This kind of thing is why I generally don't like people. They are mostly garbage.
My students cheated... a lot
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Re: My students cheated... a lot
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time. I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely…
Us students would generally love to learn too. The problem I often encountered was engineering professors did research first and foremost with teaching a second priority. It often felt like if the teacher isn’t putting in the work why should we? Conversely, my business teachers cared far more for us students and I believe people put far more effort in.
Exactly this. I've noticed in my classes there's less cheating when people respect the professor. It's honestly not hard to get that level of respect from your students; just clearly put in effort for your classes.
Far too many have just been screwed over time and time again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated) course content and whose lectures don't actually add anything to the textbook or slides.
Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently they've been published to every "student assistance" platform around.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#393I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…
Looking back, I wish I'd cheated. College was fun for partying and living alone and having time to study, but coursework was a joke. I remember skipping my CS 101 class, coming in for the midterm, and finding it insane that they were still trying to get through pointers.
Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun. Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get away with it.
You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time. I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely…
It's not a waste of time, only caring about grades and getting a job is the most efficient use of time. I would've loved to learn too, but when passing classes impact the rest of your life, cheating and taking easier classes to maximize GPA are the right choices.
The "right" choices? For who? It seems like engineering culture has suddenly become rife with this exploitative mindset with zero regard for honor.
When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but…
Tests always get leaked somehow. The students that were hit by the curve were, like me in school, struggling honestly toward the middle. That method is probably not as good at knowledge acquisition as the various methods of cheating, but hopefully better at flexible problem solving. I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter; the curve proba…
> Tests always get leaked somehow.
Tangentially, it seems incredibly unfair that self-plagarism is a thing because "if you're not coming up with new material then you're not engaging with the course" and yet professors aren't even taking the incredibly simple step of changing a few numbers between repeats of an exam. It's basically self-plagarism from the professor, the professor isn't engaging with the course in the same way that a self-plagarizing student is not.
The dead-simple answer to students who are looking at test banks is to produce semi-novel material for each course, in the same fashion that students are expected to produce semi-novel material for each course. In both cases, yeah, it's kinda trite, there's only so many novel takes you can have on the best way to factor an integer or the implications of shakespeare on russian 20th century literature, but that's the system we've agreed upon.
It should cut both ways and the fact that professors suffer consequences and difficulty from not producing novel material is not really the student's problem. The solutions of forcing syllabus-level contracts-of-adhesion above and beyond the school academic policies is not a fair solution either.
I realize there's usually a "and whatever the syllabus says goes" clause but that's shitty, a lazy professor should not be able to exempt themselves from academic diligence by adding a "and it's OK for this professor to be lazy" clause in a contract of adhesion.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#396This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual. I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating Turned out that a HUGE cohort…
This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make the best effort to understand the material as opposed to leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade.
On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.
Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#397I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat. College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt t…
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Re: My students cheated... a lot
#398I’m surprised at the number of people here justifying or supporting cheating. It’s not a victimless crime. Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.
Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating vastly outperforms on average compared to the risk/reward of not cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action will make any sort of meaningful difference. And w…
Yes, if you exclude ethics - issues of right and wrong - there's little reason not to cheat. But excluding ethics from the picture is more than just "look at it this way", but being amoral. You know, like a psychopath. I hear that's also rewarded in the business world, but doesn't mean you personally have to like it or be that way yourself.
Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but because they know what they're doing.
Re: My students cheated... a lot
#399Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class. This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well. Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pas…
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Re: My students cheated... a lot
#400In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate. The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find o…
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