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The Shadow Scholar

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Re: The Shadow Scholar

#71

Post by billswift »

rick_2047 wrote: post #24
jorleif wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your writing process like? Do you edit a lot, or just write it in one go? I notice with the academic articles I'm involved in, that they are edited to death by the separate authors. Comments are often good, but sometimes I feel that when everything is edited many times, the coherence of the first (sloppy) version is often lost.

I just get the keyword from my contractor (who in turn gets it from hi clients) and then google the term. If it is common enough there will be a wikipedia, ask.com or wikihow page. I just use that info. I can take a sentence in those websites and churn out 100-150 words on it. Its really easy to bloat articles (planning a blog post on all this). I have also produced on academic paper (it was a position paper) and I i…

Interestingly, that was one of Robert Heinlein's pointers for writers; Don't re-write except to an editor's requests (quote from memory).

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#72

Post by _delirium »

twrensch wrote: post #23

I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail. I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonest…

I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me.

I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring myself to care that much about that, though. To me the important question is whether people who want to learn are able to; not whether people who don't want to learn slip through or don't slip through.

The much bigger failing in my mind isn't that cheaters aren't sufficiently punished, but that motivated students who want to learn things other than exactly what they're assigned are given virtually no assistance, and often actively discouraged (the side-projects-are-bad, keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you're-told mentality).

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#73

Post by klbarry »

grellas wrote: post #30

Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is? I vividly remember the slackers of my generation (college/law school in the 1970s). They took the basket-weaving classes on the cynical assumption that it was a short-cut to getting an "easy A." They padded their papers with junk - that is, whenever they couldn't avoid having to do a paper. Th…

Keep in mind who buys his stuff: Mostly people who don't have "the privilege of being able to devote large blocks of uninterrupted time to diving into any given area and mastering it". If you work full time and go to school, and possibly have a family, you're forced to go to school for career, not learning.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#74

Post by obiterdictum »

BoppreH wrote: post #13

I envy the knowledge that this guy has amassed.

There is probably a lot of redundancy. It's like learning a new technology. Your first project will take a long time, then, once you've solved the meta-problem, it gets incrementally faster each iteration until it reaches some lower bound. But the knowledge you gain each iteration gets lower too, until it's marginal.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#75

Post by [deleted] »

liuhenry wrote: post #38
oz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Has modern education become so jaded that it now plays out as farce, where learning is not the goal but gaming the system is?" In a word, yes. You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning . It's about getting a job . We HN types value learning for its own sake, and would happily curl up with a copy of SICP or TAOCP and feel content. The average person wants the whole thing to be over as quickly and pai…

> "You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning . It's about getting a job. " That is exactly true. But I challenge that "learning for its own sake" is not normal; rather, the educational system is atrocious in its ability to foster "learning" in kids who never experienced truly mastering something in the first place. I daresay that the sense of accomplishment from solving a problem or truly learning so…

[deleted]

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#76

Post by kenjackson »

gwern wrote: post #69
kenjackson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure how that follows. Was there some established link between GRE scores and ethics? I suspect it has as much to do with the following requirements: 1) A degree that is take-home essay heavy. 2) Very vocational -- the goal being the degree, not the learning. I'd expect business and law schools to be high on the list too, although maybe the dynamic is somewhat different for professional schools.

Suggested link is lack of brains, not lack of scruples - remember the shadow scholar's list of reasons includes 1 group that is simply too stupid to handle the work.

This would imply a large variance of ability in the group, not a lower average GRE score. Although it could be speculated that as the GRE score regresses to the mean (of the general population), the variance likely increases.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#77

Post by robryan »

skybrian wrote: post #52

Hmm, I suppose one way to go would be to require students to use a version-controlled word processor for their writing, and submit the version history. It could still be faked, but the difficulty of creating a good fake would make the economics less favorable. If it's badly faked, then the version history would provide evidence that's more likely to hold up than a teacher's suspicion about the student's writing.

Make them write a smaller version in a test environment from only say a couple of pages of notes they can bring from their long paper. Style changes would quickly become apparent.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#78

Post by [deleted] »

gwern wrote: post #68
hardy263 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 75 page paper usually takes longer than 48 hours for normal students to write. If the version history for the paper is submitted, but all the commits are within a very short time frame, then either the student stayed up all night to write it, or they paid someone else to stay up all night to write it. And if you ask them about what the wrote on on something they took all night to write, they should know it fairly w…

So then this big company hires a programmer to write a tool to randomize entries over a week or a month or whatever, and our shadow scholar has 1 additional step when he finishes up. Basically, this idea is DRM in another guise, and terrible for all the same reasons. If you don't trust the student that much, then simply abandon take-home work in general.

[deleted]

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#79

Post by robryan »

_delirium wrote: post #72
twrensch wrote: post #23

I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail. I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonest…

I guess this particular part has never greatly bothered me about academia, though plenty of things are quite broken and bother me. I mainly value whatever education takes place, not the formalities, so if someone who doesn't deserve it gets a degree, who cares? I can see that for people who care about the value of the pieces of paper, it's important to keep unqualified people from getting them. I just can't bring mys…

Different perspective though, from an academics point of view that does make an effort to reach out to students and teach them well this cheating would be disheartening.

Re: The Shadow Scholar

#80

Post by angrycoder »

oz wrote: post #40
liuhenry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You see, education, for most people, is NOT about learning . It's about getting a job. " That is exactly true. But I challenge that "learning for its own sake" is not normal; rather, the educational system is atrocious in its ability to foster "learning" in kids who never experienced truly mastering something in the first place. I daresay that the sense of accomplishment from solving a problem or truly learning so…

Upvoted. I see your point. Question for you: Is there any way it could be different, given the constraints the education system faces, such as limited time, untalented teachers, and the human need to quantify?

One thing that would help is if people like the author in this article looked at this a chance to mentor or tutor students who weren't getting it rather than perpetuating the problem by doing their work for them.
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