You're not. But it's not like tests accurately evaluate people's ability to perform the work anyways.
There is two types of cheating. There is the yuppies who are really competitive and are sometimes even paying people to get them good grades so that they can get a good job. Then there is another type of cheating, which is people cheating through some very difficult class with the only objective being to pass so that they can get a degree. The first kind of cheating is kinda shitty, and it could actually be harmful. The second kind is cool and good because people being able to get a job or passing an unusually hard class/bullshit class is more important than "meritocracy" fetishism.
I'm better than a lot of my peers and comrades at this nerd shit so if someone is having trouble with a class, I send them some answers. But it's not like I'm gonna do it for everything, or that I'm gonna work hard to give them a perfect grade. Most of them have already studied first anyways, but there is so much workload it's just not manageable.
Education as we know it does not have a good way to incentivize people to learn for the sake of learning; capitalist education is always anchored around extrinsic motivation.
You’re not. But it’s not like tests accurately evaluate people’s ability to perform the work anyways.
Some don't. Some do. In some of my more data oriented classes I even use my test design as a case study in trying to measure some abstract quantity on the basis of a directly measurable imperfect proxy.
There is two types of cheating.
Nope, there are more. I was still seeing cheating even after instituting my policy of letting students delay tests until they were ready and letting students re-attempt tests they did poorly on, which confused me because that should eliminate that second kind of cheating you mention. So I started having my incoming students conduct anonymous surveys about this and other topics, and it turns out, about 15% of students will consider cheating if they are just not interested in the material. Not that it's too hard for them to understand, not that their too busy, but specifically they just aren't interested. Which it's fine to not be interested, no judgements there, but then do something else. I don't assign a moral weight to even this kind of cheating, but from a practical perspective, it's attempting to subvert me at my job and make me bad at it so that you can then go on and get a job you're bad at. So of course I'm going to try to prevent this from happening.
The meritocracy is in fact bullshit, but the meritocracy is different than basic competence at performing a set of tasks. The situation of living in a fake meritocracy is hardly improved by just eliminating all qualifications to be an engineer or a doctor.
which confused me because that should eliminate that second kind of cheating you mention
I'm not sure it should eliminate that kind of cheating but it depends on the uni. It's more of an overall workload issue.
Which it’s fine to not be interested, no judgements there, but then do something else.
In uni you are forced to take classes you are not interested in even if most of the other stuff you are interested in. Like, I was forced to take 3 classes on statics, material mechanics etc which are completely useless to me and what I am trying to do, and if that wasn't enough, they were the hardest classes I ever had because that professor was a psycho. I had to take bullshit "principles of pedagogy" classes by some person who clearly had no idea how to be a good teacher regardless, which is a class that only exists because the uni needs to convince the government we are qualified to teach physics and math even though absolutely no one gives a shit about that class and it doesn't do what it is supposed to anyways. There is even professors who will just outright say "yeah I know my class is kinda pointless for you guys but we have to do it".
from a practical perspective, it’s attempting to subvert me at my job and make me bad at it
I'm not sure how that makes you bad at your job. Is your job just to assign people a value about how well they perform in a test?
The situation of living in a fake meritocracy is hardly improved by just eliminating all qualifications to be an engineer or a doctor.
I do not know how someone can become an engineer or a doctor just by cheating. Getting a good job like that is just so fucking hard. Especially doctors, to become a doctor you have to actually finish practical training in an actual hospital etc, which is the most important part of a doctor's training. To get an "important" position you usually also have to have finished an additional degree and probably some kind of internship. The reality in schools like mine is that a very large percentage of people won't even work in something directly related to what they studied. "Oh I see you studied applied maths, well I guess you probably can manage to sorta work a computer, so do that" or "oh I see you studied physics, that's cool, I guess you can probably teach physics to 12 year olds then". If this was the 60s and a nice fancy degree could instantly land you a fancy, important job then I can understand that, but the way things are degrees have very little power unless they come from super fancy schools, all they do in their own is filter who gets to get a job better than working services.
Ironically if anything uni is holding my learning back because working on my own is much more efficient for me than all the garbage professors we have and the ass backward approaches they have to material and what we should learn, I learn a lot more during holidays than when I actually have to study for their classes.
I’m not sure how that makes you bad at your job. Is your job just to assign people a value about how well they perform in a test?
My job is to help people learn the course material and then evaluate their level of mastery, which tests serve as a partial proxy for. I don't know how to describe someone using $120 and a Chegg account to demonstrate a false level of mastery without having actually learned the material other than "subverting me at my job".
Most of your grievances are legitimate and seem to be stem more from just professors who are bad teachers, which originates in the absolute joke of an incentive structure for TT professors and the incorrect notion that subject mastery = qualified to teach. Which yeah, the whole higher education system needs an overhaul to address these issues. But widespreading cheating isn't going to put the pressure on that to change, all that is going to do is drive professors toward Orwellian solutions like Lockdown Browser and Respondus Monitor, which students hate even more than the current status quo.
To get an “important” position you usually also have to have finished an additional degree and probably some kind of internship.
You're conflating "important" with consequential. It's not "important" people designing highway overpasses or pedestrian bridges in Podunk, Indiana, or the other 1000x bits of infrastructure that you interact with over the course of the week. Sure, the first order effects of a high school teacher having cheated their way through mechanics II are probably 0, but there are tons of positions for which that isn't the case.
My job is to help people learn the course and then evaluate their level of mastery, which tests serve as a partial proxy for
If someone doesn't care about the course, then even if they do well in the tests they won't really have learned it. They will forget it immediately, as I have for every course I hated but had to pass regardless. So that part of your job doesn't really apply there.
and the incorrect notion that subject mastery = qualified to teach.
It is even worse than that. There are professors who do supposedly have "mastery" of the subject in the sense that they actually have completed very fancy PhDs, have decent published research etc but they only know anything about a very, very narrow field of expertise that they are forced to step out of when teaching and they just say nonsense. For instance there is this professor who teaches us chemistry which she is forced to connect with physics, except she knows jack shit about physics and says so many horribly incorrect things that even laymen could point out errors, but they are part of the curriculum so I have no fucking clue what I am supposed to do if these questions are asked in the exam, am I supposed to write the blatantly incorrect stuff she said in her lectures? Then there was this optics professor who literally turned to us and asked us to help him out with vector calculus barely above high school level. Then there is big shot engineering mechanics
professor (the psycho I mentioned earlier and the fucking dean of the school) who is supposed to be this super impressive guy and he was spouting horrible misconceptions about moments, torque and angular momentum which aren't just scientifically incorrect, they are intuitively incorrect if you think for 5 seconds but I guess they never directly entered his published work so his incompetence in the subject never otherwise surfaced. It is pretty impressive how easy it is for these things to fall between the cracks. They just don't care enough to check if what they're saying is actually correct.
all that is going to do is drive professors toward Orwellian solutions like Lockdown Browser and Respondus Monitor, which students hate even more than the current status quo.
But that's a thing to resist against. I guess in the US with all the paid universities and private universities it is harder but here students have generally managed to keep these things away.
You’re conflating “important” with consequential. It’s not “important” people designing highway overpasses or pedestrian bridges in Podunk, Indiana, or the other 1000x bits of infrastructure that you interact with over the course of the week.
No, that is exactly what I mean by "important". It's not super easy to be trusted with public money and before you do that you'll generally have to have demonstrated competence by means of internships etc. I know people who have tried to head that route, it really isn't that straightforward. That's why I don't really take that kind of argument very seriously. It's not like the filters end at university, or that the skills required are mostly taught there. This is also why a lot of STEM degrees are very "flexible", in the sense that for a lot of things people will hire you for things that are not even directly related to what you studied, since they just use them as a gauge of your exposure to mathy, sciencey and computery stuff just to see how easily you might be able to pick up on some concepts after a training period or an internship as long as you have attended a couple relevant seminars.
If someone doesn’t care about the course, then even if they do well in the tests they won’t really have learned it. They will forget it immediately
In my experience, there is an absolute world of difference between learning something and forgetting it and never learning something in the first place. In the former, you're usually good to go after half an hour and a google search.
There are professors who do supposedly have “mastery” of the subject in the sense...
Yeah, these are all real issues caused by an absolute boondoggle of a higher education system. There needs to be a refocus on teaching and less on grant-writing, dedicated teaching professors, and possibly an elimination of tenure. Edgy cheating boosting isn't going to help achieve any of that. Cheating is like affirmative action; it's an unfortunate, ineffective, ad hoc solution to a problem with a variety of systemic causes, which are better addressed than papered over.
But that’s a thing to resist against. I guess in the US with all the paid universities and private universities it is harder but here students have generally managed to keep these things away.
Well that's good for you all, but here it's very much not the case. From what I've seen in the chronicle and insider, any attempts by students to push back are met with administrative shrugs.
No, that is exactly what I mean by “important”. It’s not super easy to be trusted with public money and before you do that you’ll generally have to have demonstrated competence by means of internships etc. I know people who have tried to head that route, it really isn’t that straightforward. That’s why I don’t really take that kind of argument very seriously. It’s not like the filters end at university
This is unironically a meritocracy argument, which might hold sway where you are, but in the land of subsubsubcontractors that is the US I'd have to disagree. Same with the UK. Wasn't there a shipping company without any ships that just got a massive multi-million contract over there or something?
In my experience, there is an absolute world of difference between learning something and forgetting it and never learning something in the first place. In the former, you’re usually good to go after half an hour and a google search.
That's not the case though, I know because I've tried lol
Now if you REALLY learned something, then yeah you're right. But if some class is a pain in the ass for me I won't REALLY learn it, I will learn just enough to able to pass, and then I won't remember shit next week. And in my experience most people who cheat have some exposure and understanding, just not enough to actually pass, or at least not enough to be confident they can pass. Idk what Chegg is but generally cheating won't work 100% of the time. Like, if you're trying to copy from someone or if someone is sending you answers, there's always the possibility that that someone will mess up and not give you the right answers or won't know how to do everything, so people won't go in completely clueless.
This is unironically a meritocracy argument, which might hold sway where you are, but in the land of subsubsubcontractors that is the US I’d have to disagree. Same with the UK. Wasn’t there a shipping company without any ships that just got a massive multi-million contract over there or something?
It's not a meritocracy argument, it's just that the filters the university has in place aren't nearly the most important filters there are when it comes to who gets to do important consequential work. Generally if you have no competence in a job at all you can't really do that job unless no one cares too much about it. It's not that the best people end up there or that you have to be good to end up there, it's just that people don't get in there with just their uni grades and skills, these are very secondary. Where "meritocracy" really breaks down (if we ignore outright pay-to-win capitalist shit for rich failsons) is much more subtle stuff, like the mechanics professor who doesn't understand torque. This guy just completely slipped through all these filters. How? I'm not sure but it probably has to do with said filters kinda being irrelevant with this and I am not sure how this issue could be resolved to be honest. Perhaps the issue is just that he teaches instead of doing something else.
By the way, I'm pretty sure the US is better at doing a "meritocracy" than here. We're notoriously shitty in that regard. It's just that unless you know the right people, you can't be trusted with something you just have 0 knowledge about. If you do know the right people, then it's different, but you hardly even need a degree in that case. It's not unprecedented that people who don't even have a higher education degree become hospital directors.
The more contact I have with higher education the more of an absolute circus it becomes. It's just structurally garbage, and imo one of the garbage aspects is definitely the way students are evaluated. It's similar to how schools evaluate students, and I just don't really see why this way of evaluating makes sense. I'm not even sure universities have a good concept of what evaluation should be in general. I think maybe it would be better if you had 2-5 years or whatever (according to the subject) for learning and then a final year (or more) of completing a thesis, evaluation and practice on a large number of choice subjects that you have already been taught, that you can extend to 2 or 3 years or however long it takes for you to attain the level to pass the subjects if you can't make it in one year. In a sense that isn't too dissimilar from what medicine students do. Universities should emphasize practice throughout in general, and by that I mean PAID practice because they too should be part of production, but not in such a way that capital basically just comes in and exploits the shit out of public research. I believe maoist China had some experiments to that effect. And overall evaluation via examination should be far lower in the priorities than just ensuring everyone will at the very least have adequate familiarity with a number of subjects by means of positive incentive and avoiding as much as possible to examine people in stuff they don't give a shit about. Also for the love of god something should be done about loose cannon professors who will literally fail like 80% of the class because... I don't know, they hate people or something?
If something like that was in place, I would understand cheating less, and it would also be significantly less effective. But in general I don't think getting a degree should be hard given that degrees don't mean shit any more and are more like a baseline necessity to get a half decent job. A degree shouldn't (and almost always doesn't) automatically land you in a critical job, but when people are forced to go through 50 additional filters anyways, I don't see the point in having university be that big gatekeeper. Well, it makes sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of something that makes you a disciplined bootlicker who will endlessly grind and an ideological state apparatus but it's not really what we should want it to be.
I gotta ask, why are you so confident about the dynamics of higher education when you don't really have the full grasp of the lay of the land? Chegg is a service where you pay $15 a month, and get to ask a bunch of experts (retired professors, adjuncts, people in the field, whoever) questions in the field and they'll get paid to write up an answer. If one adjunct doesn't know how to answer your question, another one will, and I have caught a number of students doing this throughout the entire semester, usually because they're writing in non-standard notion and or are using techniques above the level I've taught. But there are almost certainly some that I am missing because they adequately reflect the style of a higher performing undergrad. And pretending that this is "cool and good" is just edgy contrarianism. Similarly, pretending the onus is the professor to try to thread the needle between evaluations that are not Orwellian but also filter out this kind of cheating is just gonna end up with 80% of professors choosing the Orwellian route.
Generally if you have no competence in a job at all you can’t really do that job unless no one cares too much about it. It’s not that the best people end up there or that you have to be good to end up there, it’s just that people don’t get in there with just their uni grades and skills, these are very secondary.
You can only get away with this argument by working with some abstract general "competence" as opposed to looking at competence to the individual actual tasks at hand. An engineer who is 90% "competent" in your abstract measure can still do a word of hurt by misinterpreting an analysis he doesn't understand because he cheated in that section.
Like I've said, your arguments about the clown show that is higher education have merit, but the solution to that is not to make it even more of a worthless clown show where the grades become entirely uncorrelated with competence; it's the fix the actual problems. Your argument seems to me to be "Because there is often a difficulty of differentiating the signal from the noise in terms of academic success, it's better if we just boost the noise to the point we can forget about the signal entirely."
I gotta ask, why are you so confident about the dynamics of higher education when you don’t really have the full grasp of the lay of the land?
Chegg is not a thing in Greece my dude lol, I haven't studied abroad. I have a close friend who tells me a lot of stuff about studying in the UK but she hasn't told me anything about Chegg (yet). I generally don't like pay to win shit, it feels very exploitative.
usually because they’re writing in non-standard notion and or are using techniques above the level I’ve taught.
I do that tons and it's not because I cheat. Usually it's because I study things on my own on the Internet or books instead of the lectures. I wouldn't be too quick to assume that they're cheating just based on that.
And pretending that this is “cool and good” is just edgy contrarianism.
No, it really is cool and good because people gotta find work somehow and making far fetched arguments about how somehow these people will somehow end up making bridges and that bridge will fall because they didn't know something they would have known had they not cheated in a test as a 2nd year undergrad don't change that and aren't very convincing. Yes, it is not ALWAYS cool and good, neither is literally always cheating for every single exam. But that's not what the vast majority of cheating is like.
An engineer who is 90% “competent” in your abstract measure can still do a word of hurt by misinterpreting an analysis he doesn’t understand because he cheated in that section.
Or it could happen because that engineer passed the class but didn't know that particular thing which is not just likely, it is a fact that 99% of people won't know everything about the class but will still pass. Or it could be because it literally wasn't taught to them at that university, which is also very likely. Or it could be because they did learn it but completely forgot about it regardless. Or maybe they just had a brain fart. All these things are far more likely than it happening because someone cheated in undergrad. Regardless, even if this argument worked, it would only work for a select few professions. Alright, so what if I'm not gonna make a bridge? Am I allowed to cheat now? Because the vast majority of people aren't gonna build bridges.
Your argument seems to me to be “Because there is often a difficulty of differentiating the signal from the noise in terms of academic success, it’s better if we just boost the noise to the point we can forget about the signal entirely.”
No, I think the entire concept people have about that signal is kinda wrong and pointless.
I do that tons and it’s not because I cheat. Usually it’s because I study things on my own on the Internet or books instead of the lectures. I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that they’re cheating just based on that.
No that's true, but it does warrant further investigation, like checking Chegg myself, and when I find that exact same notation there, that's pretty conclusive.
No, it really is cool and good because people gotta find work somehow
Then push to fix the system, don't pretend hackneyed solutions like this are "cool and good", especially when it's literally a gamble that could get a student expelled. You can soberly acknowledge the reality of cheating in the current system without pretending it's the bees knees for internet points.
No, I think the entire concept people have about that signal is kinda wrong and pointless.
There's also plenty of merit to be mined out of this premise, but once again, that doesn't require celebrating academic malpractice.
Yes, that's obviously also a thing to do but until that happens people have to get a job somehow. Like, yeah, the ideal solution to poverty isn't stealing from supermarkets but if someone who is poor steals from a supermarket, that's cool.
If someone snitches or never ever helps anyone out ever even though they can, then these things are not cool or good.
especially when it’s literally a gamble that could get a student expelled
Well you can't really get expelled based on that here...
Anyways sorry for not being somber enough in this shitposting site I guess?
Anyways sorry for not being somber enough in this shitposting site I guess?
You're welcome to shitpost all you like, but there are lots of high schoolers and undergraduates posting here, and boosting cheating is setting them up for trouble if they get found out. I'm required by my contract to report academic misconduct, and so the last thing I want is for my students to make dumb decisions on with long-term ramifications on the basis of shitposts.
The same goes for something like shoplifting. Shoplifting is cool and good except for the fact it sets the stage for someone to possibly get shot. Which is bad.
Yeah all my stuff has been take home since covid, and it's open/book/open note/open whatever. The one stipulation is that in needs to be you synthesizing these resources. Not someone else.
People will still copy each others exam answers line for line though.
I mean to get really into it, all of these resources are fundamentally filtered through a variety of people synthesizing resources - unless you’re doing original research, the teacher and textbook author have the most sway over what is the correct answer.
I don't see what your point is here; I write all my own questions and yes, I have some notion of what the right answer is when I write the question, but that doesn't mean a student that thoughtfully approaches the problem and comes up with a different solution methodology is incorrect or will be marked down. They might even get extra credit.
This doesn't have anything to do with getting someone else to do the problem for them though, be it a classmate or Chegg.
Certainly this is a quality of the test
Nope.
If two students’ answers can be exactly the same then it’s easy to cheat.
If they're exactly the same, they get flagged for cheating. It's easy to catch. Additionally, some students will just pay other people to do the problem for them via services like Chegg, and that makes any test easy to cheat on.
Every time I've caught one of my students trying to buy a classmate's assignment, it's always been one of the undergrad 'entrepreneurs': rich douchebags who seem to have only bothered to get into engineering because they long to eventually tell people they dropped out of it when one of their many dad-funded startups becomes the next big thing.
I'm pretty lenient with cheaters in general since most of the time it's just an act of desperation in response to busywork overload, but I have no tolerance for that pay-to-win fuckery.
Yeah I've seen something similar. I've also started including a syllabus statement and mentioning in class that if a student starts getting the urge to cheat on an assignment, that if they reach out to me about that I'll do whatever I can in terms of extra tutoring/extension to make sure they can earn they grade they hope to achieve legitimately instead of cheating. It's only been invoked a few times, but I was always happy with how those situations resolved.
This is brilliant, I really love this approach. I think the coldness of higher education (at least, relative to school) is a huge part of why students lose faith in the system and give up on trying to pass honestly. The class sizes mean there's inherently much more distance between teachers and students, and students are constantly being told that they're adults now and must handle their own problems, so I don't think anybody has a right to be shocked when they fall into difficulty and take matters into their own hands.
Last semester, with online teaching, my tutors and I tried this weird new thing (at least, compared to my faculty's typical teaching culture) called "actually giving a shit". Like, if students didn't submit something or had a steep decline in their marks, we'd just ask them if they're ok. And wouldn't you know, it turns out that students dealing with depression/ family problems/financial stress/ all the other things they might have to cope with outside of their work are way more likely to open up and seek help if you come to them first in a compassionate way.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
How am I supposed to evaluate your ability to perform the work if you didn't do it?
You're not. But it's not like tests accurately evaluate people's ability to perform the work anyways.
There is two types of cheating. There is the yuppies who are really competitive and are sometimes even paying people to get them good grades so that they can get a good job. Then there is another type of cheating, which is people cheating through some very difficult class with the only objective being to pass so that they can get a degree. The first kind of cheating is kinda shitty, and it could actually be harmful. The second kind is cool and good because people being able to get a job or passing an unusually hard class/bullshit class is more important than "meritocracy" fetishism.
I'm better than a lot of my peers and comrades at this nerd shit so if someone is having trouble with a class, I send them some answers. But it's not like I'm gonna do it for everything, or that I'm gonna work hard to give them a perfect grade. Most of them have already studied first anyways, but there is so much workload it's just not manageable.
Education as we know it does not have a good way to incentivize people to learn for the sake of learning; capitalist education is always anchored around extrinsic motivation.
To end cheating means to end the logic behind it.
Some don't. Some do. In some of my more data oriented classes I even use my test design as a case study in trying to measure some abstract quantity on the basis of a directly measurable imperfect proxy.
Nope, there are more. I was still seeing cheating even after instituting my policy of letting students delay tests until they were ready and letting students re-attempt tests they did poorly on, which confused me because that should eliminate that second kind of cheating you mention. So I started having my incoming students conduct anonymous surveys about this and other topics, and it turns out, about 15% of students will consider cheating if they are just not interested in the material. Not that it's too hard for them to understand, not that their too busy, but specifically they just aren't interested. Which it's fine to not be interested, no judgements there, but then do something else. I don't assign a moral weight to even this kind of cheating, but from a practical perspective, it's attempting to subvert me at my job and make me bad at it so that you can then go on and get a job you're bad at. So of course I'm going to try to prevent this from happening.
The meritocracy is in fact bullshit, but the meritocracy is different than basic competence at performing a set of tasks. The situation of living in a fake meritocracy is hardly improved by just eliminating all qualifications to be an engineer or a doctor.
I'm not sure it should eliminate that kind of cheating but it depends on the uni. It's more of an overall workload issue.
In uni you are forced to take classes you are not interested in even if most of the other stuff you are interested in. Like, I was forced to take 3 classes on statics, material mechanics etc which are completely useless to me and what I am trying to do, and if that wasn't enough, they were the hardest classes I ever had because that professor was a psycho. I had to take bullshit "principles of pedagogy" classes by some person who clearly had no idea how to be a good teacher regardless, which is a class that only exists because the uni needs to convince the government we are qualified to teach physics and math even though absolutely no one gives a shit about that class and it doesn't do what it is supposed to anyways. There is even professors who will just outright say "yeah I know my class is kinda pointless for you guys but we have to do it".
I'm not sure how that makes you bad at your job. Is your job just to assign people a value about how well they perform in a test?
I do not know how someone can become an engineer or a doctor just by cheating. Getting a good job like that is just so fucking hard. Especially doctors, to become a doctor you have to actually finish practical training in an actual hospital etc, which is the most important part of a doctor's training. To get an "important" position you usually also have to have finished an additional degree and probably some kind of internship. The reality in schools like mine is that a very large percentage of people won't even work in something directly related to what they studied. "Oh I see you studied applied maths, well I guess you probably can manage to sorta work a computer, so do that" or "oh I see you studied physics, that's cool, I guess you can probably teach physics to 12 year olds then". If this was the 60s and a nice fancy degree could instantly land you a fancy, important job then I can understand that, but the way things are degrees have very little power unless they come from super fancy schools, all they do in their own is filter who gets to get a job better than working services.
Ironically if anything uni is holding my learning back because working on my own is much more efficient for me than all the garbage professors we have and the ass backward approaches they have to material and what we should learn, I learn a lot more during holidays than when I actually have to study for their classes.
My job is to help people learn the course material and then evaluate their level of mastery, which tests serve as a partial proxy for. I don't know how to describe someone using $120 and a Chegg account to demonstrate a false level of mastery without having actually learned the material other than "subverting me at my job".
Most of your grievances are legitimate and seem to be stem more from just professors who are bad teachers, which originates in the absolute joke of an incentive structure for TT professors and the incorrect notion that subject mastery = qualified to teach. Which yeah, the whole higher education system needs an overhaul to address these issues. But widespreading cheating isn't going to put the pressure on that to change, all that is going to do is drive professors toward Orwellian solutions like Lockdown Browser and Respondus Monitor, which students hate even more than the current status quo.
You're conflating "important" with consequential. It's not "important" people designing highway overpasses or pedestrian bridges in Podunk, Indiana, or the other 1000x bits of infrastructure that you interact with over the course of the week. Sure, the first order effects of a high school teacher having cheated their way through mechanics II are probably 0, but there are tons of positions for which that isn't the case.
If someone doesn't care about the course, then even if they do well in the tests they won't really have learned it. They will forget it immediately, as I have for every course I hated but had to pass regardless. So that part of your job doesn't really apply there.
It is even worse than that. There are professors who do supposedly have "mastery" of the subject in the sense that they actually have completed very fancy PhDs, have decent published research etc but they only know anything about a very, very narrow field of expertise that they are forced to step out of when teaching and they just say nonsense. For instance there is this professor who teaches us chemistry which she is forced to connect with physics, except she knows jack shit about physics and says so many horribly incorrect things that even laymen could point out errors, but they are part of the curriculum so I have no fucking clue what I am supposed to do if these questions are asked in the exam, am I supposed to write the blatantly incorrect stuff she said in her lectures? Then there was this optics professor who literally turned to us and asked us to help him out with vector calculus barely above high school level. Then there is big shot engineering mechanics professor (the psycho I mentioned earlier and the fucking dean of the school) who is supposed to be this super impressive guy and he was spouting horrible misconceptions about moments, torque and angular momentum which aren't just scientifically incorrect, they are intuitively incorrect if you think for 5 seconds but I guess they never directly entered his published work so his incompetence in the subject never otherwise surfaced. It is pretty impressive how easy it is for these things to fall between the cracks. They just don't care enough to check if what they're saying is actually correct.
But that's a thing to resist against. I guess in the US with all the paid universities and private universities it is harder but here students have generally managed to keep these things away.
No, that is exactly what I mean by "important". It's not super easy to be trusted with public money and before you do that you'll generally have to have demonstrated competence by means of internships etc. I know people who have tried to head that route, it really isn't that straightforward. That's why I don't really take that kind of argument very seriously. It's not like the filters end at university, or that the skills required are mostly taught there. This is also why a lot of STEM degrees are very "flexible", in the sense that for a lot of things people will hire you for things that are not even directly related to what you studied, since they just use them as a gauge of your exposure to mathy, sciencey and computery stuff just to see how easily you might be able to pick up on some concepts after a training period or an internship as long as you have attended a couple relevant seminars.
In my experience, there is an absolute world of difference between learning something and forgetting it and never learning something in the first place. In the former, you're usually good to go after half an hour and a google search.
Yeah, these are all real issues caused by an absolute boondoggle of a higher education system. There needs to be a refocus on teaching and less on grant-writing, dedicated teaching professors, and possibly an elimination of tenure. Edgy cheating boosting isn't going to help achieve any of that. Cheating is like affirmative action; it's an unfortunate, ineffective, ad hoc solution to a problem with a variety of systemic causes, which are better addressed than papered over.
Well that's good for you all, but here it's very much not the case. From what I've seen in the chronicle and insider, any attempts by students to push back are met with administrative shrugs.
This is unironically a meritocracy argument, which might hold sway where you are, but in the land of subsubsubcontractors that is the US I'd have to disagree. Same with the UK. Wasn't there a shipping company without any ships that just got a massive multi-million contract over there or something?
That's not the case though, I know because I've tried lol
Now if you REALLY learned something, then yeah you're right. But if some class is a pain in the ass for me I won't REALLY learn it, I will learn just enough to able to pass, and then I won't remember shit next week. And in my experience most people who cheat have some exposure and understanding, just not enough to actually pass, or at least not enough to be confident they can pass. Idk what Chegg is but generally cheating won't work 100% of the time. Like, if you're trying to copy from someone or if someone is sending you answers, there's always the possibility that that someone will mess up and not give you the right answers or won't know how to do everything, so people won't go in completely clueless.
It's not a meritocracy argument, it's just that the filters the university has in place aren't nearly the most important filters there are when it comes to who gets to do important consequential work. Generally if you have no competence in a job at all you can't really do that job unless no one cares too much about it. It's not that the best people end up there or that you have to be good to end up there, it's just that people don't get in there with just their uni grades and skills, these are very secondary. Where "meritocracy" really breaks down (if we ignore outright pay-to-win capitalist shit for rich failsons) is much more subtle stuff, like the mechanics professor who doesn't understand torque. This guy just completely slipped through all these filters. How? I'm not sure but it probably has to do with said filters kinda being irrelevant with this and I am not sure how this issue could be resolved to be honest. Perhaps the issue is just that he teaches instead of doing something else.
By the way, I'm pretty sure the US is better at doing a "meritocracy" than here. We're notoriously shitty in that regard. It's just that unless you know the right people, you can't be trusted with something you just have 0 knowledge about. If you do know the right people, then it's different, but you hardly even need a degree in that case. It's not unprecedented that people who don't even have a higher education degree become hospital directors.
The more contact I have with higher education the more of an absolute circus it becomes. It's just structurally garbage, and imo one of the garbage aspects is definitely the way students are evaluated. It's similar to how schools evaluate students, and I just don't really see why this way of evaluating makes sense. I'm not even sure universities have a good concept of what evaluation should be in general. I think maybe it would be better if you had 2-5 years or whatever (according to the subject) for learning and then a final year (or more) of completing a thesis, evaluation and practice on a large number of choice subjects that you have already been taught, that you can extend to 2 or 3 years or however long it takes for you to attain the level to pass the subjects if you can't make it in one year. In a sense that isn't too dissimilar from what medicine students do. Universities should emphasize practice throughout in general, and by that I mean PAID practice because they too should be part of production, but not in such a way that capital basically just comes in and exploits the shit out of public research. I believe maoist China had some experiments to that effect. And overall evaluation via examination should be far lower in the priorities than just ensuring everyone will at the very least have adequate familiarity with a number of subjects by means of positive incentive and avoiding as much as possible to examine people in stuff they don't give a shit about. Also for the love of god something should be done about loose cannon professors who will literally fail like 80% of the class because... I don't know, they hate people or something?
If something like that was in place, I would understand cheating less, and it would also be significantly less effective. But in general I don't think getting a degree should be hard given that degrees don't mean shit any more and are more like a baseline necessity to get a half decent job. A degree shouldn't (and almost always doesn't) automatically land you in a critical job, but when people are forced to go through 50 additional filters anyways, I don't see the point in having university be that big gatekeeper. Well, it makes sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of something that makes you a disciplined bootlicker who will endlessly grind and an ideological state apparatus but it's not really what we should want it to be.
I gotta ask, why are you so confident about the dynamics of higher education when you don't really have the full grasp of the lay of the land? Chegg is a service where you pay $15 a month, and get to ask a bunch of experts (retired professors, adjuncts, people in the field, whoever) questions in the field and they'll get paid to write up an answer. If one adjunct doesn't know how to answer your question, another one will, and I have caught a number of students doing this throughout the entire semester, usually because they're writing in non-standard notion and or are using techniques above the level I've taught. But there are almost certainly some that I am missing because they adequately reflect the style of a higher performing undergrad. And pretending that this is "cool and good" is just edgy contrarianism. Similarly, pretending the onus is the professor to try to thread the needle between evaluations that are not Orwellian but also filter out this kind of cheating is just gonna end up with 80% of professors choosing the Orwellian route.
You can only get away with this argument by working with some abstract general "competence" as opposed to looking at competence to the individual actual tasks at hand. An engineer who is 90% "competent" in your abstract measure can still do a word of hurt by misinterpreting an analysis he doesn't understand because he cheated in that section.
Like I've said, your arguments about the clown show that is higher education have merit, but the solution to that is not to make it even more of a worthless clown show where the grades become entirely uncorrelated with competence; it's the fix the actual problems. Your argument seems to me to be "Because there is often a difficulty of differentiating the signal from the noise in terms of academic success, it's better if we just boost the noise to the point we can forget about the signal entirely."
Chegg is not a thing in Greece my dude lol, I haven't studied abroad. I have a close friend who tells me a lot of stuff about studying in the UK but she hasn't told me anything about Chegg (yet). I generally don't like pay to win shit, it feels very exploitative.
I do that tons and it's not because I cheat. Usually it's because I study things on my own on the Internet or books instead of the lectures. I wouldn't be too quick to assume that they're cheating just based on that.
No, it really is cool and good because people gotta find work somehow and making far fetched arguments about how somehow these people will somehow end up making bridges and that bridge will fall because they didn't know something they would have known had they not cheated in a test as a 2nd year undergrad don't change that and aren't very convincing. Yes, it is not ALWAYS cool and good, neither is literally always cheating for every single exam. But that's not what the vast majority of cheating is like.
Or it could happen because that engineer passed the class but didn't know that particular thing which is not just likely, it is a fact that 99% of people won't know everything about the class but will still pass. Or it could be because it literally wasn't taught to them at that university, which is also very likely. Or it could be because they did learn it but completely forgot about it regardless. Or maybe they just had a brain fart. All these things are far more likely than it happening because someone cheated in undergrad. Regardless, even if this argument worked, it would only work for a select few professions. Alright, so what if I'm not gonna make a bridge? Am I allowed to cheat now? Because the vast majority of people aren't gonna build bridges.
No, I think the entire concept people have about that signal is kinda wrong and pointless.
No that's true, but it does warrant further investigation, like checking Chegg myself, and when I find that exact same notation there, that's pretty conclusive.
Then push to fix the system, don't pretend hackneyed solutions like this are "cool and good", especially when it's literally a gamble that could get a student expelled. You can soberly acknowledge the reality of cheating in the current system without pretending it's the bees knees for internet points.
There's also plenty of merit to be mined out of this premise, but once again, that doesn't require celebrating academic malpractice.
Yes, that's obviously also a thing to do but until that happens people have to get a job somehow. Like, yeah, the ideal solution to poverty isn't stealing from supermarkets but if someone who is poor steals from a supermarket, that's cool.
If someone snitches or never ever helps anyone out ever even though they can, then these things are not cool or good.
Well you can't really get expelled based on that here...
Anyways sorry for not being somber enough in this shitposting site I guess?
You're welcome to shitpost all you like, but there are lots of high schoolers and undergraduates posting here, and boosting cheating is setting them up for trouble if they get found out. I'm required by my contract to report academic misconduct, and so the last thing I want is for my students to make dumb decisions on with long-term ramifications on the basis of shitposts.
The same goes for something like shoplifting. Shoplifting is cool and good except for the fact it sets the stage for someone to possibly get shot. Which is bad.
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Yeah all my stuff has been take home since covid, and it's open/book/open note/open whatever. The one stipulation is that in needs to be you synthesizing these resources. Not someone else.
People will still copy each others exam answers line for line though.
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I don't see what your point is here; I write all my own questions and yes, I have some notion of what the right answer is when I write the question, but that doesn't mean a student that thoughtfully approaches the problem and comes up with a different solution methodology is incorrect or will be marked down. They might even get extra credit.
This doesn't have anything to do with getting someone else to do the problem for them though, be it a classmate or Chegg.
Nope.
If they're exactly the same, they get flagged for cheating. It's easy to catch. Additionally, some students will just pay other people to do the problem for them via services like Chegg, and that makes any test easy to cheat on.
Every time I've caught one of my students trying to buy a classmate's assignment, it's always been one of the undergrad 'entrepreneurs': rich douchebags who seem to have only bothered to get into engineering because they long to eventually tell people they dropped out of it when one of their many dad-funded startups becomes the next big thing.
I'm pretty lenient with cheaters in general since most of the time it's just an act of desperation in response to busywork overload, but I have no tolerance for that pay-to-win fuckery.
Yeah I've seen something similar. I've also started including a syllabus statement and mentioning in class that if a student starts getting the urge to cheat on an assignment, that if they reach out to me about that I'll do whatever I can in terms of extra tutoring/extension to make sure they can earn they grade they hope to achieve legitimately instead of cheating. It's only been invoked a few times, but I was always happy with how those situations resolved.
This is brilliant, I really love this approach. I think the coldness of higher education (at least, relative to school) is a huge part of why students lose faith in the system and give up on trying to pass honestly. The class sizes mean there's inherently much more distance between teachers and students, and students are constantly being told that they're adults now and must handle their own problems, so I don't think anybody has a right to be shocked when they fall into difficulty and take matters into their own hands.
Last semester, with online teaching, my tutors and I tried this weird new thing (at least, compared to my faculty's typical teaching culture) called "actually giving a shit". Like, if students didn't submit something or had a steep decline in their marks, we'd just ask them if they're ok. And wouldn't you know, it turns out that students dealing with depression/ family problems/financial stress/ all the other things they might have to cope with outside of their work are way more likely to open up and seek help if you come to them first in a compassionate way.