6 ms·

Throwaway for obvious reasons. When did you go to university? As I went a couple years ago and cheating was universal to the point that you could ask random cl

Throwaway for obvious reasons. When did you go to university? As I went a couple years ago and cheating was universal to the point that you could ask random classmates for the answers to quizzes you had not done yet and the frosh leaders collaborated to give the year below them all the answers. We had a massive drive of answers maintained by the student society. Academic integrity was an absurd pretense. Except for a few niche programs like political science and history, it just did not exist. Not arguing that this is a good thing, just that higher education in general is not all that reliable.

cs702 6y ago
West Point is not a run-of-the-mill academic institution. Its mission is to recruit people of character and train them for positions of leadership. Cadets must be nominated by a member of Congress, or by the President or Vice President. West Point occupies a special place in the US, both at present and throughout the country's history: https://www.westpoint.edu/about/history-of-west-point https://www.westpoint.edu/about/history-of-west-point
- weallcheat 6y ago
  All the more reason to cheat to get there and cheat to stay in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
engineer_22 6y ago
Wow, I'm impressed how organized you all were. Must be an Ivy grad...
- aj7 6y ago
  It ain’t “organization.” I studied so hard in high school, college, and my first year of graduate school that I laughed sometimes at the problems on final exams— because I had seen very similar ones in my preparation. That’s why this scandal, in freshman calculus, is so serious. This is how you get later-dissimulating individuals, like Westmoreland, Petraus, Flynn, Pompeo. You want more headlines like these?
  - engineer_22 6y ago
    Pompeo, et al cheated on freshman calculus? I'm sorry amigo, it seems you're a bit confused.
    - aj7 6y ago
      You are right. There are multiple pathways to being a liar. The Army is EXTREMELY concerned that any patterns of dissimulation will have consequences on the battlefield.
giardini 6y ago
Eliminate take-home exams. As for collections of answers or old tests, those have always been around and generally aren't considered cheating. In fact they're good preparation for allowing students to get familiar with the testing environment. But there's no excuse for lazy professors/instructors and each new test should be distinct. Re-using an old test or old test questions is questionable behavior by a professor. I agree with what Veen posted earlier: the cheating students should be expelled.
aj7 6y ago
Here’s the same kind of cheating. I was working at a well-funded ($86M Series B) fiberoptic startup in Fremont in 2000. We were trying to develop a polarization-maintaining fused fiber coupler, which we knew little about except for reading some papers. We were led by a young Chinese guy who kept everything he knew pretty much to himself. We all went out for pizza. I asked him, how did you solve so-and-so problem? Remarkably, without hesitation he said, I called up my friend at so-and-so COMPETING STARTUP, and asked him how they did it. (And he didn’t share with me any details of the solution, either). Then, I knew Silicon Valley was immersed in a sea of electrons…
- dahart 6y ago
  I assume there is more context here, so out of curiosity, why do you consider that example “cheating”? Was the competition friend a low level engineer who stole and leaked information, or was he in the competition’s leadership and agreeing to share solutions? Is there a rule at either company, or law that was broken?
  - aj7 6y ago
    What do you think? And does it matter?
- lordnacho 6y ago
  What's cheating about that? "How did you cook the soufflé?" "I asked my friend and he gave me some pointers" Not clear to me how your story differs. Was it something specifically mentioned in an NDA or contract?
  - aj7 6y ago
    Reread it about four times. ESPECIALLY the last sentence.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Okay, so if it was a trade secret, that's trouble. But people will give away all sorts of information all the time. That's what the network is for. If you want to publish a blog post on something, it's really involved. You have to make your vendors look good, your engineering team look good, and then there'll be this army of people on HN and Reddit who will nitpick everything so that you lose any of the good will you generate. Wayyy better to just use private channels to exchange that information. So, if I'm considering data pipeline stuff I'll just hop on Discord with my friends and ask them how it went at their company and they'll just tell me. Obviously none of us will tell the rest of the world, but we'll tell each other. Heck, strangers will do that in SF and Silicon Valley in general. Most people easily understand what parts are MNPI and what is company-private IP and what isn't. Until Xiaomi or Huawei or whatever stole that bloody robotic arm off T-Mobile even big companies would routinely officially sanction this information sharing.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Test and answer banks are not unique, and don't directly permit cheating unless the professors are ignorant of it (would be startling if true) or lazy. When I was in college, the professors knew that student organizations maintained these so they changed up their tests to account for it. The banks, then, only helped the students by guiding their studying ("concepts x, y, and z will be in one of the first two tests, so know a, b, and c"). Despite these test banks, the only widespread cheating when I was in school was on homework, which usually screwed the students when it came time for the exams because they had no practice. They weeded themselves out this way.
billfruit 6y ago
"To meet and rebuke this bad habit of the masters, the schoolboy mind, with its accustomed ingenuity, had invented an elaborate system of tradition. Almost every boy kept his own vulgus written out in a book, and these books were duly handed down from boy to boy, till (if the tradition has gone on till now) I suppose the popular boys, in whose hands bequeathed vulgus-books have accumulated, are prepared with three or four vulguses on any subject in heaven or earth, or in “more worlds than one,” which an unfortunate master can pitch upon." -- From "Tom Brown's School Days"
Dayshine 6y ago
This seems like a problem with the american style of examination. Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams? My CS/Maths/Physics exams all consisted of longform written or worked answers. Maybe 10% max were trivial, no multiple choice, no question re-use within 10 years or so. Sure, if you went and memorised every question ever asked for every subject in the 12 hours of final exams you might get lucky and have a very similar question. But, uh, that's just learning.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams?" This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors. Making your life easier by recycling the same stuff.
  - VLM 6y ago
    > This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors. There are some general issues with leadership training in the military. You're randomly and arbitrarily in charge until you're not. You're randomly and arbitrarily practicing your group cooperation skills until you're not. In theory you'll get a lesson about paying attention, hopefully not in a career ending manner. There is a strong push to demonize the kids who do dumb things. But its worth considering they're not evil, just a bit slow on the uptake. Surely if a kid at training methodically organized the process of unloading a truck that would be valid leadership training. If the same kid organized the chemistry lab so operations run smoother, that's good too. If the same kid organizes group study sessions against an outline of the syllabus that is good leadership. If the kid goes a bit far and study session photocopies change from similar questions to the test, to actual questions from the test... The kid's not necessarily evil incarnate but a bit slow on the uptake about the precise definitions of expectations and an attention getting reaction from the actual leaders is appropriate, whereas blaming the kid retroactively for Iraq not having WMD is just a bit overboard.
polytely 6y ago
Wow that sounds amazingly corrupt. I have never experienced anything like that in my life. The school I went to was not a university I think (I'm not sure how to compare the Dutch & US education systems) but they would change and improve courses based on student & industry feedback every year, so while you could get an idea from upper year students what kind of questions they would ask, you would still have to learn it.

cs702 6y ago

West Point is not a run-of-the-mill academic institution. Its mission is to recruit people of character and train them for positions of leadership. Cadets must be nominated by a member of Congress, or by the President or Vice President. West Point occupies a special place in the US, both at present and throughout the country's history: https://www.westpoint.edu/about/history-of-west-point https://www.westpoint.edu/about/history-of-west-point

weallcheat 6y ago
All the more reason to cheat to get there and cheat to stay in.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

engineer_22 6y ago

Wow, I'm impressed how organized you all were. Must be an Ivy grad...

aj7 6y ago
It ain’t “organization.” I studied so hard in high school, college, and my first year of graduate school that I laughed sometimes at the problems on final exams— because I had seen very similar ones in my preparation. That’s why this scandal, in freshman calculus, is so serious. This is how you get later-dissimulating individuals, like Westmoreland, Petraus, Flynn, Pompeo. You want more headlines like these?
- engineer_22 6y ago
  Pompeo, et al cheated on freshman calculus? I'm sorry amigo, it seems you're a bit confused.
  - aj7 6y ago
    You are right. There are multiple pathways to being a liar. The Army is EXTREMELY concerned that any patterns of dissimulation will have consequences on the battlefield.

giardini 6y ago

Eliminate take-home exams. As for collections of answers or old tests, those have always been around and generally aren't considered cheating. In fact they're good preparation for allowing students to get familiar with the testing environment. But there's no excuse for lazy professors/instructors and each new test should be distinct. Re-using an old test or old test questions is questionable behavior by a professor. I agree with what Veen posted earlier: the cheating students should be expelled.

aj7 6y ago

Here’s the same kind of cheating. I was working at a well-funded ($86M Series B) fiberoptic startup in Fremont in 2000. We were trying to develop a polarization-maintaining fused fiber coupler, which we knew little about except for reading some papers. We were led by a young Chinese guy who kept everything he knew pretty much to himself. We all went out for pizza. I asked him, how did you solve so-and-so problem? Remarkably, without hesitation he said, I called up my friend at so-and-so COMPETING STARTUP, and asked him how they did it. (And he didn’t share with me any details of the solution, either). Then, I knew Silicon Valley was immersed in a sea of electrons…

dahart 6y ago
I assume there is more context here, so out of curiosity, why do you consider that example “cheating”? Was the competition friend a low level engineer who stole and leaked information, or was he in the competition’s leadership and agreeing to share solutions? Is there a rule at either company, or law that was broken?
- aj7 6y ago
  What do you think? And does it matter?
lordnacho 6y ago
What's cheating about that? "How did you cook the soufflé?" "I asked my friend and he gave me some pointers" Not clear to me how your story differs. Was it something specifically mentioned in an NDA or contract?
- aj7 6y ago
  Reread it about four times. ESPECIALLY the last sentence.
renewiltord 6y ago
Okay, so if it was a trade secret, that's trouble. But people will give away all sorts of information all the time. That's what the network is for. If you want to publish a blog post on something, it's really involved. You have to make your vendors look good, your engineering team look good, and then there'll be this army of people on HN and Reddit who will nitpick everything so that you lose any of the good will you generate. Wayyy better to just use private channels to exchange that information. So, if I'm considering data pipeline stuff I'll just hop on Discord with my friends and ask them how it went at their company and they'll just tell me. Obviously none of us will tell the rest of the world, but we'll tell each other. Heck, strangers will do that in SF and Silicon Valley in general. Most people easily understand what parts are MNPI and what is company-private IP and what isn't. Until Xiaomi or Huawei or whatever stole that bloody robotic arm off T-Mobile even big companies would routinely officially sanction this information sharing.

Jtsummers 6y ago

Test and answer banks are not unique, and don't directly permit cheating unless the professors are ignorant of it (would be startling if true) or lazy. When I was in college, the professors knew that student organizations maintained these so they changed up their tests to account for it. The banks, then, only helped the students by guiding their studying ("concepts x, y, and z will be in one of the first two tests, so know a, b, and c"). Despite these test banks, the only widespread cheating when I was in school was on homework, which usually screwed the students when it came time for the exams because they had no practice. They weeded themselves out this way.

billfruit 6y ago

"To meet and rebuke this bad habit of the masters, the schoolboy mind, with its accustomed ingenuity, had invented an elaborate system of tradition. Almost every boy kept his own vulgus written out in a book, and these books were duly handed down from boy to boy, till (if the tradition has gone on till now) I suppose the popular boys, in whose hands bequeathed vulgus-books have accumulated, are prepared with three or four vulguses on any subject in heaven or earth, or in “more worlds than one,” which an unfortunate master can pitch upon." -- From "Tom Brown's School Days"

Dayshine 6y ago

This seems like a problem with the american style of examination. Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams? My CS/Maths/Physics exams all consisted of longform written or worked answers. Maybe 10% max were trivial, no multiple choice, no question re-use within 10 years or so. Sure, if you went and memorised every question ever asked for every subject in the 12 hours of final exams you might get lucky and have a very similar question. But, uh, that's just learning.

inglor_cz 6y ago
"Why are exams that contribute to the final grade being reused? Why are they such trivial questions that you can reuse answers from previous exams?" This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors. Making your life easier by recycling the same stuff.
- VLM 6y ago
  > This sort-of feels like cheating on the side of the professors. There are some general issues with leadership training in the military. You're randomly and arbitrarily in charge until you're not. You're randomly and arbitrarily practicing your group cooperation skills until you're not. In theory you'll get a lesson about paying attention, hopefully not in a career ending manner. There is a strong push to demonize the kids who do dumb things. But its worth considering they're not evil, just a bit slow on the uptake. Surely if a kid at training methodically organized the process of unloading a truck that would be valid leadership training. If the same kid organized the chemistry lab so operations run smoother, that's good too. If the same kid organizes group study sessions against an outline of the syllabus that is good leadership. If the kid goes a bit far and study session photocopies change from similar questions to the test, to actual questions from the test... The kid's not necessarily evil incarnate but a bit slow on the uptake about the precise definitions of expectations and an attention getting reaction from the actual leaders is appropriate, whereas blaming the kid retroactively for Iraq not having WMD is just a bit overboard.

polytely 6y ago

Wow that sounds amazingly corrupt. I have never experienced anything like that in my life. The school I went to was not a university I think (I'm not sure how to compare the Dutch & US education systems) but they would change and improve courses based on student & industry feedback every year, so while you could get an idea from upper year students what kind of questions they would ask, you would still have to learn it.