I understand cheating is shitty but it would make a lot more sense for the teacher to make this a teachable moment about cheating, and to promote collaborative solutions, but also checking work you get from others.
A huge part of development is copying code and reusing code from libraries. The important part is that you know how the code you copy works.
Their teachable moment is that plagiarism has consequences, and they earned that lesson entirely by themselves.
Sure, but as a general rule the carrot is a better incentive than the stick.
Let’s not pretend these are kids who have a test for their first time. They all were told to not cheat and that cheating would lead to expulsion.
I refuse to feel bad knowing that chances are they have been given an opportunity that many others would never get.
They made their choice, but then rehabilitation should be the goal rather than cutting their hands off. Not that there’s not a time and place for cutting hands though.
This would be to mitigate societal loss rather than exert immediate justice, so the ones who are able and willing to change have the option.
On the flip side, all threat of consequences works as a deterrent only when there’s the expectation to be caught and punished.
By always catching but never handing out punishment to kids violating rules, you only teach them that consequences are inconsequential.
To clarify, I wasn’t trying to argue there shouldn’t be consequences, just that depending on severity it must be proportional.
I want to compare it to the US justice system where, from an outsiders perspective, many are judged unnecessarily harsh. This makes it harder for people to “come back” after release and creates a societal loss.
I’ll end it there because I cba to write more but, eh, just my thoughts. Some nuance is lost in translation too.
Your thoughts are valid and I agree – in principle.
The proportionate punishment does, however, depend on the severity of the violation. In an academic context, there are few things as severe as blatant plagiarism. Being caught in not just cheating but brazenly copy-pasting other people’s work can imho be appropriately punished with expulsion, be it in the US or elsewhere.
Expulsion is honestly not a harsh punishment in that case
Yes, the punishment for plagiarism is kinda standardised. I feel like maybe, at first strike there should be a warning + redo the assignment. But the specifics would be a whole new never-ending discussion
I’ve always only heard it’s punishable directly with explosion. Maybe it’s for there for a reason, or is it a remnant of the past?
As a general rule, the stick is better than the carrot when teaching someone what not to do. But this guy’s goal isn’t to teach them “cheating is bad” but to weed out dishonest people too stupid to program.
Your flaw is thinking people believe there is a carrot at the end. I have no idea how these generations will get through and they all feel it.
What’s the carrot for being honest then?
A CS degree
?? When the cheaters are simply waved through the courses as well, some of them will definitely achieve a CS degree as well. They will simply have put in less work and be less well educated.
But in my experience people who cheat do so repeatedly, in multiple courses, their bachelor thesis, in exams when there is a way, …
You’re right, every task should be made so that you can take information from anywhere and learn it, but have to apply it in a certain way. Then there’s the cases where people let others do their work for them. Every task should be automatically looked through to match, so that cheating can be gotten every time or at least as often as possible.
This is in a perfect scenario imo though, and with LLMs things will get more obfuscate than before.
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those programmers understand the underlying code.
This is about students PROVING they understand the underlying theory. Letting them copy destroys that.
As a software developer I’m expected to, at the very least, to do two things when “plagiarizing”:
- Find the source to copy from.
- Perform the necessary adjustments to apply that copied solution to my own problem.
When students plagiarize, they don’t even need to do that. The solution they are copying from was written for the exact same assignment, so they don’t need the adjust anything (at most, they change some identifiers to throw off plagiarism detectors). And they copy from each other, so they don’t need to search for a solution. They may need to apply some social skills to find out who to copy from - but these are vastly different from the technical skills required to find relevant code to “plagiarize” in real world programming.
If you can find it on GitHub and Stack Exchange, it’s not plagiarism
The important part is that you know how the code you copy works.
i wish my deadlines are not hard enough so that i could actually take time to learn everything from the code i copy.
Don’t worry – you don’t have to cope with too-short deadlines after you’re dead. Up to that minute, and especially after graduation, though, it’s all deadlines and priorities. Grok the concept.
You’ll find the head-fake (as Randy Pausch calls it) is teaching you to manage your time and priorities WHILE you’re learning your craft. Like how we learned C++ in an algo course by having the Prof teach Zero C++ and expecting us to pick it up.
Sure, committing to a deadline is reasonable if you are included in the decision calculus of scope vs time. Part of that should be to include space for learning as needed to understand anything you’d copy.
Omitting that is a recipe for low quality garbage and not only will the code suffer, but the organization also will while all the staff fall behind any competitors who make the investment.
How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
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Never said they didn’t know it wasn’t allowed. I said that the teachers view of cheating is flawed. I’m also not saying the students aren’t*** (autocorrect likes to change my contractions to the exact opposite) guiltless. My point was that young people make mistakes, and teacher should use this as a teachable moment about the difference between cheating and collaborating. Between just copying code, and knowing how what you copied works. These are students they are still learning. Also, an over 20% fail rate is abysmal and speaks to how poor of a teacher this professor is.
You’re assuming good faith and willingness to learn/change in the part of the students. I was a TA at a private US uni for the not so smart kids of rich parents. Our approach (imposed by admin) was all carrots all the time. 20% seems fair, even low, for the share of students who were there to get a degree with the least amount of effort necessary and then get a job thanks to the uni’s name and their connections.
The point of the (probably fake) story is that there was a massive issue with cheating.
When we run through the cheating software at my uni it give you a percentage of how much of this paper is copied (quotes.etc) from previous work. In some first year this gets as high as 30% - not because of cheating, but because everyone us running from the same text book, same readings and same template… and when you are discussing historic theories not much has really changed in the last 50 years for first years. But there is a massive difference between writing something similar to the other 300 students and copying a block of work - was it understood, did it flow correctly… or did they copy the Wikipedia article?
You are correct, young people make mistakes. But if this is a capstone course its likely third year - the time for a teachable moment was 20 papers ago.
Lol 20% is absolutely not a high fail rate
This is not a 20% fail rate, but a 20% expulsion rate. A bit different.
… And a 20% reduction in kids cheating in that class.
That’s a win.
It should be “at least 20% reduction”, as those may have been all cheaters (not likely)
If you give cheaters too many chances, the other students will feel betrayed. And I guess rightly so.
It’s not uncommon to get mails directly, or later in course evaluation, from students who complain about other students that didn’t put in the work. I can only remember few cases where there were names involved. Typically it’s some general complaint, but the frustration is obvious.
It sucks when you make an effort but witness other students cheating their way through the class. What are we supposed to tell them when the dishonest behaviour of other students doesn’t cause any consequences?
You tell them that they have learned the important life lesson:
In most situations, results matter more than the means by which you got them.
The result of a CS degree is supposed to be someone who knows how to program. This prof got what he wanted.
The result of any degree is someone who can get a degree. Everything else is a potential bonus, not a guarantee at all.
In the real world the faculty would step in to prevent losing so many students at once (tuition is lucrative), and the students would learn a couple life lessons: cheat but don’t get caught, and if you do then might makes right.
Getting a degree without cheating is an impressive feat and teaches valuable skills. Unfortunately the underperforming cheating frat bro at the back of the auditorium will use his connections to land a C-level job making about 10x as much as his former classmates.
They don’t give the money back when you’re expelled. They made their dime off the idiots.
The school still loses on enrollment next year (or next semester or however it works contractually).
I’m not all up-to-date on academic fuckery but I seem to remember that universities tend to do a lot of fucky shit to keep attendance rates up as it matters for a lot of metrics. Losing a quarter of a class at once is probably not something that looks good on anyone’s KPIs (and god knows the real world only cares about useless KPIs).
These schools are in such high demand that there’s no extended vacancies.
Unfortunately the underperforming cheating frat bro at the back of the auditorium will use his connections to land a C-level job making about 10x as much as his former classmates.
This is true, and I feel like the people who complain about cheating are complaining about it because they feel like “the grade hasn’t been earned”, or what have you. Realistically, the problem here is that the students are robbing themselves of the opportunity to learn, ideally, rather than that they’ve stolen accolades from more promising students. The solution to that problem is a different approach that will get them to learn better.
Of course, college being what it is, you’re probably not learning as much as you otherwise would, based on this structure which is oriented to be more of a zero-sum whittling down, so you can have a more limited group that you can then offer certifications to. The students aren’t incentivized to learn (which, you know, should they be, or should they just want to learn because learning is cool? who knows.), and their knowledge, beyond a basic level, isn’t even really necessary in the workforce. The dynamic is probably going to remain the same after graduation, where the high-income cheater frat bro gets a high paying job, and the put upon dork who thought hard work would get them somewhere eventually has to basically cover everything for them, or risk getting punted to the curb. STEM guys suffer this delusion that they inhabit a uniquely meritocratic position in the workforce, in the economy, but this is not true. Everywhere is littered with its people who succeed on merit, and succeed on raw unadulterated bullshit, it’s the same everywhere.
You cannot correct these flaws by doubling down on perceived meritocracy and “objective” standards. The bias, the positive group and the negative group, are an intrinsic part of these systems. So to say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
I actually see it as a good opportunity to teach them that means matter. By kicking cheaters out of the course.
My brother in Christ, can I get a hells yeah
It’s University. If you don’t know by 18-22 if cheating is bad, despite each class at the beginning of the semester explaining the penalties for cheating, you deserve to get expelled.
Surely these kids knew that cheating is bad before they enrolled in college.
“Teachable moments” are for freshmen. Cheating seniors can get fucked.
On a very related note, I actually earned my CS degree.
As someone who only cheated in one class because the professor was a lazy fuck and assigned 5 hours worth of problems for a 1 hour exam with no regard to whether it was completable, I agree. The whole class cheated, because they had to. We actually all knew the material really well because distributing that material across 20 students was still iffy on time.
He’s dead now, the lazy fuck. Fuck you Dr. Aung.
Believe it or not, one of the goals of a good university is to not graduate stupid people who don’t know anything.
Keep in mind, it’s likely that more people cheated, but the smarter ones changed just enough code to make it look “their own”, or actually tested to ensure it’d work, and thus weren’t caught. Those 22 caught are very likely the ones that copy-pasted verbatim.
Then the smarter ones fulfilled the task, knowing and understanding the material enough to provide a working solution, rather than paste a non-working one. They may have done less than someone working from scratch but they showed themselves no less competent in the material.
Strongly agree.
I was lucky enough to take a computer science course at my high school almost 20 years ago. The teach straight up we web design was 90% copying and 10% modification. He was a early retiree webmaster switched teacher.
Fast forward to today. System administration. I’m not paid to code. I’m paid to fix problems. So I research and focus on remediation. If there’s a script for a fix I’m using it.
I’m super paranoid about copying code to use on a production system though. Whenever I come across a script or code to fix an issue i go through it line by line to ensure I know what it’s doing.
Often I’ll just take the logic or parts I need and write my own.
make this a teachable moment
A person’s character is built at home. If you’re an adult in secondary school and can’t figure out not to cheat, better hope you get a warning and understand THAT’s the only teachable moment you’re going to get.
The prof has neither the time or opportunity to fill in where your up-bringing was incomplete . Uni is the first place we learn that the universe doesn’t have a lot of patience for the laggards.
That’s something you do in the freshmen year. This is a master’s program. They should be able to write the tests that catch a cheater themselves and they know better.
Reminds about recent Linus’ rant on LKML.
You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE.
AGAIN.
Yeah, code reuse is a massive problem in the industry. I can’t find it now, but I remember a few years back that there was a vulnerability in the (I think ) Intel management engine due to manufacturers reusing example code from the documentation that wasn’t secure
My uncle’s a uni professor. First assignment last semester was writing a paper specifically using ChatGPT, and seeing how much work you had to do to fact-check it and make an actual paper.
The difference between a quality college/University education and a shit one of that the students who should fail get failed.
Junior/senior level students know the consequences of cheating. Professor catches students cheating. Students face consequences of cheating.
“BuT tEaChAbLe MomEnT!”
I work in IT, and it’s a similar situation. Bluntly, I Google half of the tickets I touch. I don’t really know shit about how things work specifically. I know the generalities, and the structure in which they function. I have the foundation of knowledge to know what to Google, but the fact is, I don’t remember crap about how to do just about everything.
There’s simply too much to know.
In college, using Google was a sin. IMO, they should teach a class on how to get the results you need from Google because you’re not going to remember whatever the subject is when you need to in six years and you come across an issue which requires that knowledge.
it’s the fucking capstone for a master’s in CS. If they’re not able to write their own code, then that’s on them.
If it’s a capstone class and I’m still having to do stupid mini weekly assignments instead of focusing on my semester log project then I would also be phoning in those assignments. If it’s a capstone then why is the teacher not just letting them focus on their big coding project. Bad teacher.
If you’ve ever done a capstone course, you’d know that there are check-ins at various intervals with certain milestones that need to be met, not just the final project due at the end.
You know, like a real project in the real world.
Fuck that noise. If the student is stupid enough to fall for that they don’t deserve the diploma.
Especially, if they are to lazy to change the tasks. Sure, cheating is bad but it’s also bad teaching.
There is no but. Cheating is bad. Period. If you don’t like school/uni go work at a Wendy’s. In the restaurant or behind the dumpster. I don’t care.
They’re all fucking wankers and got what they aimed for. Nothing. Turning this around on the prof is the entire fucking problem here. (it’s not my fault, you made it possible so I had no other choice but to cheat. It’s a bullshit argument. Take some responsibility for your own choices.)
Just to clarify, you don’t need schooling and a degree to get a job as a dev, I’ve hired several that are particularly strong. Strong junior devs love learning. Cheaters…well they don’t care about learning. They just want to look good.
Just to clarify what? You can certainly develop code without a CS degree, but there are tons of useful and fascinating ideas found in CS programs that “wolfling” devs are only haphazardly exposed to.
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Sounds like they didn’t learn the material though. If they had learned it they would have noticed it would fail when graded by a human.
Then maybe the teacher is also shitty.
The point of a degree is that the individual is certified at having a certain level of ability in a specific field. How is a student supposed to regularly demonstrate they understand the material in a format that is workable with one teacher, a few TAs, and a hundred students? Would the degree be an accurate endorsement if they passed all their classes by cheating?
How is a student supposed to regularly demonstrate they understand the material in a format that is workable with one teacher, a few TAs, and a hundred students?
This is kind of the core problem at work here, I think, more than the cheating itself, even. Cheating is kind of like piracy, you know, it’s an issue, but it’s coming about because of a lack of proper feedback in terms of what you’re doing correct or incorrect. It’s a systemic issue. It’s easier for a teacher to just give you an F and call it a day, rather than writing paragraph on paragraph of feedback, or being an individualized therapist for every single student in their class of hundreds, and trying to get them to engage with the material, or figure out what they’re specifically having trouble with when they might just be a kind of guarded and closed individual. More likely is that teachers just kind of rely on their students coming to them, before they’re given help, but in all of my extremely limited experience, this is not a solution that actually works for those who need the most help.
Anecdotal but I have a team of devs under me, cheating is definitely still a thing in industry. Some people copy other people’s work and claim it as their own and they are weak devs. I could teach them, but when it gets close to micromanaging I have to let them go due to poor performance.
Many of them don’t grow up. Be an adult. I hire people based on how teachable they are. Cheating cheapens that.
There’s often modules to work collaboratively for this very reason.
The point of this module will have been to learn and understand the material, which will also have been the point of the assignment.
Also, on the cheating not being a thing outside of real life point. a) it is - there are lots of things you can cheat at which is against the rules. Stealing for example could be considered cheating as you haven’t earnt the item you’re stealing. b) uni/college is not there to teach you real life. It’s there to provide you the materials to learn a subject. Don’t want to use those materials and learn? Well then you probably just shouldn’t be there.
If I were a teacher I could give two shit’s if students cheated if they learned the material.
If the code they copied from github worked with the sample data provided but failed in most other cases it’s safe to say they didn’t learn the material, or didn’t care enough to actually read the code they were submitting.
“cheating” is almost not a thing outside of school.
They are supposed to know how to program. All these students had to do was to fix the code they copied. In the outside world that’s the difference between having a job and getting fired for being an incompetent ass.
“If I were a teacher I could give to shit’s if students cheated if they learned the material.”
Oh, the irony😂, do we tell him?
Yes, it’s “two” sue me it’s 4 in the morning
Gotta admit, given the context pretty damn funny. Thanks for the laugh @ 4 am
you collaborate and work with people to help you both understand.
If it’s a group assignment, sure. But if some contractors decide to work together instead of being competitors, that’s hugely illegal and fraudulent. If two random people from two different governments decide to pool their work together, that’s possibly treason.
“cheating” is almost not a thing outside of school.
Ever heard of scams? Fraud? Legal loopholes? All those white collar crimes that people somehow manage to get away with? Or, more importantly, plagiarism?
I know, “only plagiarism is similar, none of the other things is about copying someone else’s work”. True. But all of them are about not getting caught.
Also, specifically for programming, you can cheat if you’re “smart” enough, by simply outsourcing your job and claiming it’s all your work.
you collaborate and work with people to help you and them understand. It’s crazy that showing someone the answers and explaining said answer to them is considered cheating. And because the very act of sharing your work is villainized these students have never been taught how to properly work collaboratively outside of just sharing answers. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
This, I fully agree with. Humanity didn’t get here with people learning and memorizing shit by themselves, never asking for help. It’s always been about sharing knowledge, collaborating for a goal that’s impossible at the individual level. Most education systems completely fail to teach collaboration.
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Why? We are talking about students doing a CS degree. This applies specifically to them.
It is a teachable moment. They learned that if you agree to an honor code, then violate it, you really will be subject to the penalties outlined in that honor code.
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Most people never learn.
Nah, cheating is fine, if used sparingly and under specific, niche circumstances, and in ways that don’t harm others. As an example: I was struggling with Calculus. Like basically getting my ass handed to me. I went to all the study sessions, saw the Professor in their office several times, found a math tutor, and fuck me the info just wasn’t sticking. I put in legitimate effort and it wasn’t working and I wasn’t about to let one class shit on years of hard work towards a degree. So: I cheated.
We were allowed your typical little notecard. For the record, this is math. Make that shit open book, dear instructors. I know you all looking up near every formula yourself anyway. I digress. I slapped two notecards together and slapped a third into the fold. I had a very non-traditional schooling as a child so the rules as formulas changed were really getting me and I needed those and other reminders. Long as I had those I was fine. Still only squeaked by with a C.
Cheating in many situations is a very reasonable morally unjustifiable thing to do. If you’re not actively fucking over someone that doesn’t deserve it, or causing no harm, I honestly see no problem.
Thaaat saaaid, cough Thomas Edison cough, some cheating should be punished.
Even though the school might call that cheating, I don’t really think it is.
All of my engineering and math classes were open book, open notes. I got lucky in that all of my professors (except one (fuck you Dr. Aung)) designed exams such that they tested understanding, not memorization.
And here I am, 10 years later, still able to solve most of these problems without looking at a textbook for reference other than tables and formulas, despite not having worked in the field for half that time.
I got a mechanical engineering degree. Two the most useful classes I took were microeconomics and circuits 1.
This is a part of what I was trying to say. What I did is considered cheating. Yet it is defined as such largely by those who place artificial, and sometimes extremely unfair, limitations in place. Many of which serve no real purpose. Yet often if it works in their favor such “cheating” becomes a convenience.
In academia cheating is rightly frowned upon and often definable by the cheaters removal much of the time. Yet as a general rule I feel it has its place, and plenty of us use some form of it in our daily lives. Many of us are not particularly dishonest or openly practice deception with others, though we withhold truths amongst other mostly acceptable social whims. I’d bet though most of us have gone to the bathroom for too long at work. Chatted with a colleague. “Forgot” to reply to that email. Faked being sick. All defined in some way under the larger moniker of “cheating”.
Not saying any of it is right or wrong specifically. Just laying justification for why I believe this.
On the one hand: awww, poor cheater world’s smallest violin meme
On the other hand: expulsion from the university for a first offense seems… harsh.
universities take plagiarism very seriously. Friend of mine teaches stage craft (how to make sets, props, costumes, lighting and sound design/planning/execution/engineering)
First semester, first test, easy pass: Someone pokes their head into the class and my friend goes to the door to answer them, stepping outside for like ~30 seconds
comes to mark the papers:
“In a proscenium theater, what is the very front of the stage called?”
Real answer: apron
55% of the student answers: the same made up word that sounded vaguely Portuguese with no hits on Google.
even though it’s super dumb and super easy and barely matters at all and is a one word answer to a basic question - the students ended up being investigated by the university and my friend had all his classes audited.
Just wanna say I took a stage craft class as an elective many, many years ago when college was affordable enough to do such things.
We didn’t do anything hands on, just learned how stuff works.
It was one of my most favorite classes. I was a beer chugging, skirt chasing, never went to class burnout back then, but I enthusiastically went to that class every time.
I may be dumb, but to clarify: they were assumed cheating because the word was fake, and the only reason for so many duplicated fake answers would be if they shared a faulty answer sheet. Right?
yeah, I mean a forgivable wrong answer would be “downstage center” “the front” “the lip” “limelights” “footlights” “wing” “leg” “curtain” “pit” - like close but wrong terminology or similar guesses.
The fact that loads of them said the same weird wrong answer was very sus.
Cheating is taken VERY seriously at every decent University. As it should.
Still, cheating to some extent exists everywhere. This just weeds out the real lazy or stupid cheaters. Which is also some kind of quality check, I guess.
To cheat properly, I’ve has to be a bit clever and shrewd, which is a valuable character trait. Maybe not the most moral one, but real life isn’t all moral either. 🤷♂️
Sometimes the best and most efficient solutions are created by just cleverly combining the work of others.
I will say up front that I am not a cheater - not because of good moral character, but because I am a terrible liar. It’s less stressful to me to risk failure, than to risk being caught.
That said, a lot of cheating is excellent preparation for work in corporate America. I don’t like that it is, but it is. My main beef with capitalism is that it encourages, breeds, and rewards the absolute worst attributes of human nature. There’s literally nothing in capitalism that speaks to anything good in people. Knowing how to cheat, cheat profitably, and (most importantly) avoid being caught is perhaps one of the most useful skills in the American capitalist corporate space.
Not getting caught is less important than always having a scapegoat ready. A successful office worker is just like a politician: talk a lot, confuse the issue as much as possible, and in an emergency, deflect blame on someone else. The actual work delivered matters very little, and ideally you can just appropriate the work of someone less well spoken anyway.
Your bosses will praise you for your open communications and dealing well with trouble.
And this is a global truth, not just in the US. I have encountered many a successful worker that contributes nothing to their company or society. And while more noticable at boss and manager levels, this goes all the way down to minimum wage line work, although there it’s more difficult to hide.
🤝
I only qualify it for the US because that’s where most of my experience has been; I don’t doubt capitalism brings out the worst in people in all cultures.
Doesn’t mean it has to be tolerated.
If a school is known to go easy on cheaters. Why would anyone actually trust a degree from that school?
You don’t learn by just copying someone’s github repository and presenting it as your solution.
As someone said. “You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”
It’s a masters program, I have no issue with high level cheaters getting slapped with consequences. When I was in undergrad, first offence was an immediate F in the class, with a second being expulsion. Given the requirements for masters/doctorate (my MIL got both while I was dating my wife), getting an F is probably going to bounce you from the program anyway, so it’s not that much difference IMO.
On the other hand: expulsion from the university for a first offense seems… harsh.
That boy needs therapy.
Purely psychosomatic.
I’m afraid expulsion is the only answer. It is the opinion of the entire staff that Dexter is
criminally insanecheating!Well, now, that will be haunting my dreams for years to come. Thanks!
I love seeing my favorite plunderphonic in the wild! :D
I’m going to allege that such “educational” institutions’ focus on “cheating” is harmful and dangerous for their students.
I’m a flight instructor. Students would show up to my class actually afraid to be caught writing things down to refer to them later. They were afraid to be caught using checklists. They would overwhelm themselves trying to commit entire technical manuals to memory. That’s not how anything actually works. The FAA prints all these references so pilots can read them. We don’t take them away from you when you pass your practical.
Checklist usage in the cockpit is a required skill to pass a practical test. The examiner has to see you using a checklist during the test in order to pass you. Writing things down so you can refer to them later, like flight planning and ATC clearances, also a required skill. Schools make people afraid to do these things.
If you’ve got a kneeboard that has the tower light gun signal chart printed on it, and you lose the radio and need light gun signals, you’re not going to have your license taken away from you if you use that quick reference. Too many students bring that pressure into flight training with them. It’s a fun bit of deprogramming to do.
I’m going to allege that such “educational” institutions’ focus on “cheating” is harmful and dangerous for their students.
I won’t disagree that the overall anti-cheating mentality goes too far, but this example was students literally plagiarizing their first project.
That mentality sounds like instructors aren’t properly setting expectations for students. If going over checklists is a required skill, students should be informed regularly that they need to be doing XYZ and should be writing that down. When I was still trying for my CS BS, that was something my profs did regularly. We could bring notes to the final, but you were still expected to write your own code (by hand) on the final.
That mentality sounds like instructors aren’t properly setting expectations for students. If going over checklists is a required skill, students should be informed regularly that they need to be doing XYZ and should be writing that down.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by “it’s a fun bit of deprogramming to do.” Especially younger students are strongly conditioned to think of tests or performances as “closed book” unless specifically informed otherwise and often demonstrate actual fear of being caught using reference materials or god forbid open a reference manual. Breaking them of that habit often takes more than “setting expectations.” It can take some effort to get students to realize the game we’re playing here isn’t “You have to know everything in all the textbooks,” it’s “You’ve got to know which book to find which answer in.”
Having gone back to college after becoming a flight instructor, I’m strongly under the impression that college just doesn’t matter. There is no certification or accountability requirements for professors; no legal requirement for them to study the fundamentals of instruction, hell I’m not convinced anyone actually interviewed some of my professors before hiring them.
I had an English professor tell me she “likes to give students enough rope to hang themselves with.” I want you to imagine hearing that out of a flight instructor.
College professors seem to see themselves as gatekeepers rather than guides. Their classes have to be hard so that only the worthy graduate. Flying an airplane is already complex enough, my job as a flight instructor is to make the process of learning that complexity as easy and safe for my students as possible. What even is college if not corrupt?
I think it’s more that it’s in their master’s capstone class. In undergrad, definitely too harsh. But for a master’s program I get it
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Who TF is copying out of github for their masters, though, honestly?
People who relied on it to get there in the first place and now are stuck not knowing how to do anything without it.
Nah fuck em
I hope my Uni had this. I have never cheated, but cheaters sometimes have better grades than me.
I guess that would harm you if the class is graded on a curve. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be caught and penalized, only that expulsion from the university is a harsh penalty. Automatic failure of the class would hurt plenty, without utterly destroying someone’s life.
It is not harsh. Cheating is immoral and unfair, and every adult knows that. It is in nature a forgery of your degree. Honesty needs to be highly valued and respected. We have cooperations and politicians lying everyday because of this.
when a professor does this they’re “based” and “brainpilled” but when I pretend to sell crack on the benches outside, all of a sudden the judge claims it’s “entrapment” and “illegal” smh…
At this point I’m only hoping to emerge from the other side of the “based” fad although I’ve never understood what it meant. WTaF is “brain pilled”?
Groovy. Tubular. Fetch.
Here’s the real answer for based:
“Based” (corruption of base head - from someone who smokes base - street name for crack cocaine) was popular as an insult in rap / African American circles in the early 00s
Rapper Lil B got called it and decided on a whim to pretend the meaning was changed to mean something positive, started using it in this way, it caught on - mostly through the new York scene and its attendant twitter following
As all slang does in the last ~100-150 years, passed from black people to everyone.
Brain pilled is a reference to The Matrix f/t Keanu Reeves in which Morpheus - whose namesake is the God of dreams - offers to wake up Neo from his fake reality by taking the red pill - leading to the phrase "red pilled" meaning (a right wing variant of) "woke." Over time [x]-pilled became slang like how Watergate/ [x]-gate became a suffix to imply an imbrolglio.Historically based and KnowYourMeme-pilled
I always thought “based” was a contraction of “based on facts and logic” (or similar)
Turn back now
Groovy
I can’t explain it, but this one feels very different from the rest.
And I still can’t read “tubular” without picturing a 90s TV show about skaters shot entirely with a fisheye lens.
I always took based to be a sort of ironic agreement with a slight political connotation, especially if something said seems particularly “bold.”
Essentially “You totally understand who you’re talking to (your “base”) and the subject at hand; This guy/gal gets it; This is ‘based’ on hard facts” (especially when seen as controversial and few will admit it.)
You can understand how this became conservative-shitpost parlance for a while but thankfully (and ironically) has become more depolarized. So now I see it like “Yeah this fellow human being understands their fellow human beings!”
“Brainpilled” is just a stupid shift from the term “Red pill”, coined by The Matrix and eventually co-opted by conspiracy theorists and others with intense socializing difficulties (that are everyone else’s fault, naturally.)
The idea being you made a choice to “see the truth” when nobody else wants to.
It eventually spawned “black pilled” which is a ridiculously nihilist idea that “I see how everything really works now, and it’s all terrible and there’s zero hope.”
And now we’re at “brainpilled”, like the movie Limitless maybe? LOL. “This person sees it from some genius angle us mere mortals can barely comprehend. They’re playing 5D chess and we’re still playing Candyland.”
I dunno, some of it is fun and descriptive. Some is braindead. Language is like any art, it’s like Bruce Lee says: take what works and leave the rest behind. :)
Based just means something like, “coolest of the cool”. They are unwavering in their conviction, and respectable in that regard.
“X pilled” = a believer in X; i.e. they’ve taken the red pill with regard to X and see that it is true/good.
My understanding of based is it’s a way of showing respect for someone who did or said something controversial. You could disagree with what they did/said but you respect them nonetheless.
Based and apathetic-about-internet-slang-pilled.
Cheating in academia is the name of the game. There is a survivor bias here assuming the other 78 students didn’t cheat. They’re Learning how to not get caught. Building a better trap may simply yield a better better cheater. The proof ends up being in the work.
I still think honeypots are amusing AF.
i didnt have a big problem with cheating, except with the caveat if a test is weighted via averages, then it actively fucks over those who dont cheat, as the curve is set higher than it should.
Average-weighted tests can go die in a ditch
It just discourages cooperation leading up the the exam, because you actively benefit from your peers performing worse
it works when tests are graded where the intended score is not 100%. having a test basically be “not finished” shows which subjects on a test was not properly gone over, thus the curve would apply and remove said question from the exam. if it were to be graded in a 100% scale, the question would exist to not give the class a perfect score regardless.
I have average intelligence and maintained a 3.5 at a top bioengineering school. I barely went to lectures, and just made sure to stay on top of the material through online resources (we have literally everything ever available to us). Id say not being a dumbass is the name of the game.
It always surprises me when I interview new graduates now and they can’t explain any of their projects or pass a basic software proficiency test that most intro classes should cover (I usually ask them to write code to reverse complement a DNA sequence… just swap out some letters and reverse a string, I do include the rules in the prompt). I think cheating is really rampant in software students.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but I bet a portion of that could be explained by the brain-dump method students are conditioned for in grade schools before college.
I graduated from software engineering but still until this point, I loathe using one of the chatbots to make the code I want to make work on my own. I’ve used it twice to ask about how to organize a big software project but that was it. I am just a couple years older than the interns at my office but…damn…they are abusing chatgpt to get stuff done, albeit barely, because intern intelligence never ceases to amaze, and it’s funny to watch.
If they wanna cheat, they should at least learn or practice that which they try to cheat xd
I have no issue using an AI bot to help write code, but from personal experience, you have to at least have a basic understanding of how to do what you’re trying to do, otherwise you won’t be able to fix the code your AI bot gave you. I’ve tried using a bot to just write entire programs for me, it never works out of me. I always have to go back and update and fix what it gave me so I actually have a working product in the end but I’m also only doing scripting so that might make it easier to get by with a bot.
I think it’s my gamer experience talking, but once I realized games were more enjoyable without cheats, it opened my eyes. I think I might be going through the same with my coding adventures. It feels more…rewarding to make the code work after trying and trying until it’s all good.
Luckily chat bots are hot garbage at logic. They have no clue what they’re doing at all, most of what they say is just easy/popular sources that don’t work or at worst sorta work but will create huge bugs. Sure ai will get better, but imo chatgpt/llm won’t replace real eng cause it sources from dumbasses like me
There was an early episode of Naruto that involved a test that was nigh impossible for someone of their grade level. The actual purpose of the test was to see how good they were at cheating without getting caught, which would translate to their ability to gather information in enemy territory. I think about that a lot.
Reminded of Space Cadet:
Cheat (open your eyes) -> score is too high -> fail
Keep eyes closed -> laughably low score -> perfect!
Star Trek version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
At a certain point though, you’ve just plain done the work. If you jump through enough hoops to cheat then you have to know the material well enough. Like doing a bunch of editing passes on downloaded papers.
Makes me think of the Key & Peele sketch where the bank robbers’ plan is to get jobs at the bank and get steal the money week after week in the form of paychecks.
It’s so much easier to just go to class and do the assignment work.
The same mentality that tries to cheat also doesn’t understand that actually knowing the material is crucial to actually doing the job.
Sure, they’ll argue that we only use about 2 weeks of accumulated college knowledge in our professional careers, and that claim apparently checks out; but it’s the very last few weeks that we’ve built on the years of pre-req that we use later on. I.e it’s just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s the tip of a fucking iceberg.
It also disregards all the secondary and tertiary benefits to “knowing the material” and those benefits of doing the work to get there.
Like honing your ability to research, skills in pulling the actual useful info out of diverse sources of vastly differing quality, speed at which you can pick up new ideas and concepts, etc.
Part of what you’re learning is how to do the boring grunt work of learning itself, and honing your skills at that through experience
The most boring days of my job are when I just need to follow well written directions or documentation. The real test is when you’re past that and you need to combine multiple things to meet your specific situation, when no one who has figured it out before ever documented it in one easy place.
This is just what happens when you send a bunch of people to higher education who didn’t really want to go.
Well, if the piece of paper wasn’t necessary to make enough money to split an apartment with 3 other strangers, I’m sure fewer people would go.
We really need to stop forcefeeding kids this rubbish anyway.
Your life is not over if you don’t go to college. It should be perfectly acceptable to get other jobs, and see what you want to do in life. There’s no magic pot of jobs for graduates. Office jobs are easily done from overseas. You know what can’t be done by some poor Indian earning $10 a day? Unblocking my toilet. Plastering my walls. Fitting my bathroom. Making my food. Emptying my bins.
Yeah, they’re not glamorous. Yeah, you’re not going to be a billionaire doing those things. But you know what? You weren’t anyway.
Also universities shouldn’t be required for technical jobs. They can be trained. Universities are so research oriented because they were about science and figuring shit out. Healthcare is an excellent example. We require so much education for positions someone can do with half or a quarter of the training time. An 8 year program should be for the top spots and specialists.
And your back is screwed after two decades. There’s a reason why people don’t want their kids to do those shitty jobs.
It’s interesting to me that mental effort is generally avoided by the majority of people.
They’ll go to extreme lengths to simply, not have to solve the problem themselves.
Wish more teachers had that dedication to something, in general.
At university most teachers have serious dedication. It’s just not for teaching, lmao.
But once you do your thesis, discussion in their respective fields of research or general expertise is really awesome.
It’s just not for teaching, lmao.
Exactly. The “Ugh, these annoying students are keeping me from doing something useful” is very strong with some of them.
I mean, depending on their agreement with the university that might legitimately be the case.
What is TA?
Teacher’s Assistant/Teaching Aide
Basically an older student helping teach the younger ones as a parttime job. Generally involves a lot of crappy work like supervising labwork, helping out with grading and answering the same question 18 times.
Can be real fun though and often you get deeper insight into the subject than just attending a class or gain valuable connections into the institute.
I bet you’ll NEVER forget any of that material ever your whole life. You’ll be on your deathbed senile can’t remember your name and can still spout that shit out.
In my personal experience, it usually means doing 80% of the professor’s work for minimum wage pay so the $140k/yr prof can fuck off and go brown-nose the school Board of Trustees all term.
The Prof might be doing other research too, as universities aren’t just for teaching undergrads. He might be advancing science in his field
In some countries doing research is requirement fot being prof.
Or maybe that professor is an adjunct professor and they’re making 40k/yr :(
Tough out there.
So, like a senpai.
Not really. A senpai is usually a more experienced co-worker or in school an older student in your extracurricular. You would refer to a TA as sensei.
TITS ASS
LETS GOOO
TITS ASS
Tourette’s Affected?
This is equal part fucked up and you get what’s fucking coming to you
Anon’s prof is a G.
What is TA?
Teaching assistant. They do a whole bunch of stuff for professors like grading, teaching, and the like
Teaching assistant
He’s just keeping you boys honest.
I have a feeling that people are confusing asocial with anti-social.
*Bad. Fuck you.
“Bad; fuck you.” would have also been acceptable.
What’s TA?
Teaching assistant
Why are these pictures always so difficult to read? The text is all scrambled!
If you’re using an app, you may need to adjust image quality in the settings. For Boost, there’s an HD button on the image by default.
Yep, that work better, thanks!
