Colleges need to make up their mind about undergraduate education. The primary drivers of university rankings are research, staff and teaching quality, and professor to student ratio. Your average undergraduate STEM student at Harvard and Dartmouth (lets ignore the other more academic Ivies for now and focus purely on rankings and reputation) will not be subjected to the same rigor in assessments as a typical student at Berkeley or Geogia Tech in the same faculty after taking into account grade inflation. Yet those degrees from the former schools are worth "more" and the value of their degrees is not deminished in any sense. Clearly merit and hard work ends at the admissions office. After that it is just network and legacy.
My students cheated... a lot
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Re: My students cheated... a lot
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another thing is that college is voluntary You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.
If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it? I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating. How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college? I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we al…
If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it?
Because there is no way to measure whether the teaching and learning is effective if you just make stuff up. There is no way to do research if you just make stuff up. There is no way to advance human knowledge if you just make stuff up. It's not some convoluted thing, a lot of systems, probably most you encounter in adult life in an industrialized society, depend on essentially voluntary cooperation.
That's not to say the way universities work is somehow optimal but again, as you point out yourself, you don't have participate if you think their methods are too poor to bother with.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#73I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…
I totally agree with you. It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves.
Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together.
I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#74I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…
If I go to school for computer science, but have to take chemistry, statistics, etc. And get stuck with a bad professor who spends half the class time ranting about irrelevant topics, cheating makes sense so I can spend my time focused on the classes that matter to me.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#75Quite sad that nothing came out of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U . Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about the education paradigm and why it should be changed, and in what ways. He appeared on TED[1][2], too, since then, and probably elsewhere as well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Sadly he passed away in 2020.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#76I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…
I totally agree with you. It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves. Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together. I have a concern for the…
> they are only cheating themselves.
I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#77This is a widespread problem. The inevitable outcome is that university education loses more and more prestige. Maybe this is the way it has to be. Self-taught people with impressive portfolios start becoming more and more attractive while well-qualified people become less and less attractive - or even suspect.
Since a plurality of the population has higher education degrees and since that segment of society enjoys greater respect and privilege, I'd wager that instead those with higher education will use their positions and voting power towards the passage of laws and regulations to keep the self taught out of the workplace.
You can see the start of that here sometimes. It is sometimes suggested programmers become like "real engineers" by increasing regulation and requiring a certain level of education.
I mean the fact that we are having a serious discussion about forgiving trillions of dollars of debt for this statistically already quite privileged population shows they have to power to pull it off.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#78Not surprised. Just about everyone performs some amount or cheating in high school and college. Really if anything these places are teaching you not to get caught. To be honest I think academic integrity policies are stupid. Colleges administrators are living in a pretend world that doesn’t exist where they think the kids are there because they care and dont just want the piece of paper they are paying 200K for so th…
No, a subgroup of students surround themselves with cheaters and believe everyone else is cheating. There are plenty of students who are quite satisfied learning the subject matter and receiving a grade for their performance. They just aren't part of the study/social groups that devolve into cheating.
> No, a subgroup of students surround themselves with cheaters and believe everyone else is cheating.
It's exactly this. I didn't cheat in college, I've always hated cheaters, plus obviously I didn't want the risk of potentially being caught. People I was friends with in my CS degree, to my knowledge, didn't cheat either. Maybe they were cheating and I just didn't notice or something, but I think it's unlikely.
When I was an undergrad TA for our intro CS class, we did have to deal with some cheaters, but not that many. Either it's because it's BYU, where the level of honesty is higher (I'd lose stuff all the time, and even laptops would show up at the lost and found), or we just sucked at finding the cheaters.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#79I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…
I totally agree with you. It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves. Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together. I have a concern for the…
> I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.
The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more. It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not go to college), but there were already clear trends that are definitely going to be exacerbated.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#80I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. (Sure, there are cases, but over time they quickly attenuate from “sometimes” to “never” a…
If I go to school for computer science, but have to take chemistry, statistics, etc. And get stuck with a bad professor who spends half the class time ranting about irrelevant topics, cheating makes sense so I can spend my time focused on the classes that matter to me.
statistics is pretty useful in computer science...and as someone has has worked in biotech on the software side...chemistry can be as well. Heck even anthropology and philosophy were pretty relevant when I took my courses on NLP years ago.