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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

#281

Post by eecsninja »

learc83 wrote: post #273
eecsninja wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial fraud: > The theory of contract espoused here demonstrates that fraud is properly viewed as a type of theft. Suppose Karen buys a bucket of apples from Ethan for $20. Ethan represents the things in the bucket as being apples, in fact, as apples of a certain nature, that is, as being fit for their normal purpose of being eaten. Karen conditions the transfer of title to her $20 on Ethan's not knowingly engag…

> It's a "victimless crime" essentially. It's not a victimless crime. 1. Every CS class I took had some form of curve. People cheating directly lowered the grade of people who didn't. 2. Cheating devalues the credentials that other students paid for. You can argue about the benefits of the credentialing system, but that doesn't change that fact that students cheating directly financially harms students who don't chea…

Dude I've been out of school for almost a decade. I didn't major in CS. And the only stuff I learned that was useful for my future career was through a project class where it was impossible to cheat or otherwise bullshit your way to an A. Most of my programming skills were learned from coding games in my spare time.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#282

Post by GuiA »

cmplxconjugate wrote: post #197
basementcat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When visiting a university in China, I saw a prominently displayed list of students who were caught cheating in the most recent term. I haven't yet seen such lists in American universities.

My partner is finishing their masters in China currently (native Chinese). The levels of cheating that go on within her course alone are mind boggling: 1. Girls asking their would-be boyfriends to complete their essays and attend modules. 2. Purchasing completed essays from Taobao. 3. Copy pasting others work from Baidu with only name alterations. 4. Paying exam setters for exam questions. Of course this is anecdotal…

You'll notice that 2 items in your list are about having money. If you come from a well off background, then you care about getting your degree, but not about actually acquiring skills/knowledge. Once you graduate you'll get a fictitious job for your parents' company, or something like that.

I'm not sure if any data is available/accessible on the topic, but I'd be willing to wage that the young Chinese person who is the first of their family to attend university cares much more about understanding the material so they can then get a high paying job than those who can afford to buy essays from Taobao.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#283

Post by PhasmaFelis »

dbasedweeb wrote: post #244
basementcat wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When visiting a university in China, I saw a prominently displayed list of students who were caught cheating in the most recent term. I haven't yet seen such lists in American universities.

In the US what happens if someone on that list kills themselves? Lawsuit from hell probably, at the very least.

You'd have a very hard time making that lawsuit go anywhere, I think.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#284

Post by Retra »

creep wrote: post #113
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always intriguing to see how people justify grossly unethical behavior to themselves. I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.

Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

There's far less variability in the human brain than you imagine; we have a natural tendency to amplify it.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#285

Post by andai »

sithadmin wrote: post #66
badlucklottery wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't really see meaningful value in degrees anyway Do you see how that's a rationalization strategy? Maybe you honestly don't but discounting the value of the degree to zero makes your actions victimless. But, if the value is non-zero, damage has been done.

Rationalization? No. There's no rationalization going on in my head. I just don't care. But if people are going to argue about it? Sure, I'll raise a counterpoint.

There's no nice way to say this, but you might be a sociopath.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#286

Post by ChuckMcM »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #246
ChuckMcM wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"According to The Economist, influencers with at least 100,000 subscribers on YouTube can get an average of $12,500 for a sponsored post, with payments going up rapidly if you have one million subscribers or more. But those figures refer to endorsements by people who are celebrities in their own right. Someone who's only well known on YouTube might not command that kind of pay." https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-…

Looks like if you scale it up from those numbers to the several million subs category you'll easily get 6 figures, possibly 7.

I don't doubt it, but people with several million subscribers are in the 97 - 98th percentile. They are even less likely to risk their revenue stream by pushing something that is clearly cheating. (Not that the guys who offer a cheating service wouldn't love to have their endorsement of course).

I am thinking about people on the bubble who have enough subscribers to be considered 'famous' but not so many as to be making bank like the top 3% do. The economist article suggests that revenue as a 'youtuber' drops really hard from the high end, into the not so high end personalities.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#287

Post by mythrwy »

creep wrote: post #111
misterbowfinger wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Morally this is wrong since cheating hurts everyone in education. Going to slap a big "NOPE" to this bit. It's the school's responsibility to educate and assess students, and therefore it's their job to reduce cheating. IMHO, if it's really easy to cheat on a test (mostly rote memorization), then students SHOULD cheat. It's a bad test and and insanely huge waste of everyone's time and money.

I agree with you. Why not take advantage of the loopholes given? I think that's clever. I'm a math major, and something I've noticed is that my exams aren't helpful for actually learning math. I don't cheat on the exams because I want to learn as best I can, and I want to say that my good grades really are mine, but in all honesty my degree isn't useful in the future because I have the ability to get the right answer…

A loophole is different from what you describe.

An example: Suppose there was an obscure rule that said professors must pass anyone who had taken the class three times. Some people take advantage, enroll for the same class three semesters, don't attend at all and still receive a passing grade. That would be a loophole. Dubious and contrary to the purpose, but technically legal.

What you describe is a circumvention or subversion of the system itself rather than a loophole.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#288

Post by mythrwy »

creep wrote: post #113
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always intriguing to see how people justify grossly unethical behavior to themselves. I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.

Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

I don't believe that.

I do however agree ethics are system dependent.

The effects of unethical behavior on the system are objective however.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#289

Post by Theodores »

baldfat wrote: post #2

As a former University Librarian and Residents Director A) Cheating happens more then it doesn't. In a Philosophy Class which had a dozen seniors all cheated in Spring Semester. Professor flunked them all by giving them an F and told them they were lucky they weren't expelled. President Graduated the students and fired the professor. Then on appeal the President was fired and the Professor rehired with a raise. B) Sh…

I learned this the hard way.

When I was at university I happened to be 'fluent' in 68000 assembly language, so I was able to do that assignment within minutes of the task being set, no cheating needed. I actually understood what I was doing and wrote an assignment that was not cribbed from the work of others.

I thought this was going to be marked well, passing was expected. However, when the results came out a 'see me' was on the board. The lecturer was angry at me because I wouldn't say who I 'copied my work from'.

But then I remembered showing my code to a colleague in the minutes before handing in the assignment. Mine worked perfectly the first time but when I ran it again it failed. I realised I had cleared a 'byte' instead of a 'word' and changed my work accordingly before handing it in. Nobody else had this change, just my work. That one byte of real difference showed I knew 68K assembly when nobody else did.

So it turned out that my original 'done in ten minutes' code had been fished out the bin and typed in by someone else, they had then spread this around and everyone on the course except for a few mature students that were out of the loop had copied my stuff.

Now this was just one incident, as well as that there were other problems with groupthink which is not the same as cheating. I was behind on one project and submitted a simple diagram. Everyone else submitted reams of stuff, all returned with red pen on most of the pages. My assignment had just the one tick for perfect mark. Had I huddled with my colleagues in depressing group think panic sessions and done my own version of the 70 page assignment they were doing then I would not have got that perfect mark.

In my opinion plagiarism is just scraping the surface, beneath that there is a bigger problem of original thought and problem solving. Most people go along with what everyone else is doing.

Re: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

#290

Post by always_good »

norealidea wrote: post #155
komali2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical writers should write scientific experimentation papers because the purpose of the papers is to explain the experiment to people. I still talk to a rubber duck when writing code that I don't have to explain to anybody (probably). The purpose of an academic paper isn't to explain anything, it's to force the student to form an idea about a thing, then find and apply evidence to support that idea. The purpose i…

If you're cheating in a 101 class, you have much bigger problems than worrying about being expelled for committing fraud in a 101 class. The thing is, that isn't where people are cheating(probably), and finishing a BS in computer science is relatively easy. I'm going to stand by the fact that the hiring process is flawed, the college system is flawed, and our public school system is flawed. There's nothing motivating…

All of my "101" courses in uni were notoriously hard weed-out courses due to their large volume of assignments and reading material.

My computer science courses were the easiest part of my degree. Meanwhile I was up late into the evening for my British lit, psychology, and other "soft" "101" courses. Those were the courses I'd have been most tempted to cheat in if it was possible.

So you're only speaking for your own uni experience.

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