4 ms·

Ignoring for a moment the large number of distinct issues raised in the article I want to focus on just how ridiculous to consider the use of such drugs as chea

Ignoring for a moment the large number of distinct issues raised in the article I want to focus on just how ridiculous to consider the use of such drugs as cheating. Before I present my argument - ask first why you might think it cheating? It only makes sense to think of it as cheating if you think that education is a competitive activity, and that in competitive activity you should only be able to avail yourself of your god given abilities. My argument then relies on the belief that seeing education as a competitive activity is heinous in the extreme. Yes - it IS treated as a competitive activity. Your grades reflect your standing relative to other students in your class as enforced by bell curves which academics are made to apply after the fact. It is ridiculous. What makes me really angry is the way universities then force course co-ordinators to give a clear statement of learning outcomes in course descriptions - as if they fucking matter. For if the point of education was to achieve a learning outcome - then YOU WOULD BE GRADED ACCORDING TO WHETHER OR NOT YOU MET THAT LEARNING OUTCOME - not according to your relative standing. Education should be about learning outcomes. I want to know - who has this skill... etc... not, who was the best in year X. Because even if I only ever accept the best - it's still a crap shoot as to what I really get. And now they want to restrict people's access to drugs that could help them meet learning outcomes? Because they are so enamoured of their perverted education paradigm that they can't see the forest for the trees. I work in a university and I honestly wonder if the people above me who make these decisions can count to three. No doubt on reading this the first question they'll ask is how they'll determine who should get the scholarships if they can't rank competitively. To which I answer - rank competitively all you want. Just don't confuse this process with grading. This brings us to the second aspect of cheating - that you can only use your god given abilities in a competitive environment. If we assume that grading has now been separated from the ranking process - for the purposes of finding the best students - one still has to ask if it's fair to use drugs to get an edge. The answer (and as far as I'm concerned this answer goes equally for sports and everything else) is an easy yes but only if the following conditions hold. 1) Access is universal 2) cost is negligble 3) health risks are negligble You don't, for instance, want to award your scholarships to folks that end up dying of heart attacks at 30. But dexamphetamines and the like have been around for over 100 years. These are well understood drugs. The only problem is 1) - but as the author seems to demonstrate - this isn't actually a problem since it's apparently so easy to get them.

barrkel 16y ago
As long as the monetary gains to those higher up the scale are disproportionately higher in comparison to their skill or performance advantage, relative positioning matters a great deal. If the best doctor has an imaginary skill rating of 99%, and the next best 98%, and the next 97%, the best doctor won't be earning merely 2.06% more than the guy at 97%; he'll probably be earning 200% more. For certain products and professions, people want the best, and will pay out of all proportion for it. There are other aspects too, of course. Third-level education, outside of technical disciplines in particular, is largely about signalling, not learning outcomes; it's a socialization process for the middle class, a badge that encourages particular social groups to accept you as one of their own, and without which you will not advance far.
- grovulent 16y ago
  Yes everything you say is correct. In particular I like your comment about signalling which is spot on. I would say this would be the main reason anyone bothers to do an arts degree these days. Ultimately, these are in fact the evolutionarily designed QA processes which have actually worked reasonably well up until now. But we've reached the point where they are clearly holding us back. Being able to socialise with a certain class may well have reliably indicated competence or excellence in a field in the past. The rigours of specialisation almost entirely wipe out that correlation. We've got millions of people being produced out of universities that actually can't do anything. And it's not just in arts that this is a problem - how many posts are we seeing here on HN from people saying they've done a computer science degree but can't code for shit? That the upper echelons of academe are in fact SO incredibly status orientated suggests that what many of the best academics are actually doing revolves more around signalling procedures than actually making a real contribution of knowledge. and while I accept that this seems like an extreme conclusion - I've seen it time and time again. Many of the academics who have achieved the most status outside the academic community actually have reputations for not doing very much at all. It's certainly not all - but so many more than most of you would initially guess.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Third-level education, outside of technical disciplines in particular, is largely about signalling, not learning outcomes; it's a socialization process for the middle class, a badge that encourages particular social groups to accept you as one of their own, and without which you will not advance far. Of course, if this is true (and I tend to believe it is), it's a vastly bigger problem - we are wasting 4 years of life and billions of dollars on a zero sum game. Performance enhancing drugs are an incredibly tiny problem in comparison.

barrkel 16y ago

As long as the monetary gains to those higher up the scale are disproportionately higher in comparison to their skill or performance advantage, relative positioning matters a great deal. If the best doctor has an imaginary skill rating of 99%, and the next best 98%, and the next 97%, the best doctor won't be earning merely 2.06% more than the guy at 97%; he'll probably be earning 200% more. For certain products and professions, people want the best, and will pay out of all proportion for it. There are other aspects too, of course. Third-level education, outside of technical disciplines in particular, is largely about signalling, not learning outcomes; it's a socialization process for the middle class, a badge that encourages particular social groups to accept you as one of their own, and without which you will not advance far.

grovulent 16y ago
Yes everything you say is correct. In particular I like your comment about signalling which is spot on. I would say this would be the main reason anyone bothers to do an arts degree these days. Ultimately, these are in fact the evolutionarily designed QA processes which have actually worked reasonably well up until now. But we've reached the point where they are clearly holding us back. Being able to socialise with a certain class may well have reliably indicated competence or excellence in a field in the past. The rigours of specialisation almost entirely wipe out that correlation. We've got millions of people being produced out of universities that actually can't do anything. And it's not just in arts that this is a problem - how many posts are we seeing here on HN from people saying they've done a computer science degree but can't code for shit? That the upper echelons of academe are in fact SO incredibly status orientated suggests that what many of the best academics are actually doing revolves more around signalling procedures than actually making a real contribution of knowledge. and while I accept that this seems like an extreme conclusion - I've seen it time and time again. Many of the academics who have achieved the most status outside the academic community actually have reputations for not doing very much at all. It's certainly not all - but so many more than most of you would initially guess.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Third-level education, outside of technical disciplines in particular, is largely about signalling, not learning outcomes; it's a socialization process for the middle class, a badge that encourages particular social groups to accept you as one of their own, and without which you will not advance far. Of course, if this is true (and I tend to believe it is), it's a vastly bigger problem - we are wasting 4 years of life and billions of dollars on a zero sum game. Performance enhancing drugs are an incredibly tiny problem in comparison.