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I taught two courses to undergrad CS students at Stanford. I think about half of students cheated on problem sets and tests. The answers were all way too unifor

• paulpauper 4y ago
  they got into Stanford, which confers above average intelligence and also bestows connections, so that probably helped. Interesting stories.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
    What do you mean by "confers above average intelligence?"
    • anonymoushn 4y ago
      They become more intelligent when they receive the admission letter.
      • imtringued 4y ago
        become recognized as more intelligent
• janow 4y ago
  Perhaps that shows that these students figured out they're not so great at computer science, but ended up knowing a lot of people who were - and how to use their skills to make a small fortune.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    those who know, code. those who don't, find someone who can
• pryce 4y ago
  From my understanding of cryptocurrency and the people in it, I don't have the premise that founding a billion dollar (or 10 billion dollar) cryptocurrency is laudable. It strikes me that your comment would read by crypto fanbase as a success story, and yet as crypto detractors like myself as even further reason to regard them as terrible... you may have just invented the "completely unintentional if-by-whiskey argument[1]" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey
  • renonce 4y ago
    If it were a 216B cryptocurrency then it would indeed be laudable. It’s Ethereum and it is innovating in every aspect.
    • tyre 4y ago
      > it is innovating in every aspect Could you expand on what you mean here? What are the aspects?
      • ikt 4y ago
        Well decentralisation is hard, it's particularly hard when it's dealing with real peoples money, it's hard to scale and hard to maintain, Ethereum is getting closer and closer day by day to moving to an alternative system called Proof of Stake, it's a different system from Proof of Work, you may be familiar with Bitcoin and its energy use. You can read more about issues on Vitaliks website for example when Musk tried to become a blockchain expert overnight he looked a bit silly: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html Vitalik is probably the only Billionaire in the world I don't hate and ethereums innovations are incredible.
        • AlexandrB 4y ago
          > Ethereum is getting closer and closer day by day to moving to an alternative system called Proof of Stake At least this is honest and doesn't provide a date given how many times the planned date has slipped.
• onetimeusename 4y ago
  You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but previously it was a grey area since it could be just a form of studying. It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of the curve but might have actually fared better under different conditions.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    this was a huge deal back in the 40s-70s. They were called 'bibles'
  • jl2718 4y ago
    Tests always get leaked somehow. The students that were hit by the curve were, like me in school, struggling honestly toward the middle. That method is probably not as good at knowledge acquisition as the various methods of cheating, but hopefully better at flexible problem solving. I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter; the curve probably did not affect them.
    • calvinmorrison 4y ago
      > Tests always get leaked somehow. This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests cannot be leaked. Problem solved. Or maybe don't do stupid tests for computer science. This is a space where whiteboarding is a good idea, in fact, interactive whiteboarding with a whole class is a great way to teach and work through problems. Any type of interactive test is hard to fake.
      • Jensson 4y ago
• medler 4y ago
  Interesting that they both founded cryptocurrencies. It’s not surprising that academic success is uncorrelated with being able to run a good Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was extremely successful in his time, but he wasn’t a prodigy either.
  • ikt 4y ago
    So by and by you're saying something like Cardano is definitely not a ponzi because it's extremely focused on doing everything academically? https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-papers https://docs.cardano.org/explore-cardano/relevant-research-p... If this is a ponzi then I have to give them credit, to be doing research at a university level in order to swipe me of a bundle of dollars is amazing. They don't have anything about making themselves richer at the expense of new users either, for some reason it's all focused on developing a great blockchain that is sustainable and is usable for dapps which ultimately provides utility for end users.
    • headsoup 4y ago
      That wouldn't be a 'billion dollar'+ cryptocurrency though would it
      • noahmasur 4y ago
        It’s a 16 billion dollar market cap currently.
        • headsoup 4y ago
          Guess we'll find out which it is in the next few months. Proof of stake is just as vulnerable to Ponzi, especially if promising any sort of outsized interest returns through middle-men services. The 'scientific, peer-reviewed philosophy' statements appear as marketing, with peer review appearing to be crypto tech conferences (not itself a poor measure), not the classical 'peer-review' format the statements would allude to.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ffhhj 4y ago
  > billion-dollar cryptocurrency > I’m not sure what the lesson is Gambling is a profitable business.
• willbudd 4y ago
  Becoming successful requires a stubborn conviction that you can make your own ideas a reality. Doing well on tests requires the ability to re-enact the ideas of others. They're both valuable skills of course, but they should be recognized as being distinct from each other; and measuring "intelligence" as some one-dimensional modality is a spectacular failure to do so, IMO. This idea is also to an extent analogous to the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning (AI).
  • jl2718 4y ago
    I’ve known a fair number of very successful people, and the strongest theme among them is ignorance of the challenges they had committed themselves to, perhaps even a stubborn disability to heed warning that there is yet another layer of the onion after years of peeling. I really don’t think it’s some kind of dreamer attitude or deceptive nature; maybe just blissful ignorance. In most cases, it starts with a simple idea that everybody had, e.g. a CS50 class project that everybody else did, but they all saw the technical and legal and market and competitive challenges, and most importantly and predictably failed to answer the biggest question, “why me?”. Somehow the person with the worst answer to that question is always the one that fails to ask it. Despite this observation, none of this has changed the way I see things in my real life. I have read that the parasympathetic nervous system causes people to pay attention to details and become overwhelmed by risks. Chronic pain or fear or lack of sleep or overtraining or infection can do that. I recently had a lidocaine injection into a painful joint deformity, and the rest of that day I experienced astonishing positivity. So something tells me that it’s not really all that complicated, but simple things like happiness and good health and relationships are far more rare than we would expect, at least among those with curiosity for difficult subjects.
• yayitswei 4y ago
  Was it Do Kwon?
  • jl2718 4y ago
    My own feelings aside, Do might be a good case study. I don’t think he’s an intentional scammer; he just had an idea that he was convinced was brilliant, without the knowledge or maybe imagination to see how spectacularly dangerous it was. I personally avoided Terra/UST from genesis because I immediately saw that is was exploitable with a big enough position on UST. But it took some searching to find the exact peg mechanism, and by the time it collapsed, it had gotten so big that I started to question my own judgement. Do might have caught whiffs of the already risky ideas surrounding algorithmic stablecoins, and pushed forward something that looked passably similar at his introductory level of knowledge. The apparent possibilities at this level are far greater than what is possible with more knowledge in the area. The investor class is also stuck at this level of knowledge, because they make their money by raising from and selling to the level down from there. I don’t see any distinction between crypto and traditional equities in this regard, except that the SEC is supposed to protect ignorant consumers, which they clearly can’t, and the government is there to backstop any disasters at the expense of everybody smart enough to avoid it in the first place, which makes them the dumb ones in the end. So yeah, it was a stupid idea, but look hard enough and you’ll find the same stupid ideas behind every investment with any hope of keeping up with the cost of feeding, housing, and educating your kids. If there is evidence that shows that Do is the one who pulled the rug, then my theory is flawed. Basically, it is that people who achieve great investment success are operating at a level of genuine enthusiastic ignorance that cannot be faked by a scammer or an expert.
• ascorbic 4y ago
  That you should leave your cheating until you've left education because there are fewer checks, people are more credulous and the rewards are greater?
• imtringued 4y ago
  It sounds like they were occupied with something that isn't college.