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YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

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Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#131

Post by hdctambien »

misterbowfinger wrote: post #99
s17n wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying "stealing isn't morally wrong - inventory control is retailers' responsibility and therefore it's their job to reduce loss".

I don't think the two are comparable. Cheating on a test doesn't "take" anything of intrinsic value from another person, stealing does. Cheating hurts no one. You can argue that cheating puts you ahead of students that work in good faith, systemically, though it's still a bit different. Stealing has implied intent of taking something away from someone, cheating doesn't. You're just trying to get better grades.

Cheating can take from others.

Merit scholarships are given based on class rank. If the #11 student cheats to get to #10, then they took scholarship money that someone else actually earned. This is a very real problem in my school district.

Additionally, if you cheated to get good grades and got into a good university because of them, then you probably took the seat of someone that didn't cheat and was not accepted but would have been.

Also, (some?) universities internally rank high schools by the performance of the students they accept. So, if School A sends a bunch of 4.0 students that all flunk out, then future students from that school get their 4.0 weighted lower than a 4.0 from School B where students regularly graduate from the university with honors.

So, if you are cheating to get a good grade and you get into a good school (taking the seat of a student that didn't cheat) and then you get caught cheating, or just end up doing poorly because you were never that good of a student, then future students from your high school will be penalized because of the poor choices you made (and because the school was unwilling or unable to deal with those choices).

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#132

Post by openasocket »

sithadmin wrote: post #115
openasocket wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistics don't enter into it. Whether something is morally wrong or right is intrinsic to the act itself, not based on what other people are doing. If everyone in the world starts stealing from stores, that doesn't mean it is OK for you to start stealing as well.

Okay, so you're into the deontological line of thinking. I'm not. The fact that you think your approach to morality is the default just suggests that you haven't actually had a meaningful engagement with current literature on moral reasoning.

My argument is "if everyone in the world is doing something immoral, it is still immoral for you to do it," which works equally well in consequentialism. The fact that your actions are statistically insignificant compared to the whole only means that the immorality/morality of your individual actions are small compared to the whole of humanity. That's a false comparison, I'm not aware of any ethical system that determines morality by comparing your impact against the totality of humanity. Maybe comparing your impact against the impact of the average person, but not the total. Under such a system only the Hitlers and Ghandis of the world would even register.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#133

Post by nradov »

eecsninja wrote: post #108
misterbowfinger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the two are comparable. Cheating on a test doesn't "take" anything of intrinsic value from another person, stealing does. Cheating hurts no one. You can argue that cheating puts you ahead of students that work in good faith, systemically, though it's still a bit different. Stealing has implied intent of taking something away from someone, cheating doesn't. You're just trying to get better grades.

Agreed 100%. We only think cheating is only "wrong" because it goes against how the people who set up the educational system intend for it to work, e.g. they are short circuiting the system. It has no counterpart in the real world, and cannot be compared to murder and theft. If it were up to me, I'd make the school system results-only -- i.e. it's about how well you can build a project and explain it, not how well yo…

A results-only education system would be preferable and would make some forms of cheating irrelevant. But it suffers from practical cost and scalability obstacles. We're already struggling to adequately fund public education. Are politicians willing to budget for additional teachers to evaluate student projects rather than relying on cheap and simple exams?

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#134

Post by baldfat »

eecsninja wrote: post #102
s17n wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying "stealing isn't morally wrong - inventory control is retailers' responsibility and therefore it's their job to reduce loss".

Academic cheating is NOT morally wrong in a general sense. We only think it is because it's drilled into us from a young age by the educational system. But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works. If cheating happens, it…

> But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works.

Real Equivalent cheating:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.

He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his jo

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#135

Post by eecsninja »

eecsninja wrote: post #130

I'm really disappointed by the downvotes that sithadmin, misterbowfinger, and I have been receiving in this thread. Let me restate the argument, not in favor of cheating but why it's not the moral issue that everyone makes it out to be: 1. Cheating is only an issue in the artificial world of academia, where it goes against how the system is supposed to work. 2. We only think it is a moral issue because it's been dril…

The haters are out in full force today. Why don't you post point-by-point refutals here instead of hiding behind your downvotes? Way to demonstrate that you're incapable of thinking outside the box that I mentioned in point #2.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#136

Post by eecsninja »

nradov wrote: post #133
eecsninja wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%. We only think cheating is only "wrong" because it goes against how the people who set up the educational system intend for it to work, e.g. they are short circuiting the system. It has no counterpart in the real world, and cannot be compared to murder and theft. If it were up to me, I'd make the school system results-only -- i.e. it's about how well you can build a project and explain it, not how well yo…

A results-only education system would be preferable and would make some forms of cheating irrelevant. But it suffers from practical cost and scalability obstacles. We're already struggling to adequately fund public education. Are politicians willing to budget for additional teachers to evaluate student projects rather than relying on cheap and simple exams?

Maybe not, but companies are capable of assessing prospective employees.

For the sake of my future children, that's all that matters to me. Fuck academia.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#137

Post by creep »

openasocket wrote: post #72
sithadmin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with less than 100 clients over the course of two years. My impact was statistically insignificant.

Statistics don't enter into it. Whether something is morally wrong or right is intrinsic to the act itself, not based on what other people are doing. If everyone in the world starts stealing from stores, that doesn't mean it is OK for you to start stealing as well.

Morality isn't anymore intrinsic than the concept of good and evil. My mother thinks the Catholic faith is inherently evil, but Catholics will fight to the death for their belief that it is inherently good. Who's right? Probably neither of these people-- the question is irrelevant and not useful. Morality isn't determined by any absolute truth. Morality is only useful when the majority agree with it and the outcome of that belief helps the group in context. Over time, the group changes along with the majority opinion, and morality changes to suit the needs of the group in flux.

Stealing is usually harmful to any group, which is why we haven't seen any real change in how we look at stealing. Cheating, however, is undergoing change. What is a hacker if he is not a cheater? We have jobs for hackers now-- it's called penetration testing. An increasing number of people see many of our dominant systems as being flawed-- thus, an increasing number of people may begin to cheat the systems to get where they need to go. This is important because if those systems want to exist, they either need to change or they need to be more secure. You will see moral opinions change along with this entropic state until an equilibrium is reached which will continue for some period of time until another relevant variable changes.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#138

Post by baddox »

majormajor wrote: post #39

A bit of chatter here about "it eventually catches up to people anyway" that I think misses the point. You want people to learn when the stakes are low. This is better for them, and it's better for all of us. School should gradually go from low stakes to higher stakes, not be a low-stakes zone the whole time that then tosses people into the real world. Otherwise you're presented with terrible choices like expelling a…

When are the stakes low vs. high when it comes to academic plagiarism? I would think that the stakes are always quite low, at least until you get to post-graduate academic work where plagiarism can have legal or serious ethical (e.g. medical research) problems.

You seem to be claiming that at some point the stakes become "truly" high, and thus we ought to artificially punish plagiarism so that people learn that there are consequences.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#139

Post by trendia »

eecsninja wrote: post #130

I'm really disappointed by the downvotes that sithadmin, misterbowfinger, and I have been receiving in this thread. Let me restate the argument, not in favor of cheating but why it's not the moral issue that everyone makes it out to be: 1. Cheating is only an issue in the artificial world of academia, where it goes against how the system is supposed to work. 2. We only think it is a moral issue because it's been dril…

I disagree. Homework and exams have two purposes:

1. Help the student learn (by applying theory in homework and encouraging internalization for exams), and

2. Verifying that students have learned the material

Cheating destroys both of those. A student can copy a solution to a general relativity problem, but that doesn't mean they understand it, and likewise they can obtain the exam before they take it and memorize the solutions, but then the exam only measures whether they've memorized the solution.

That is, cheating completely eliminates the purpose of obtaining an education.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#140

Post by eecsninja »

baldfat wrote: post #134
eecsninja wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic cheating is NOT morally wrong in a general sense. We only think it is because it's drilled into us from a young age by the educational system. But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works. If cheating happens, it…

> But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works. Real Equivalent cheating: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693 The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat…

How does that harm anyone? Does anyone who doesn't work at Verizon care?

Here's the real problem: leaking private info:

> And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.

> "Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.

> Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.

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