Crikey. I failed my degree because I'm lazy and hate lectures and exams (and see them as a perverse way to test someone's ability to actually do something), but I feel less bad knowing that so many people who passed were cheats. Fuck dishonesty man.
Why I will never pursue cheating again
301–310 of 506 posts
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#302At the school i'm going to right now (actually the other big school in nyc...), cheating in the CS department is a huge issue. Big enough that the main focus of orientation seemed to be about how if you got caught even on just weekly assignments, you'd get kicked out pretty fast. Was a bit more than I was expecting. I later found out the reason for this, the high population of foreign students. I'm generally not one…
I went to a school in Virginia and while they spoke a good deal about what the penalties for cheating were the actual punishment was much tamer than what the student handbook would have you believe. Out of all the cheaters that I've met, and people speak pretty freely when inebriated, not one of them was ever kicked out of school.
The professors knew who the cheaters were and the cheaters knew what they were doing but when it actually came time to present the evidence to the academic review board the accused had a lame, but valid, excuse or tried the emotional appeal (death in family, drug abuse, child abuse).
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nyu undergrad business majors. MBA is 150k on average. http://www.stern.nyu.edu/OCD/Recruiters/PlacementReports/ind...
Total compensation. Only $100K base salary. From the salary survey posted here a couple days ago, a number of HN readers are doing better. Also, remember that that includes an average of 5 years work experience. How much do engineers with 7 years of work experience, or 5 years and a master's degree, make?
Not sure why the distinction base/bonus matters. What counts is the total one makes at the end, no matter how it's divided.
Re: 150k, outside of the Valley & NYC, significantly less.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#304" Suggestions to change completely the assignments from year to year are appealing on the first sight but they cause others types of problems: It is very difficult to know in advance if an assignment is going to be too easy, too hard, or too ambiguous. Even small-scale testing with TA's and other faculty does not help. You need to "test" the new assignment by giving it to students. If it is a good one, you want to ke…
And in other news, I have first-hand reports from a professor in France using the same exam since the 1980's, each year using copies of the original version formatted with a typewriter.
My university has a lot of rules too, and the majority are worthless.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#305Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but what's wrong with cheating? Isn't using other people's code, as in open-source, "cheating"? Isn't Google cheating just because it created a fancy clone of FB + Twitter? Wasn't Plotinus cheating because he borrowed one of Plato's main ideas and just fancied it up a little? Wasn't all Western Medieval philosophy cheating because it was barely a commentary to Aristotle and then later…
The point of these assignments, in case you don't realize, is not to write something new or groundbreaking, it's to give students experience in doing research and writing. What they write about exactly isn't that relevant, it's the process of going through it. And by skipping that, the whole point is lost.
Not sure if I'm feeding a troll here, but the amount of 'why do I have to read this book, I will never need what's in it anyway'-style failure to understand the purpose of deliberate practice is high so you may actually believe yourself that your argument makes sense.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Total compensation. Only $100K base salary. From the salary survey posted here a couple days ago, a number of HN readers are doing better. Also, remember that that includes an average of 5 years work experience. How much do engineers with 7 years of work experience, or 5 years and a master's degree, make?
Not sure why the distinction base/bonus matters. What counts is the total one makes at the end, no matter how it's divided. Re: 150k, outside of the Valley & NYC, significantly less.
Right, and total compensation for skilled software engineers is easily more than $150K. So in an apples-to-apples comparison, the techies don't come out so bad.
The bulk of the NYU grads cited in the statistics above were working in the Northeast (presumably NYC), so again, comparing them to Silicon Valley engineers is totally apples-to-apples. If anything, it's unfair to the Silicon Valley folks, as cost of living is higher in Manhattan than SV.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#307It is interesting that so many people think that Panos should have taken a hard line. Panos seems to have had few options (and I applaud the approach he ultimately chose for the reasons he gave), but that is only if you constrain yourself to the current system, which is grade based. Removing the grades from the system is an option, but few consider it, and there is much evidence from the people that have stopped usin…
"My PhD experience, " "--- everyday was a day of glory, pursuing my passions;"
Holy smokes, that's the first time I heard anyone describe their PhD experience with positive words; and not just any, either. Congratulations.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#308I am surprised no one brought up the pervasive cheating within ethnic lines. From my anecdotal evidence, just graduating from a private school in Philadelphia in IT, the majority of ethnic students would simply pass assignments and essays to one another from term to term. It was extremely demoralizing seeing these students at graduation standing for the academic honors, e.g., cum laude and magna cum laude, and get ap…
Actually, that's not what he said - what he said was that cheating happened in the same ethnic groups, but he didn't say that it happened more in certain groups than in others.
Which is not to say that one couldn't make such distinctions, I think - but blogging about that would be sure career-suicide.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#309What bothers me about this episode is that it highlights what is wrong with education in America and confirms what many think about academia as being too insular. What is the “cheating” that Professor Panos complains of? In many of the cases the cheating was not the mindless copying of math problems from someone seated nearby. Instead, the professor asked questions which the students were to research and submit an answer in the form of an essay. The class was a class in real-world business, not an exercise in rhetoric. Presumably, essay writing skills, to the extent that they are needed at all, are taught elsewhere. The job of the students is to perform research and find the answer or answers to the question. Professor Panos complains that the “cheating” students’ methodology was, “research, copy, paste.” There is no comment as to whether the cheating students submitted correct answers. The failure to document sources is considered plagiarism in academia, journalism and other fields. Not so much in business. In business, what is important is the answer. If McKinsey has done a study for company X on an issue and company Y has now commissioned McKinsey for the same study, does Professor Panos believe that McKinsey won’t use the earlier study–or any other study done by someone else which they can get their hands on–to answer the question? I’m not picking on McKinsey–all consultants work this way. There is nothing wrong with it, and not having to reinvent the wheel is a clear benefit to the client. If I have a question to answer and a colleague has already comprehensively answered it, whether he be Korean, a fraternity brother or a sorority sister–where is the harm in saying, “I am indebted to my colleague who has answered this.” The fact that I serendipitously found an answer is not a negative in the business world. Not giving credit to a colleague is a whole other issue. The Internet is a research tool and there is nothing wrong with using it wisely. What’s more–and since this is not about writing essays–is the goal here to have twenty-something business students give their personal opinions, opinions that the business world tends to discount greatly; or is the goal to have them find useful answers and compile the same appropriately? Having been asked numerous times in real life, “where did you get this from?” being able to say, “someone has already looked at this and this is the conclusion they came up with” has always been helpful. On more than one occasion, it saved the day.
These were not math or language tests. The Spanish word for test is “examen” but if all I have done is copied the answer from my neighbor during a test I will not have made any progress in learning the language. Cheating is penalized because the student is cheating himself out of the opportunity to learn. I do not see how students who do research on the Internet and compile that research in answering a question have cheated. If you want to demand more rigorous citations from your students, demand them. If a fraternity brother has answered the question, give him credit. Improve on his work if you can. These are real world skills, and to the extent that business school insists on archaic essay writing the students are being done a disservice.
Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting a raise less than the rate of inflation is losing money. His purchasing power declined.
The article does not make the claim that his raise was lower than the rate of inflation. If it was, then yes, it was effectively losing money.
From the article: "my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation"