21–30 of 122 posts
This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.
Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year? This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.
Back when I studied the school would openly distribute old exams - complete with solutions.
And no, not everyone got an A despite this, and yes, I still remember my maths (helped someone the other day, I guess it is about 15 years since last time touched it.)
One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just stumble into a job where they don't do much work, and the work isn't very difficult, and are ok with getting fired from every other job?
To counter this sort of cheating, one of my prof had us defend our papers in a one on one 'podcast' interview with him for 10-15 minutes and then graded the paper based on our performance.
Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real headache when you have hundreds of students.
Sadly, btw. Students aren't paying $30,000 per year for 23-year-old living in poverty to grade their work and do half the teaching and a checked-out professor focused on research with no passion of teaching.
Having graduated from a program with ~60% dropout rate by the second year, I appreciate the quality control side of things, but the number of professors I had to had any sort of passion for teaching was sadly low.
Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms.
At the same time, we knew from internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs!
This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar).
And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc.
When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least.
So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear.
edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.
Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analyti…
Large numbers of students in colleges shouldn't be there.
One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat…
> Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them How does this play out after school? These students obviously have no passion for programming and are probably just there for the money after school. But once they get that job--and I'm not even sure they can land that FAANG job they want; you're not going to cram your way to being a competent whiteboard coder--do they just hope they'll just…
When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from interns…
I would say that cheating in school isn’t a problem, but it unfortunately devalues other people’s work. Ideally we would live in a world in which no class was graded on a curve and in which going to college wouldn’t be considered by employers at all. But I guess we don’t. But cheating isn’t the root problem, it’s the sports like mentality we have about education (valedictorian, 3rd in your class, etc etc) that’s the…
That's just the human (or maybe cultural) drive to compete. The problem is it turns into an arms race that starts with training (but the training can become overwhelming) and leads to performance-enhancing drugs (could be steroids, could be Adderall). Where do you draw the line? 4 hours of studying? Educational summer camp? 12 year olds taking the SAT? Practically mandatory extra-curriculars?
At least on the academic side, obviously smart students who just missed the cutoff for elite schools still do fine, but it's hard to tell kid who has to go to UCLA because they didn't get into Harvard that it affects their opportunities less than they'd think.
Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analyti…
We really need to move towards vocational ed and apprenticeships: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos... . Large numbers of students in colleges shouldn't be there.