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No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He claimed he stopped when one of his cli

No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He claimed he stopped when one of his clients was caught. The unfortunate lesson I got from university is that they were very aware of cheating, but not all that enthused about penalizing people for it. 11 people in one of my freshmen classes got copying an assignment to keep a journal over the semester. In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
syops 6y ago
I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.
- gwerbret 6y ago
  > I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it. ...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Let’s be real though, the honest students are getting far more out of this than the ones cheating. I promise you the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were. It’s still ultimately all about who you know, and those kids likely have a cushy job awaiting them back home. The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers. Foreign students are absolutely a grift at US universities, though I suspect COVID may have ended that one. A great many will come to the US hoping to land a job but most will go home with a name-brand degree and a stake in the moderately successful family business.
    - solveit 6y ago
      > the second your ass enters the work world Yes, but the name of your school and your GPA does tend to affect the manner of your posterior's entry.
    - ironmagma 6y ago
      It does affect your chances of getting into grad school or being hired as a TA.
      - ModernMech 6y ago
        I specifically try to hire TAs who struggled in my classes and demonstrated that they increased their competency through the semester. A student who got a C on the first exam but an A on the final and a B+ average makes a much better TA than one who got As on every assignment. They are able to empathize with the kinds of students who come to see them during office hours.
      - ActorNightly 6y ago
        Sure, but thats like saying "If I work for a company and get a poor performance rating, I won't get promoted". Just go do something else. Even if you want to learn, its not like academia is the gatekeeper to learning.
        ironmagma 6y ago
        So a professor should make that decision on behalf of an honest student while giving the cheaters a better shot? Give me a break. Also, learning isn’t always the end goal. Maybe you want to be a professor and teach, or maybe you want to do academic research.
    - jebeng 6y ago
      > The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers. A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults. Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.
- acomjean 6y ago
  My College roommate had a friend as his partner in his circuits design class. His partner did less and less work on the group projects as the semester went on. On the final project my roommate did the whole project (And elevator control circuit with a little spinning disk). He was exhausted. They had to demo to the professor, who asked who did what on the project. "Dave did most of the work." "What did you do?" the prof asked.. "Actually Dave did all the work."" The friendship was salvaged, but the freeloader had to take the class again.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    "the freeloader had to take the class again." If only that were the norm. Unfortunately freeloading is typically rewarded in university assignments. People say "that's real life" - well, no. In the workforce there's some accountability and the freeloader will get fired while you get promoted.
    - te 6y ago
      > the freeloader will get fired while you get promoted. Lol, if only.
      - hntrader 6y ago
        It takes painfully too long but there's an overall pressure in that general direction.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Unfortunately the winning strategy is to leave yourself.
    - rapjr9 6y ago
      Professors cheat also. I've seen several of them invite someone with a reputation to a meeting or just talk with them, then offer to add that person to a paper they are working on "because they contributed to the meeting or conversation". It's a way of buying influence for their paper and getting in good with the person with the reputation. It's very similar to ghost-writing or freeloading, the distinguished person usually does no actual work on the paper (they are asked if they want to add their name when the paper is finished and ready to be submitted) yet everybody involved benefits from reputation enhancement for no effort. Students see this happening and learn from it.
- topspin 6y ago
  It's getting difficult to identify the parts of our world that aren't corrupt.
  - sn41 6y ago
    Corruption is incentive-based. There is always an incentive to lower effort. Indeed to a certain extent it may be essential for survival. It seems it can only be counterbalanced by the constraints imposed by ethics (i.e. guilt and shame) and punishments (i.e. fear). The only positive mindset way to reducing corruption is to inculcate the view that life is for service - but that does not gel well with capitalism, I guess.
    - topspin 6y ago
      The only thing more rare than righteous institutions are forum threads not plagued by malcontents griping about capitalism.
      - Edman274 6y ago
        In fairness, if you didn't have to worry about where your next meal was coming from, it might be easier to not want to violate your ethics to get ahead in life. This is not an endorsement of socialism, rather, a defense of criticism of capitalism.
        topspin 6y ago
        The market economy I live in, where you imagine we spend our time worrying about our next meal, has fostered the largest cohort of morbidly obese people in the history of our species. And I am utterly incapable of imagining anything less in need of defense than criticism of capitalism.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        It indeed achieves both, at the same time! Here's how it works: a typical person - particularly an American - gets enough money to buy more food than they'd ever need, but at the same time, they're ~two random events (e.g. sudden medical or car repair bill, and losing their job) from becoming homeless. It's really not that hard to imagine living in luxury and fear at the same time. That's how rich and/or powerful people feel in less democratic countries - they simultaneously have more money than they know what to do with, and are one random event (mistake, shifting political winds) from losing it all, possibly along with their lives. It's actually one of the main reasons democracy is considered the superior system - powerful people living in fear is a combination that often leads to blood being spilled.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  This is a sad thread. I guess institutionalized cheating is a very real and acceptable thing. I remember "cheating" once during a physics exam. It wasn't "cheating" really. He said we could use the internet, and it turns out a couple of the questions were on the internet. It's not ethical, and I shouldn't have done that, but technically it was allowed. Thankfully I was never the type of person who had to cheat their way into prestige. I did that because I was an immature kid. What's worse is that I was smart enough to solve the problems anyway, but I was just lazy.
lumost 6y ago
Is this really surprising? People who can pay for cheating schemes are so likely to be paying the university full price. The university will only crack down when it affects their prestige.
- godelski 6y ago
  In theory it would. But either the schools are so good they can make cheaters good in the workplace or the workplace doesn't need the best and brightest (I guess cheating the the workplace could be a third answer).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Or, the cheaters don't end up in good workplaces - some will get washed out early, some won't get accepted, some won't even apply. A good diploma doesn't mean immediate, effortless transfer into best companies - you have to do some work applying and interviewing. In particular, I believe the kind of roles your rich family can get you through their network probably aren't the best ones - you're more likely to be given irrelevant make-work that doesn't disrupt the actual business, and your paycheck is just a price of your sponsor's friendship. Also, some of the cheaters - particularly of the lighter kind - still absorb enough knowledge through osmosis + self-study that they can back up their diploma with actual knowledge. Ultimately, I think looking at the aggregate outcomes, the correlation between students cheating and university getting bad feedback from the market is weak enough that it just doesn't form a strong incentive for universities to do anything about it. It takes a widely-published scandal to temporarily change that.
Fomite 6y ago
This. For something that "No one will discuss", this has been being discussed since I was in High School, and I'm now prepping my tenure packet.
angry-tempest 6y ago
> In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment. It's likely that this decision was not up to the professor. Unless you have massive proof, deans (and the administration in general) hesitate against taking serious action. I'm talking from my own experiences.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  The TAs caught it because the students copied the text exactly, so there was no issue of evidence. The administration didn't get a say because she never reported it to them. In retrospect I could have made a stink and gone to the dean, but Freshmen me wasn't willing to do that sort of thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

syops 6y ago

I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.

gwerbret 6y ago
> I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it. ...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Let’s be real though, the honest students are getting far more out of this than the ones cheating. I promise you the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were. It’s still ultimately all about who you know, and those kids likely have a cushy job awaiting them back home. The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers. Foreign students are absolutely a grift at US universities, though I suspect COVID may have ended that one. A great many will come to the US hoping to land a job but most will go home with a name-brand degree and a stake in the moderately successful family business.
  - solveit 6y ago
    > the second your ass enters the work world Yes, but the name of your school and your GPA does tend to affect the manner of your posterior's entry.
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    It does affect your chances of getting into grad school or being hired as a TA.
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      I specifically try to hire TAs who struggled in my classes and demonstrated that they increased their competency through the semester. A student who got a C on the first exam but an A on the final and a B+ average makes a much better TA than one who got As on every assignment. They are able to empathize with the kinds of students who come to see them during office hours.
    - ActorNightly 6y ago
      Sure, but thats like saying "If I work for a company and get a poor performance rating, I won't get promoted". Just go do something else. Even if you want to learn, its not like academia is the gatekeeper to learning.
      - ironmagma 6y ago
        So a professor should make that decision on behalf of an honest student while giving the cheaters a better shot? Give me a break. Also, learning isn’t always the end goal. Maybe you want to be a professor and teach, or maybe you want to do academic research.
  - jebeng 6y ago
    > The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers. A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults. Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.
acomjean 6y ago
My College roommate had a friend as his partner in his circuits design class. His partner did less and less work on the group projects as the semester went on. On the final project my roommate did the whole project (And elevator control circuit with a little spinning disk). He was exhausted. They had to demo to the professor, who asked who did what on the project. "Dave did most of the work." "What did you do?" the prof asked.. "Actually Dave did all the work."" The friendship was salvaged, but the freeloader had to take the class again.
- hntrader 6y ago
  "the freeloader had to take the class again." If only that were the norm. Unfortunately freeloading is typically rewarded in university assignments. People say "that's real life" - well, no. In the workforce there's some accountability and the freeloader will get fired while you get promoted.
  - te 6y ago
    > the freeloader will get fired while you get promoted. Lol, if only.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      It takes painfully too long but there's an overall pressure in that general direction.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Unfortunately the winning strategy is to leave yourself.
  - rapjr9 6y ago
    Professors cheat also. I've seen several of them invite someone with a reputation to a meeting or just talk with them, then offer to add that person to a paper they are working on "because they contributed to the meeting or conversation". It's a way of buying influence for their paper and getting in good with the person with the reputation. It's very similar to ghost-writing or freeloading, the distinguished person usually does no actual work on the paper (they are asked if they want to add their name when the paper is finished and ready to be submitted) yet everybody involved benefits from reputation enhancement for no effort. Students see this happening and learn from it.
topspin 6y ago
It's getting difficult to identify the parts of our world that aren't corrupt.
- sn41 6y ago
  Corruption is incentive-based. There is always an incentive to lower effort. Indeed to a certain extent it may be essential for survival. It seems it can only be counterbalanced by the constraints imposed by ethics (i.e. guilt and shame) and punishments (i.e. fear). The only positive mindset way to reducing corruption is to inculcate the view that life is for service - but that does not gel well with capitalism, I guess.
  - topspin 6y ago
    The only thing more rare than righteous institutions are forum threads not plagued by malcontents griping about capitalism.
    - Edman274 6y ago
      In fairness, if you didn't have to worry about where your next meal was coming from, it might be easier to not want to violate your ethics to get ahead in life. This is not an endorsement of socialism, rather, a defense of criticism of capitalism.
      - topspin 6y ago
        The market economy I live in, where you imagine we spend our time worrying about our next meal, has fostered the largest cohort of morbidly obese people in the history of our species. And I am utterly incapable of imagining anything less in need of defense than criticism of capitalism.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        It indeed achieves both, at the same time! Here's how it works: a typical person - particularly an American - gets enough money to buy more food than they'd ever need, but at the same time, they're ~two random events (e.g. sudden medical or car repair bill, and losing their job) from becoming homeless. It's really not that hard to imagine living in luxury and fear at the same time. That's how rich and/or powerful people feel in less democratic countries - they simultaneously have more money than they know what to do with, and are one random event (mistake, shifting political winds) from losing it all, possibly along with their lives. It's actually one of the main reasons democracy is considered the superior system - powerful people living in fear is a combination that often leads to blood being spilled.
anonytrary 6y ago
This is a sad thread. I guess institutionalized cheating is a very real and acceptable thing. I remember "cheating" once during a physics exam. It wasn't "cheating" really. He said we could use the internet, and it turns out a couple of the questions were on the internet. It's not ethical, and I shouldn't have done that, but technically it was allowed. Thankfully I was never the type of person who had to cheat their way into prestige. I did that because I was an immature kid. What's worse is that I was smart enough to solve the problems anyway, but I was just lazy.

lumost 6y ago

Is this really surprising? People who can pay for cheating schemes are so likely to be paying the university full price. The university will only crack down when it affects their prestige.

godelski 6y ago
In theory it would. But either the schools are so good they can make cheaters good in the workplace or the workplace doesn't need the best and brightest (I guess cheating the the workplace could be a third answer).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Or, the cheaters don't end up in good workplaces - some will get washed out early, some won't get accepted, some won't even apply. A good diploma doesn't mean immediate, effortless transfer into best companies - you have to do some work applying and interviewing. In particular, I believe the kind of roles your rich family can get you through their network probably aren't the best ones - you're more likely to be given irrelevant make-work that doesn't disrupt the actual business, and your paycheck is just a price of your sponsor's friendship. Also, some of the cheaters - particularly of the lighter kind - still absorb enough knowledge through osmosis + self-study that they can back up their diploma with actual knowledge. Ultimately, I think looking at the aggregate outcomes, the correlation between students cheating and university getting bad feedback from the market is weak enough that it just doesn't form a strong incentive for universities to do anything about it. It takes a widely-published scandal to temporarily change that.

Fomite 6y ago

This. For something that "No one will discuss", this has been being discussed since I was in High School, and I'm now prepping my tenure packet.

angry-tempest 6y ago

> In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment. It's likely that this decision was not up to the professor. Unless you have massive proof, deans (and the administration in general) hesitate against taking serious action. I'm talking from my own experiences.

nitwit005 6y ago
The TAs caught it because the students copied the text exactly, so there was no issue of evidence. The administration didn't get a say because she never reported it to them. In retrospect I could have made a stink and gone to the dean, but Freshmen me wasn't willing to do that sort of thing.