 90s, and their way of doing things took over completely. It's why companies like Sun went out of business -- they had the super-reliable (and overpriced) systems, but nobody wanted them anymore.
What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
You're right about how companies managed to scale their internet server farms. But that was late (1990s) and still has not seeped into the rest of the industry.
> What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
I regularly discuss this with people who are convinced they can make such a system secure.
For another example, I frequently advocate on HN for embedded systems to have physical write-enable switches for reprogramming the system memory. This makes it a physical impossibility for malware to infect that memory. Nobody agrees with me. They all think they can write bulletproof code.
I can't buy disk drives with physical write-enable switches, either, not since the 1990s. This is necessary so if you try to restore from a backup drive, you can't make a mistake and overwrite the backup, and the ransomware on your system cannot write to it. This is a regression in the industry.
And yet nobody on HN thinks this is a good idea, because it's inconvenient. Or they'll suggest a software switch, which of course is inherently corruptible.
BTW, the aviation industry gets this right. The stabilizer trim has a physical cutoff switch on all their airplanes, including the 737MAX. Unfortunately, in the 3 incidents of MCAS runaway, only one use the switch properly (and you never hear about that incident). The second never used the switch at all, and the third crew decided to disable the trim system when the airplane was in a non-recoverable dive without using trim. (The electric trim switches also are physical and override the software.)
For that matter the number of programming jobs that require computer science is pretty low.
For a programming job that requires knowledge of chemistry, it's easier to find a chemist who can program. Likewise physics, math, statistics, electronics, etc.
agree. composition and anthropology were such a waste of time. the composition class was harder than the stem classes though because the teacher was pretty meticulous about writing.
Not at all. Writing entails some creative freedom. It was more like "read this essay and make sure your opinion does not depart too far from the professor's"
I don't bother reading articles by people who can't form a complete sentence. In my experience, there's a strong correlation between bad writing and having nothing perceptive to say.
Composition can be incredible. It's a blank canvas type course that can be about anything the professor wants as long as they're teaching you to write. My composition class was a passionate introduction to western philosophy. Incredible class. Pedagogical laziness, overly prescriptive syllabi, or lack of creativity make classes like composition bad— not the subject itself.
"... so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?"
I've been a TA, and I've talked to some students who cheated or considered cheating.
The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind cheating. Students don't actively make a decision that "I'm just gonna apply to a university and cheat". That's not what happens in their minds.
They do think they can get through uni on their own when they first started. Then, they make bad decisions, usually small ones, like skipping a class, or something, but it grows into a habit, even an addiction. Before they know it, half of the course is over, and they learned nothing. When the exam comes, it is too late. There is no time to decide to "get everything out of it anymore". So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the bad grade (which they should).
It's a course worth multiple thousands of dollars that is filled with info that might or might not be of interest to the person taking it. It's necessary to pass or the investment in the degree is null and void. And you're a young person in some of the first best years of your life on a campus with more access to unsupervised socialization than you've probably ever had in your life. It seems pretty straightforward to me lmao. The real miracle is that anything else ever happens.
- It’s not _their_ money, it’s their parents’ either “hard earned” money, but they’re too inexperienced to understand its meaning, or “not so hard earned” money and they’re just going through it like their parents do.
- the goal is also money on the other end of the pipe. The statistics that get repeated is how much more you earn with a college degree vs without one. There’s no catchy clickbait title about how _learning more_ makes your life better. It only makes sense for them to go for the fastest route to having a degree, if possession is the only thing that has been pitched to them.
To follow your analogy, media will only report on the car colors on the podium, and job interviews will require the badges to get a foot in the door.
For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when they could really work that road race with a red painted Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.
Ferrari backed it up by winning Grand Prix races year after year. I don't know much about the ones since Enzo died, but the older ones were frequently race cars that were softened up a bit so they could be driven on the street.
It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate. Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)
I agree with you in many cases, but note that different institutions, in different countries, teach differently, and grade differently. While cheating in a core class that builds important knowledge in your major seems like a horrible idea, that's not all there is. For instance, anyone studying computer science in my state school in Spain, a few decades ago, had to take a deadly physics class in their first year. It contained, easily, the material of three physics classes in a sensible American university. There's no such thing as TAs, and time with the instructor outside of class is just not a thing. The pass rate was under 20%, and that's on purpose: failing people was part of the objective, as it served as a way to keep people enrolled, but unable to access later classes, which don't really need any advanced physics. This kind of cribbing was (and it might still be?) popular in that state university. The goal for the students is not to get the best grades: It's just to pass at all, so that they can get on to the classes that might teach something they are interested on.
In an American university, I've seen people being quite motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your first midterm didn't look good...
So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an option. But systems and circumstances can be different for others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to cheat are strong.
A lot of the students (and people in general) have a low-level cleverness obsession which handily blocks out high-level perception like that.
Then the blocked out part becomes neglected so it turns kind of on/off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful information.
So as a result, it's not that you don't see the big picture. It's that your inadvertent feedback loop converted high level thinking into a huge scary monster of high-level disasters that will seemingly result if you aren't as clever as can be.
This also explains the cleverness in the face of everything else. Caught? Email back and be clever. Etc. Don't ever stop being clever, caught or no. It is your only (seeming) chance.
But did you also catch the high level thinking student who was feeling stuck and potentially screwed, in their honesty? They realize the system might just as easily punish them. They are also lucky the professor had a considerate perspective rather than a blanket-projection attitude that many have. They are also lucky they weren't randomly selected by the cleverness cabal...
(Also notice that really good professors make for reliable bridges between high and low level perspectives, with expectations of the former but also multi-dimensional empathy for those living the low-level system. This professor is indeed a very clever person on their own. So for them this is situation is probably less likely to result in massive disillusionment as it would for pure high-level folks.)
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.
> It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves.
> Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters.
Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned in that course. I also cheated a little in american history and poli sci.
I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career.
Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of college, in terms of social experience, credentials, professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.
> only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers
For STEM, sure. This guy is a psych professor though. I suspect that most of their jobs will have absolutely nothing to do with this class. Obviously being truly successful instead of cheating will help in their careers, but I doubt anything they learn in this class would.
> I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.
The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more. It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not go to college), but there were already clear trends that are definitely going to be exacerbated.
I've always wondered about that lol. Surely there are people who do this? If you dedicate your life to becoming very good at interviewing and bullshitting, you can almost certainly get high paying jobs that you are entirely unqualified for and cannot perform even the basic duties of. Despite this, you should be able to anyways since getting fired from a large company for "gross incompetence" is a long process, especially when you're a new hire and they're liable to assume you're just adjusting to new tools. Pocket those 3-6 months of pay, keep interviewing, and just keep hopping jobs and finding new places to scam without ever actually doing anything useful at all.
I feel a strong need to debunk some falsehoods here.
First, to be clear. DO NOT CHEAT.
Ok. Grades DO matter. When I graduated, there were several companies that wouldn't interview me because I didn't have the grades. I had a 3.2 ish. That meant I had to get a job slightly outside of my degree - which impacted my entire career (12 years amd counting).
Also, you can't lie about your grades - they will ask for your transcripts. The job I got out of college asked for mine after 6 months
This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but professionally I work in software development.
I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code I wrote for my side project, since I didn't have a degree in the field of any professional experience. Every job since then has been because I was recruited by previous co-workers.
My college degree was never an issue, and certainly not my grades. Many of my coworkers are surprised when I tell them I have no degree, but it is always just a "huh" and then move on.
I am now a director and have hired a lot of people, and unless they have zero professional experience, I pretty much never look at their degree when I am evaluating candidates. I have worked at very large companies, and have never had an issue trying to hire people without a degree.
I am sure there are places where it would matter, but I just can't imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.
I have a BS Electrical Engineering. I wanted to design antennas and work with radio transmission SO BAD. I ended up getting a job as an analyst with a bunch of other people that "were good at math and thinking about numbers", then I moved I to data, now Cloud stuff.
It took me a long time to give up on my dream of being an EE - but I like what I do now. Also, to your point, I ignore college credentials and I don't look at GPA.
agree. I never cheated college although I did in high school a bit . The profs are pretty good at picking up on cheating, and I saw some of my classmates get busted. But I can def. understand why some would cheat.
> You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?
In some cases you're paying for second rate material, so this holds little sway. Why worry about squandering the learning opportunity when the best learning resource is free on the internet. I'll try to save time in the class and reapply that time to better learning resources (my morals won't let me do this by cheating, but I understand why some do).
My current classes are light on technical merit and heavy on APA style citation requirements. This during a time where many very powerful people can't reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2 sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions aren't providing real learning opportunity. I will get my piece of paper though.
Maybe they aren't paying for those courses. They're almost always spending someone else's money (loans feel like free money to kids). So they do not value it.
I bet if someone compared cheaters to students who were working and their wages went into tuition, there'd not be a strong correlation.
Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is somewhere in the basement, I've never displayed it and nobody ever asked about it. I attended graduation only to please my parents, who came out for the occasion. I didn't want to buy the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift.
I didn't care about the diploma. I only cared about the education. If I only wanted a diploma, I'd have gone to a much easier university.
I can say from the other side of this that I was employed in the industry while I was still in school, and so by the time I was a junior I was becoming an Informed Consumer, and let me tell you, the realm in which professors are expert is quite a bit narrower than they would have you believe. That knowledge got worse over time, my distrust grew, and it made it quite challenging to finish my degree.
If we want to students to behave this way, we're going to have to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching are two different things, and what you're describing sounds more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.
Most people who go to University for the first time aren't doing it because they /want/ to. It's just an extension of the regular primary/middle/highschool education they were doing previously, none of which was optional.
They're also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either they've taken out loans that they haven't really considered the long term impact of, or their parents are covering some/all of it.
I completely agree with this view. However, I think it's worth trying hard to give the students the benefit of the doubt and ask how cheating might be rational. In other words, flip the assumptions and ask why we would require them to study something that they are just going to cheat at.
Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?
The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?
Many don't pay money for the courses themselves, they're paying for a degree. Why do people want a degree? To pursue high paying careers because it's difficult for many (at least here in America) to find any decent paying job (that allows for the "American Dream") without one. Now it would be nice if every student was passionate about all the subjects required for their degree of choice and/or if every professor had both passion and clarity in their lecturing but that's not the world we live in.
Students aren't always passionate about the required subjects for their degree , potentially because these subjects won't always have a direct correlation in meeting job requirements or improving job performance, and even the students who are passionate may never get the education they desire (picture a lousy lecturer on tenure who's forced to give lectures as part of the job).
Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who comes from a long history of generational poverty who was able to scrape by enough money to save up for a degree so that they can get a 6 figure job at Morgan Stanley (or the like) as a business analyst. The job will probably only require them to put some numbers into spreadsheets and make graphs. The qualifications to do that will require them to get a degree made more expensive through gen-ed requirements and a whole lot of classes they don't need.
Now in that situation would you forfeit your goal for the threat of passing a difficult, irrelevant science class requirement when a better alternative exists that will also free up time to spend more on the classes that will actually be relevant to the job? Even if you wouldn't, it shouldn't be hard to imagine why someone would.
>>I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this…
Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people are all about this.
Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to send out a message to their friends and family they are rich. People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be something they'd rather pretend to be.
Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a while, it will come to you naturally.
>>You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?
Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go post selfies, or buying books and not reading them.
>>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses.
Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth, who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other person at all.
In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself. Make genuine progress.
In addition to what everyone else said – consider that cheating does not stop being a viable short term[1] solution after you graduate. You can cheat your way through work just like you can cheat your way through school. Not always and not everywhere, but certainly a doable lifestyle for many people. Unfortunately.
[1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short term?
Sounds like a path to escalating amounts of social anxiety and loneliness.
If you cheat your way through life, what do you do when you’re 40 and no longer cute & full of potential? You don’t trust anybody and nobody trusts you.
I highly doubt there is a strong positive correlation between social anxiety and cheating. If anything people with social anxiety are less likely to cheat simply because they don't have any social connections to cheat off of.
The students aren't paying for the courses though, they're paying for the degree. Most students are at university to get a job and expand their network, education is a sidebar, a nice to have.
> if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpa
Tons of employers require transcripts, especially for new grads.
One theory of education is that you are there to learn and learn how to learn.
The other theory is that school is an arbitrary experience designed to separate out high skilled from low skilled workers into a separating equilibrium (or, replace skilled with wealthy and you're probably closer to the truth).
The college system serves three purposes: (1) Education, (2) Credentialing, (3) Networking.
The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.
Actually, it's main purpose is to provide a socially-acceptable way for young people to not devote their time to productive work. Some of these people use the time this makes available to them to learn wonderful things.
My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.
Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat.
Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.
(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)
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
Grades are meaningful during school for all sorts of reason, of course not failing is the most meaningful, but so is not losing financial aid/scholarships, or your parents are paying for it and care, or you want to get into certain programs. If they aren't meaningful after school then they are revealed as a farce. So why not cheat. And they're made even more farcical if other students are cheating.
And then, culturally, we don't tell you that you need actual skills to get an actual job out of school. We do tell you that you need a degree. And even if you believe a degree is necessary but not sufficient, it may not be at all clear to you that the skills you need are the same as what you're learning in school.
I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You're paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what you're paying for.
How old are you? I doubt the average 19-year-old is thinking about it in terms of getting everything they can for their money. In 10 years, they'll probably be horrified of how little they got for the $2000 the class cost.
Offering a different view from another vantage point. My GPA was tied to my scholarship which was tied to my visa. Slipping below 3.75/4 can get me deported. Looks pretty incentivized to me.
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 let me tell you, the difference between Cs and As as an undergrad is the difference between getting a job in the industry and getting a job making $200k or more at FAANG straight out of college, that will put you in touch with the smart and/or moneyed people who are going to make you a multimillionaire. And you want to be a multimillionaire because this is the USA and that is the only path to being able to afford the medical care you may very well need especially in later life.
Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).
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.