It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're designing our society with daily actions every day), as it rewards people without integrity who want the easy way out. Sure, you can blame the system for encouraging incentives that reward cheating, and there are benefits to thinking like a cheater to identify gaps and problems in design, but we only have one life, and one go at growing the society we want to live in.
By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.
I'm very jaded. I see students who are experts in cramming a set of material, vomiting out the answers, and doing this repeatedly for every exam. I see other students who are experts in cheating without getting caught. It's hard for me to see a distinction between these two groups in practice since they're both committed to passing the exam rather than learning anything, but one is apparently imbued with honour since they're gamifying the exam within the written rules instead of breaking the rules.
It's not that I like or respect cheaters, it's that I'm just entirely unbothered by them. They're just students taking a high risk strategy and they'll sink or swim and I'm not angry about them or shedding any tears for them. Students who actually focus on trying to learn instead of trying to pass tests are screwed even if there wasn't a single cheater in the classroom. They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test answers.
I think we need to stop looking at the students and start looking at the system.
The students are responding to incentives set out by their faculty. If you really want change, you must evaluate alternative incentives.
Personally, I was an honors student until college, and I was often the one in my group of friends to figure out how to solve an exercise, yet I would often get average (or lower) results compared to some of my friends, because some of them were just great at drilling themselves until they could repeat every single style of solution quickly.
I admit - that made me a little frustrated at the time, but 10 years later some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application of past solutions.
> 10 years later some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application of past solutions.
I know many highly successful people didn’t go to university and this why is doesn’t matter.
There are two ways to look at this. One is that those that cram for tests are doing "what the employer requires" and do will make good employees, so the system is working. Those that go this approach probably learn stuff along the way as well.
The group that focuses on pure learning, and engaging with the material, may not end up with the best marks, but they have a deep understanding, and delight in the subject that will serve them very well over their working career.
Equally though, not all courses are equally useful (to one person). I enjoyed oceanography, I went to class, did the work (mostly) and learned something. But I don't like boats (get seasick) so I've never "used" any of that knowledge. Ditto astronomy.
Comp Sci on the other hand consumed all my spare time. We gave ourselves extra tasks, read far beyond the textbook, and pushed the envelope. This would be our career and we were all in. Sometimes test scores suffered (I didn't actually study for tests) but I got a job (one I still have and love) and 30 years later I'm still applying those fundamentals I learned.
Maybe I don't have the highest paying job, but I'm where I was made to fit, and money can't tempt me away.
Those that cheat, well, you can fool some people some of the time, but it's a lot of work. And a career spans a long time.
I remember it being common at my university for fraternities to maintain banks of old tests/quizzes so next year's pledges could cram and vomit more than the permitted amount.
This is like your ML model loading your test set into training without your consent.
Yeah if you're an ML model trying to get the high score on the test set why would you explore the deeper features of the data when you can just overfit and get 100%?
At least in my experience, my professors didn't make the old material available to other students, and neither did the fraternities/sororities.
Some stuff you just have to drill until it makes sense. Ordinary differential equations was a bit notorious when I studied. Most people took 50-100 hours of drill before they could solve them reasonably competently (enough to get an A). For me it was that and some of the control theory stuff that to this day still seems like a dark art.
Other stuff once you understand it the exams are straightforward, if tedious. Antenna design was like that for me, I'd solve it geometrically in my head then work out which transforms and equations matched my solution. Other people just ground that stuff out along with all the rest. I hope no-one was twisted enough that ODE's made sense...
> They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test answers.
Can you clarify what you meant by this? As it stands it sort of reads like you claiming actually smart people don't get into the best schools - which is absurd.
I always tried to understand things. Craming was a last resort, when that didn't work. I find learning things I don't understand or have a mental representation for extremely boring and an utter waste of time and energy.
Are you labouring under the illusion that the learning was singsong to do with enhancing rather than retarding the individual? Did you believe the purported reasons for the education systems being as they are?
No, educating people is about the governance structure de-individualising people making them all think its a similar way that both fosters uncritical love on the system as well as dependence.
I don't think people are defending cheating. People are saying that what in the normal world goes under "desirable cooperation" is called "cheating" in school, and for as long as that is the case, students who exhibit normally desirable cooperative behaviour will be called "cheaters" and that's not a reasonable thing to do to them.
Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school.
These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.
And there are ways to engage students in learning. In fact, my experience humans basically come out of the womb with a burning desire to learn.
It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is extinguished a little.
Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
Give them more interesting things to do and they will cooperate in more productive ways too!
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I also disagree that you have to learn everything for yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to the ability to rely on others.
I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning with other people before going on to spend time on things.
I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second of the day.
Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each other.
> cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
This is laughably naive. Most of the cheaters I dealt with in my courses were masters students who had zero interest in learning. They were paying for the M.S. on their resume for job prospects or for visa reasons.
You’re right that some students will cheat on rote stuff because they just get bored. Where you’re wrong is thinking that’s the majority of the issue. Huge chunks of students are in college for entirely the wrong reasons.
Curious would you go to a surgeon who said he has his friend do all his brain surgeries? His friend might be out of town when yours is scheduled.
Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don’t take a math class to simply say “I’ll just skip the classes and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn as little as possible.” Why even take the class then?
I'd much, much rather have the surgeon who asks a colleague for a second opinion when they are unsure, rather than just going ahead on the wrong assumption because "otherwise I would be cheating".
In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
In this case, the surgeon isn’t conferring with a colleague; the surgeon is wholly unable to perform the operation. Collaboration is not cheating. A WhatsApp group used to collaborate on simple assignments or complicated projects is one thing, wholesale copying multiple choice answers or plagiarizing whole essays or projects is something completely different.
Even so, if my surgeon for whatever reason signed up to do an operation they are unable to perform, I would rather they ask their colleague to step in than charge ahead to avoid accusations of cheating.
I suspect you aren't trying to argue about this situation, though.
I think you're asking about comparing the performance of the student who does know the material well, and the student who needs assistance with it. The answer is not to forbid assistance, it's to design tests where assistance becomes obvious.
edit: looking back at the thread here, I see now that we're arguing over semantics I think. To me, "relying on someone" means that they are incapable of doing it themselves. It seems your definition of "relying on someone" means to get help from someone. If so, I agree, if someone needs to get help from others that's fine. If they are completely dependent on the other person being there (my definition of "rely on"), then the surgeon is incapable of doing the surgery if their friend isn't there.
This thread is about engineers not surgeons. And it happens all the time when an engineer does not feel competent for certain problem, they ask friends for help. Would you ban such practice or what?
I sure as fuck wouldn’t want an engineer responsible for anything important if they cheated. The problem with engineering is that if you cheated through the fundamentals, you won’t even recognize when to ask for help. You’ll just build build something shitty or (depending on the field) sign off on something that puts people’s lives at risk because you missed fundamental flaws.
> Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school.
Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true.
The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
I'm not saying you can be a moron, or have no understanding at all, but Google and stack overflow are tools that more people (engineers) should learn how to use.
I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan.
Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
"you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others"
This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them.
My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit."
At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
>You can't just coast forever on the people around you. //
I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt).
Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
I disagree, much of the cheating is not "desirable cooperation", but blatant copy pasting.
I guess it's no wonder that there are so many bits of open source code or stack overflow answers copied into proprietary (and sometimes open source) codebases. A significant fraction of engineers seems to think that ethical standards don't apply to them and in my experience the percentage is higher than in other technical areas (lawyers are much worse still in my experience, but that's a different story).
In chinese, copying and learning are the same word.
Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society):
1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation.
"I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed.
When evaluation is part of learning:
- You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic).
- There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading.
The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that.
Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable).
What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to".
In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student.
In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning.
When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity.
Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful.
If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves !
(I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).
An answer I gave to a different post addresses some of your comments. You are correct teachers (and schools) serve two (or even more) purposes. It is to teach someone how to do things, i.e. the teacher role and they serve as gatekeepers, i.e. make sure that they know enough to get this qualification.
I also agree with you that in an ideal world we would not need the gatekeeper role and tests would only help the students on how far along their learning journey they are. However, reality means we do need gatekeeping, we need to test that a student has sufficient knowledge to perform a certain task, because literally lives can depend on it, e.g. we would not let people drive on the roads without an exam or let a doctor operate someone without proven knowledge that they can do it.
Because of the gatekeeping requirements and the interests of students they will optimize for outcomes, that might mean they learn some subjects in depth, but it will also mean they learn some subjects with the bare minimum to pass (and that is fine).
Unfortunately the students who optimize for outcomes generally outweigh the students who want to learn (at least vocally). I think everyone who taught will be able to tell you that students are incredibly conservative towards changes, even if they improve their learning outcomes (give us recipe instructions, not try to get us to figure out things for ourselves), because it might mean more work.
And I agree that ideally (and practically) we should need much less carrot and stick, but saying we will never need them is quite unrealistic IMO.
I think that cheating is wrong, but I also think that building school systems that incentivize students to cheat is even more wrong, because it is a systemic bad decision.
During my schooling years, I observed that people most driven to cheating were the ones who could not absorb enormous amounts of material needed to pass an exam. I never had problems with that, so I wasn't tempted to cheat, but I also noticed that a year later, I barely remembered anything from what I have learnt so painfully to pass.
This isn't a good preparation for a job in modern world, where if you do something, you always have Google (or StackOverflow etc.) at your hand. And people who have a good ability to put 2 and 2 together tend to be more successful at such jobs.
Cheating is related to human problems, and engineers aren’t psychologists. It’s human problems when there is a mismatch between teachers and students, between schools and expectations, and students are at the bottom of the ladder and aren’t in a position to discuss what is demanded.
By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.
Scammer implies there is a victim. Who is the mark here? The college that charges huge tuition despite having a huge endowment? The professor who is being paid a salary to tech courses ppl are uninterested in? The employer for requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them? If cheating became so widespread that degrees stopped mattering, employers would have to find other ways.
The victim is the person who did the actual work and has the same credential as the person who did not, as well as the group who is using that credential as a decision filter. By cheating, you distort the information that credential is meant to convey.
Do you care if someone you enter a transaction with cheats, even if you take pride in your side of the bargain?
Humans (and other primates) have an innate desire for fairness. Ethics helps guide human interactions. If you don’t think interpersonal ethics are important, it’s hard to have a functioning society.
Students cannot do much on their own about the system of incentives that rewards cheating. You may as well post "By tax-optimizing, you're voting for a society of rent collectors who do no useful work and just understand the tax system better than other people"
If someone realizes that they have become an agent of a much larger system tasked with the grunt work of a harmful and illegitimate process like college education as a career credential, and if that person wants to avoid being evil, they need not lift a finger. It is easier not to do the paperwork than to do it!
If this kind of thinking was prevalent, it might work. It is currently not, and I doubt posting about it will help much. Besides, there are lots of incompetent people who prefer the current dishonesty, so breaking this Nash equilibrium is hard.
Sometimes cheating is a smart way to save some time. Scammers are just the other world, it is like when somebody with too much of spare time goes for hunting. All scammers do cheating but only a minority of cheaters go into scam.
The problem with cheating is not just "it's not fair". In fact, it takes a whole lot of cheating before that becomes a problem (through diploma inflation). The problem with cheating is that students aren't learning. This sets them up for failure on further classes that build on the current one.
They have a point though. If exam is testing for things that can be looked up easily, what's the point? Test for understanding and make tests individual enough to make mass cheating not feasible.
> Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay too?
Students are hardly in a position where they can express their views freely. Do you consider laying out rules and punishing anyone who voices objections okay too?
Professionally we collaborate with our peers to achieve some goal. In school, the goal is individual achievement. If you "collaborate" in this way in school, you absolutely aren't achieving the purpose you are spending so much time and money working towards.
If you get away with cheating it’s not cheating. The real problem is whether it’s worth the risk of getting caught and/or losing an opportunity to learn something which will help you later.
Only to yourself, just to be clear I’m not in favour of cheating but just stating that a fact. Think of a hypothetical situation - you cheated and no one in the world knows and you also donot know, can you really prove cheating happened ?
In real world you have to weigh in the risk of getting caught, but if no one can ever know (very very improbable) you didn’t cheat according to them. And make it even more absurd - after cheating you can cheat again by saying I didn’t cheat.
This is applicable to a lot of things like crime, faking it, copying it, you name it.
Cheating could grade the honest student below you lower on a curve and deny them employment in a competitive job market. Then there'd be a dishonest person earning more economic influence on the world than an honest one.
Honesty is a very subjective experience, but for this comment I guess you are using honest as a proxy to people who didn’t cheat. Yes cheating does affect a group adversely and that is why institutions invest heavily in making risks not worth it. But my original comment stays, if you get away with cheating you did not cheat unless proven guilty.
It takes a lot of cheating to harm honest students (unless graded on a curve). The real problem with cheating is that you don't learn.
Cheating is a symptom of something worse. Viewing studies as a means to get a diploma, rather than a means to get an education.
This is a deep issue, that stems from things like using the threat of failing a test to get people to engage.
The educational system presents itself as a bunch of hoops to jump through to get a successful life. Parents tend to see it the same way. Society often does aswell.
This ruins a lot of the intrinsic value of education.
The problem is, a lot of what you learn in university is shit you won't need for at least half a decade in your actual career and by the time you could need it you'd have forgotten it anyways.
Universities used to be the place where the best brains of the country studied and advanced science itself afterwards. Nowadays, with university r&d budgets slashed and those that remain in r&d being forced to waste half their time chasing grants and another quarter in administrative bullcrap, it's a place to weed out people with adhd or otherwise disadvantaged so employers can pick up the "creme de la creme" without violating a ton of anti discrimination law or the risk of hiring a dud. It's obvious when large companies require a BSc for an accountant or other paper pushers of all things.
Students know this and optimize accordingly - as usual, when something becomes a KPI it becomes useless.
By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations.