I would tell my children not to leave a digital record of cheating and that they should choose a more useful major than psychology.
Lots (probably most) of people are in college for the credentials. Most of the rest are there because they feel they are supposed to be there. They do the work required for the credentials. Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten. Cheating is often rational.
Bryan Caplan once gave an example I found memorable and persuasive. For most university courses, even at elite colleges, you could just show up and attend the course without enrolling. Not like "auditing" the course as a student, but just as someone who lives nearby, you could walk into the class and sit and listen. Nobody is checking IDs, nobody would notice, and, if they did, the professor would, more than likely, be willing to let you sit in on the course provided you asked nicely and didn't cause problems.
Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
If you were to sit somewhere and hand out free bottles of Gatorade you would quickly run out of Gatorade. Many people would take you up on that. Conversely, colleges effectively hand out free lectures (since they don't control who attends) and approximately nobody takes them up on that. This makes me think that the average value of a college lecture is less than a bottle of Gatorade.
With this perspective on the value of college the issue of cheating is reframed as a question "Why would people skip the boring useless work and more easily obtain the valuable credential they are seeking?"
> Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
Ha, as a prof, this is a fun thought experiment. But notice your same argument would apply to textbooks at the library.
Why aren't all the library textbooks checked out all the time with huge waiting lists? Because their content isn't valuable?
Only a small part of university learning involves reading a textbook (or watching a lecture), there is also the scaffolding of assignments, assessment, feedback, guidance, and externally enforced deadlines and requirements. Instead of free gatorade, a lecture is more like free tomato seeds. They're valuable but people won't take them because they aren't willing to plant and water them over the course of months.
> Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten.
I think this is generally wrong, and obviously both of us are entitled to our own opinion, but I'll point out that putting your brain through exercises and experiences that stretch it will permanently alter your brain, even if you forget many of the details that make up those experiences. For example if you put together 50 puzzles, you can forget the details of all of them but still be much better at puzzle-solving.
I think it's pretty obvious that a textbook that gets checked out a lot has a better claim to value than a textbook which is checked out seldom or never. Maybe there is some topic that is really useful to know. I bet a good book on this topic, that teaches it well, is checked out more often than a book on some useless subject or one that teaches poorly. Similarly, there are lectures on YouTube on valuable topics with tons of views and lecturers with lots of subscribers. If your content was available and accessible to large numbers of people would lots of people access it? If so, then your content is valuable, and if not...
Bryan Caplan's book, The Case Against Education, discusses defenses of education along the lines you present here. For example, he goes over surveys of college students to see what information they retained after graduating, and finds they retained almost nothing.
Maybe learning and studying is good for your brain and will enhance your ability to learn and study. But, this is an argument to learn and study, not to attend or try hard in college where learning and studying are very much optional.
This post is a great example. 70% of the OP's students were in this one particular cheating group. How many were cheating in other ways? Why are the majority of the students cheating? After all, aren't they only cheating themselves? Are they are irrational? Or, maybe, they are there for the credential which is the vast majority of what you get from college.
Ha, I actually know an old guy who went to a prestigious university to sit in on classes as we was phasing into retirement. He was the kind of person who didn't care that he was 3x the age of everyone else in the class, but I imagine one of the reasons adults don't attend uni classes in person is that it could be seen as weird/creepy.
> Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders?
Because freeloaders want quick wins. A lecture is a lot of time consumed, without an immediate financial gain, where they could be collecting multiple Gatorades instead.
Ie Physical, immediate gains are greatly preferred by freeloaders. They don’t see the long game.
First, I compared the Gatorade to a single lecture, not a single semester. Second, regardless of effort, there is a net value, and the net value of your average college course (what you learn less the effort and time required to learn it) is less than the net value of a Gatorade.
Finally, you can just change the thought experiment a bit. If you offered to pay someone twenty dollars to attend a random college lecture, would they? Probably some people would. And that fixes the upper bound of the value of the average lecture at less than twenty dollars, since, if it was that high, many people would be freeloading.
> For most university courses, even at elite colleges, you could just show up and attend the course without enrolling.
This has never been true at any college I have attended. You absolutely got booted if you were not on the class roster after the enrollment period was done.
At California community colleges, it seemed it's also a matter of insurance liability. They were remarkably aggressive about enforcement.
How was this enforced? A professor would notice in a class under 30 or so, but beyond that I'm not sure it would be apparent (assuming the attendee looked more or less like a student).
Wow! I went to a very small liberal arts college, and even there we had classes over 30. I remember a friend at a larger Ivy told me there were 900 students in her intro Econ class...which would have amounted to the entire freshman and sophomore classes at my school, and then some!
Lots (probably most) of people are in college for the credentials. Most of the rest are there because they feel they are supposed to be there. They do the work required for the credentials. Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten. Cheating is often rational.
Bryan Caplan once gave an example I found memorable and persuasive. For most university courses, even at elite colleges, you could just show up and attend the course without enrolling. Not like "auditing" the course as a student, but just as someone who lives nearby, you could walk into the class and sit and listen. Nobody is checking IDs, nobody would notice, and, if they did, the professor would, more than likely, be willing to let you sit in on the course provided you asked nicely and didn't cause problems.
Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.
If you were to sit somewhere and hand out free bottles of Gatorade you would quickly run out of Gatorade. Many people would take you up on that. Conversely, colleges effectively hand out free lectures (since they don't control who attends) and approximately nobody takes them up on that. This makes me think that the average value of a college lecture is less than a bottle of Gatorade.
With this perspective on the value of college the issue of cheating is reframed as a question "Why would people skip the boring useless work and more easily obtain the valuable credential they are seeking?"