My students cheated... a lot

Prestigious University A: More classes pr. semester, quizzes/homework every weekend. Cheating was rampant - and well known. It was aptly called "cooking", as in "cooking the books".

The classes usually had established lecturers, who'd done the same classes for YEARS, and often re-using the problem sets over and over again. Students would compile a compendium of these problem sets + answers, and hand them down to the next class.

I think the cheating was simply a result of the heavy workload. Students would have 4 problem sets to solve every weekend, and then lab work, project work, and what not. These were smart kids to begin with, as getting admitted to the Uni. was a feat in itself - but there's just so much time.

Regular University B: This Uni. followed a much more "traditional" sciences program. You'd get the syllabus on first or second lecture, the due dates to 1-3 assignments, and date for final exam. Sometimes it was only a home-exam + final exam. Also fewer, but more in-depth classes.

The assignments were much more involved, and each would probably take 2-4 weeks to finish. But cheating was much less common.

Society has demand for X trained software engineers as long as X is higher than the available number (X - Y), you have higher salaries which flashes a bright light drawing more people to Software Engineering. To fill that gap, the current educational system draws in the [talented with luck to have gotten the freedom to learn and play with code early] + [people who are talented at anything and pick SE for because of the lifestyle] + [the people who are in it for the money but not necessarily the inherent talent for it] + [the confused or misled who want to try things]. There is a massive missing pool of people who are talented or have the brain to be excellent in SE but never get to try it in an approachable way at with a good teacher or educational tool before they get pulled into something else. The truly talented SE people are often more interested in the Tech and less in teaching, and those who teach may not always have the love for the field an obsessed SE has. The Education system is a very brute tool - spray a little bit of many fields among many kids and see who catches on and then squeeze any love for the field out of them with as much pressure as possible to surface the gold nuggets of aptitude (talent) and attitude (persistence) who are the only ones sent on to train properly. If you want real outcomes, expose every child to a great Software Engineering program that is fun (maybe online, maybe via a textbook, maybe by video + a piece of software like scratch), then let them play consistently for their entire educational career without judgement but with rewards for talent and persistence (only upside, like computer games). Then start filtering only at the career level - when applying for jobs, or judging open source contributions after graduation. You would have a much broader pool of candidates and much higher quality at all levels.

Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to understand how mitosis works, etc...

The same is also true in finance. People who do model equity index volatility don't remember at all how to derive the equation for put-call parity.

In each of these fields there are people who study each of the fundamentals, and then there are people who do more routine "code monkey" work in a narrow area - think chiropractor or vanilla stock trade execution.

Programming is not unique.

It was like that before the pandemic. If you expect academic integrity in an online class, you are deluded. The students here were just dumb enough to do it in a class-wide chat. Smart cheaters do it in small, trusted, cliques.

I have pre-pandemic experience as a student and as a TA in both an Israeli university and a top American publish university.

The Israeli systems does it as I described above, and the American university does not. The US university held an exam for 350 students in a single conference hall. The proctors were the TAs. We could not check IDs, students seated themselves, and there were no effective supervision. The easiest way to cheat was just to switch the exam forms with a friend.

We intentionally created a massive incentive to cheat. Worse, we curved the grades, punishing non-cheaters.

I tried to protest, but was completely ignored because it was always done like that.

The pandemic only made this worse.

Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.

1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence

To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.

Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.

If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.

Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!

Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!

Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.

Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.

Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.