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I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup

• beebmam 4y ago
  I totally agree with you. It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves. Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together. I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.
  • sodality2 4y ago
    > I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though. The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more. It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not go to college), but there were already clear trends that are definitely going to be exacerbated.
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    > they are only cheating themselves. I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    > only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers For STEM, sure. This guy is a psych professor though. I suspect that most of their jobs will have absolutely nothing to do with this class. Obviously being truly successful instead of cheating will help in their careers, but I doubt anything they learn in this class would.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    if a good job pays 100-300k/year, does it matter if you eventually get filtered out if you already made good $ and keep expenses low.
    • Sirened 4y ago
      I've always wondered about that lol. Surely there are people who do this? If you dedicate your life to becoming very good at interviewing and bullshitting, you can almost certainly get high paying jobs that you are entirely unqualified for and cannot perform even the basic duties of. Despite this, you should be able to anyways since getting fired from a large company for "gross incompetence" is a long process, especially when you're a new hire and they're liable to assume you're just adjusting to new tools. Pocket those 3-6 months of pay, keep interviewing, and just keep hopping jobs and finding new places to scam without ever actually doing anything useful at all.
  • knodi123 4y ago
    > It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves. > Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned in that course. I also cheated a little in american history and poli sci. I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career. Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of college, in terms of social experience, credentials, professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.
• tartuffe78 4y ago
  If I go to school for computer science, but have to take chemistry, statistics, etc. And get stuck with a bad professor who spends half the class time ranting about irrelevant topics, cheating makes sense so I can spend my time focused on the classes that matter to me.
  • Avicebron 4y ago
    statistics is pretty useful in computer science...and as someone has has worked in biotech on the software side...chemistry can be as well. Heck even anthropology and philosophy were pretty relevant when I took my courses on NLP years ago.
    • tartuffe78 4y ago
      As someone with 10 years as a software engineer I haven't needed it.
      • gunfighthacksaw 4y ago
        I’m sure there are 10y SWEs (and 1 yr) that use it every day. Obviously it’s going to be irrelevant to compilers or something, but not to heuristic approaches or anything with some quantifiable (and actively quantified) nondeterminism.
        • kolbusa 4y ago
          It will be very relevant in any field that does performance testing. And that includes compilers.
          • edflsafoiewq 4y ago
            I don't think you need a statistics class to do performance testing.
            • tetromino_ 4y ago
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  A lot of the students (and people in general) have a low-level cleverness obsession which handily blocks out high-level perception like that. Then the blocked out part becomes neglected so it turns kind of on/off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful information. So as a result, it's not that you don't see the big picture. It's that your inadvertent feedback loop converted high level thinking into a huge scary monster of high-level disasters that will seemingly result if you aren't as clever as can be. This also explains the cleverness in the face of everything else. Caught? Email back and be clever. Etc. Don't ever stop being clever, caught or no. It is your only (seeming) chance. But did you also catch the high level thinking student who was feeling stuck and potentially screwed, in their honesty? They realize the system might just as easily punish them. They are also lucky the professor had a considerate perspective rather than a blanket-projection attitude that many have. They are also lucky they weren't randomly selected by the cleverness cabal... (Also notice that really good professors make for reliable bridges between high and low level perspectives, with expectations of the former but also multi-dimensional empathy for those living the low-level system. This professor is indeed a very clever person on their own. So for them this is situation is probably less likely to result in massive disillusionment as it would for pure high-level folks.)
• throwaway6734 4y ago
  In my grad algo class I have a strong hunch there was a massive amount of cheating. It was an incredibly difficult course and i think people were scared of not failing. A lot of them were foreign students as well so there was a significant amount on the line for them
• rbongers 4y ago
  The reason I think a lot of people cheat is because they just don't appreciate the value of a good education, they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives, they don't know the value of money, and are just going because their parents just want them to. I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary, but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do, and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could have dreamed of in highschool. At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most common answers. People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness. Some people need some life experience, some people will never gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and young adults.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    , they don't know the value of money, and are just going because their parents just want them to. how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass. they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.
    • barsonme 4y ago
      Because most of the cheating is born out of laziness, not from a desire to pass at all costs.
      • paulpauper 4y ago
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  > You’re paying so much money for these courses I think that’s the central point. - It’s not _their_ money, it’s their parents’ either “hard earned” money, but they’re too inexperienced to understand its meaning, or “not so hard earned” money and they’re just going through it like their parents do. - the goal is also money on the other end of the pipe. The statistics that get repeated is how much more you earn with a college degree vs without one. There’s no catchy clickbait title about how _learning more_ makes your life better. It only makes sense for them to go for the fastest route to having a degree, if possession is the only thing that has been pitched to them.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    I.e. any car can perform like a Ferrari just by painting it red and putting on some badges.
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      To follow your analogy, media will only report on the car colors on the podium, and job interviews will require the badges to get a foot in the door. For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when they could really work that road race with a red painted Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        Ferrari backed it up by winning Grand Prix races year after year. I don't know much about the ones since Enzo died, but the older ones were frequently race cars that were softened up a bit so they could be driven on the street. It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate. Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)
• hinkley 4y ago
  I can say from the other side of this that I was employed in the industry while I was still in school, and so by the time I was a junior I was becoming an Informed Consumer, and let me tell you, the realm in which professors are expert is quite a bit narrower than they would have you believe. That knowledge got worse over time, my distrust grew, and it made it quite challenging to finish my degree. If we want to students to behave this way, we're going to have to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching are two different things, and what you're describing sounds more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.
• femiagbabiaka 4y ago
  It's a course worth multiple thousands of dollars that is filled with info that might or might not be of interest to the person taking it. It's necessary to pass or the investment in the degree is null and void. And you're a young person in some of the first best years of your life on a campus with more access to unsupervised socialization than you've probably ever had in your life. It seems pretty straightforward to me lmao. The real miracle is that anything else ever happens.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  if you are going to dispense with all morals and ethics, dont even bother with college or a job. Just do crypto livestreams impersonating musk and saylor. ppl making so much $ with those.
• wormer 4y ago
  I feel like people who say that "it's so much money, so try and get something out of it" are people who have never had the experience of being a "bad student" and have an immense passion for learning. I really can't say the same. I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money. I pay a fuckton of money of classes that I'm forced to take on subjects that I learned in the freshman year of my highschool that I really do not care about (and aren't related to my major) and yet I'm supposed to feel incredibly enthralled showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I'm just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don't care about the subject at all, I just care about the GPA that I get at the end of the semester. And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with? Yup...this is not the 80s or the 90s. Employers got burned enough times, and now check that shit closely..lot's of screening. I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money. Agree..ppl just want that certificate which acts as a ticket to the middle class lifestyle. they don't care about knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get a masters or doctorate.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  Maybe they aren't paying for those courses. They're almost always spending someone else's money (loans feel like free money to kids). So they do not value it. I bet if someone compared cheaters to students who were working and their wages went into tuition, there'd not be a strong correlation. Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is somewhere in the basement, I've never displayed it and nobody ever asked about it. I attended graduation only to please my parents, who came out for the occasion. I didn't want to buy the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift. I didn't care about the diploma. I only cared about the education. If I only wanted a diploma, I'd have gone to a much easier university.
• hibikir 4y ago
  I agree with you in many cases, but note that different institutions, in different countries, teach differently, and grade differently. While cheating in a core class that builds important knowledge in your major seems like a horrible idea, that's not all there is. For instance, anyone studying computer science in my state school in Spain, a few decades ago, had to take a deadly physics class in their first year. It contained, easily, the material of three physics classes in a sensible American university. There's no such thing as TAs, and time with the instructor outside of class is just not a thing. The pass rate was under 20%, and that's on purpose: failing people was part of the objective, as it served as a way to keep people enrolled, but unable to access later classes, which don't really need any advanced physics. This kind of cribbing was (and it might still be?) popular in that state university. The goal for the students is not to get the best grades: It's just to pass at all, so that they can get on to the classes that might teach something they are interested on. In an American university, I've seen people being quite motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your first midterm didn't look good... So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an option. But systems and circumstances can be different for others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to cheat are strong.
• colinmhayes 4y ago
  The students aren't paying for the courses though, they're paying for the degree. Most students are at university to get a job and expand their network, education is a sidebar, a nice to have. > if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpa Tons of employers require transcripts, especially for new grads.
• derangedHorse 4y ago
  Many don't pay money for the courses themselves, they're paying for a degree. Why do people want a degree? To pursue high paying careers because it's difficult for many (at least here in America) to find any decent paying job (that allows for the "American Dream") without one. Now it would be nice if every student was passionate about all the subjects required for their degree of choice and/or if every professor had both passion and clarity in their lecturing but that's not the world we live in. Students aren't always passionate about the required subjects for their degree , potentially because these subjects won't always have a direct correlation in meeting job requirements or improving job performance, and even the students who are passionate may never get the education they desire (picture a lousy lecturer on tenure who's forced to give lectures as part of the job). Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who comes from a long history of generational poverty who was able to scrape by enough money to save up for a degree so that they can get a 6 figure job at Morgan Stanley (or the like) as a business analyst. The job will probably only require them to put some numbers into spreadsheets and make graphs. The qualifications to do that will require them to get a degree made more expensive through gen-ed requirements and a whole lot of classes they don't need. Now in that situation would you forfeit your goal for the threat of passing a difficult, irrelevant science class requirement when a better alternative exists that will also free up time to spend more on the classes that will actually be relevant to the job? Even if you wouldn't, it shouldn't be hard to imagine why someone would.
• geoduck14 4y ago
  I feel a strong need to debunk some falsehoods here. First, to be clear. DO NOT CHEAT. Ok. Grades DO matter. When I graduated, there were several companies that wouldn't interview me because I didn't have the grades. I had a 3.2 ish. That meant I had to get a job slightly outside of my degree - which impacted my entire career (12 years amd counting). Also, you can't lie about your grades - they will ask for your transcripts. The job I got out of college asked for mine after 6 months
  • cortesoft 4y ago
    What field are you in? This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but professionally I work in software development. I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code I wrote for my side project, since I didn't have a degree in the field of any professional experience. Every job since then has been because I was recruited by previous co-workers. My college degree was never an issue, and certainly not my grades. Many of my coworkers are surprised when I tell them I have no degree, but it is always just a "huh" and then move on. I am now a director and have hired a lot of people, and unless they have zero professional experience, I pretty much never look at their degree when I am evaluating candidates. I have worked at very large companies, and have never had an issue trying to hire people without a degree. I am sure there are places where it would matter, but I just can't imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.
    • geoduck14 4y ago
      I have a BS Electrical Engineering. I wanted to design antennas and work with radio transmission SO BAD. I ended up getting a job as an analyst with a bunch of other people that "were good at math and thinking about numbers", then I moved I to data, now Cloud stuff. It took me a long time to give up on my dream of being an EE - but I like what I do now. Also, to your point, I ignore college credentials and I don't look at GPA.
      • cortesoft 4y ago
        Ah, that makes more sense. The connection between EE degrees and jobs seems tighter than in computing.
• deleted 4y ago
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• betwixthewires 4y ago
  This write up explains a lot, and is pertinent to this particular issue. http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html There's also an article around here somewhere on signaling theory that I don't have on hand.
• fancyfish 4y ago
  Employers are setting GPA cutoffs and checking transcripts for some of the competitive jobs for fresh grads and interns. Not unusual to see a hard GPA cutoff of 3.7, and the employer wants a copy of your transcript sent directly from the university. As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line. Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter. I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.
  • sarora27 4y ago
    First job out of college (July 2013) was w/ an employer (Bay Area company whose name rhymes w/ Crisco) who marketed all of these things (GPA cutoffs, checking transcripts, etc). My college transcript was....less than exemplary but I made a point not to mention my GPA anywhere and bet on the interviewers not asking about it (they didnt). Got the job by speaking w/ a recruiter at a career fair despite not having the degree they were looking for. Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email. My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  My school had an endless stream of Saudi students only there for government cash and they'd cheat nonstop.
• p1necone 4y ago
  Most people who go to University for the first time aren't doing it because they /want/ to. It's just an extension of the regular primary/middle/highschool education they were doing previously, none of which was optional. They're also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either they've taken out loans that they haven't really considered the long term impact of, or their parents are covering some/all of it.
• powersnail 4y ago
  "... so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?" I've been a TA, and I've talked to some students who cheated or considered cheating. The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind cheating. Students don't actively make a decision that "I'm just gonna apply to a university and cheat". That's not what happens in their minds. They do think they can get through uni on their own when they first started. Then, they make bad decisions, usually small ones, like skipping a class, or something, but it grows into a habit, even an addiction. Before they know it, half of the course is over, and they learned nothing. When the exam comes, it is too late. There is no time to decide to "get everything out of it anymore". So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the bad grade (which they should).
• Buttons840 4y ago
  > You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? In some cases you're paying for second rate material, so this holds little sway. Why worry about squandering the learning opportunity when the best learning resource is free on the internet. I'll try to save time in the class and reapply that time to better learning resources (my morals won't let me do this by cheating, but I understand why some do). My current classes are light on technical merit and heavy on APA style citation requirements. This during a time where many very powerful people can't reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2 sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions aren't providing real learning opportunity. I will get my piece of paper though.
• bluishgreen 4y ago
  Offering a different view from another vantage point. My GPA was tied to my scholarship which was tied to my visa. Slipping below 3.75/4 can get me deported. Looks pretty incentivized to me.
• beambot 4y ago
  The college system serves three purposes: (1) Education, (2) Credentialing, (3) Networking. The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.
  • radford-neal 4y ago
    Actually, it's main purpose is to provide a socially-acceptable way for young people to not devote their time to productive work. Some of these people use the time this makes available to them to learn wonderful things.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Brybry 4y ago
  Not everyone is paying a lot for courses. My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program. Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA. (For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)
• ww520 4y ago
  The cynic would say the money they paid for school are just easy student loans that will be forgiven. What's their skin in the game?
• nostromo 4y ago
  People go to university for the credential, not to learn. Surprisingly little learning happens at university. The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is. Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…
• jseliger 4y ago
  I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… Bryan Caplan's book concerns precisely this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education-bryan-caplan/ https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
• furyofantares 4y ago
  Grades are meaningful during school for all sorts of reason, of course not failing is the most meaningful, but so is not losing financial aid/scholarships, or your parents are paying for it and care, or you want to get into certain programs. If they aren't meaningful after school then they are revealed as a farce. So why not cheat. And they're made even more farcical if other students are cheating. And then, culturally, we don't tell you that you need actual skills to get an actual job out of school. We do tell you that you need a degree. And even if you believe a degree is necessary but not sufficient, it may not be at all clear to you that the skills you need are the same as what you're learning in school. I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You're paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what you're paying for.
• Salgat 4y ago
  Grades get you internships and internships look extremely good on a resume. It's that simple.
• bitwize 4y ago
  And let me tell you, the difference between Cs and As as an undergrad is the difference between getting a job in the industry and getting a job making $200k or more at FAANG straight out of college, that will put you in touch with the smart and/or moneyed people who are going to make you a multimillionaire. And you want to be a multimillionaire because this is the USA and that is the only path to being able to afford the medical care you may very well need especially in later life. Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).
• tomrod 4y ago
  One theory of education is that you are there to learn and learn how to learn. The other theory is that school is an arbitrary experience designed to separate out high skilled from low skilled workers into a separating equilibrium (or, replace skilled with wealthy and you're probably closer to the truth).
• nikitaga 4y ago
  In addition to what everyone else said – consider that cheating does not stop being a viable short term[1] solution after you graduate. You can cheat your way through work just like you can cheat your way through school. Not always and not everywhere, but certainly a doable lifestyle for many people. Unfortunately. [1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short term?
  • afarrell 4y ago
    Sounds like a path to escalating amounts of social anxiety and loneliness. If you cheat your way through life, what do you do when you’re 40 and no longer cute & full of potential? You don’t trust anybody and nobody trusts you.
    • confidantlake 4y ago
      I highly doubt there is a strong positive correlation between social anxiety and cheating. If anything people with social anxiety are less likely to cheat simply because they don't have any social connections to cheat off of.
• mightybyte 4y ago
  I completely agree with this view. However, I think it's worth trying hard to give the students the benefit of the doubt and ask how cheating might be rational. In other words, flip the assumptions and ask why we would require them to study something that they are just going to cheat at. Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them? The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?
• kamaal 4y ago
  >>I honestly don’t get widespread cheating like this… Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people are all about this. Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to send out a message to their friends and family they are rich. People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be something they'd rather pretend to be. Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a while, it will come to you naturally. >>You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place? Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go post selfies, or buying books and not reading them. >>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses. Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth, who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other person at all. In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself. Make genuine progress. Do not get high on the very dope you are selling.
• dehrmann 4y ago
  How old are you? I doubt the average 19-year-old is thinking about it in terms of getting everything they can for their money. In 10 years, they'll probably be horrified of how little they got for the $2000 the class cost.