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This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade

• deleted 4y ago
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• MattGaiser 4y ago
  Cheaters by definition are not interested in fair, so this argument will not convince any of them.
• Cd00d 4y ago
  > If people cheat, it screws up the fairness I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.
  • derevaunseraun 4y ago
    I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic. This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention
    • fsckboy 4y ago
      what's the ethical dilemma of a grade curve? your grade reflects how well you learned.
      • ginnungagap 4y ago
        Your grade reflects how well you learned with respect to your peers. Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A the year earlier just because they happened to enroll with different peers? Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?
        • fsckboy 4y ago
          > why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand? because we know beforehand that population density over repeated trials of some measure will fall in a normal distribution, especially when constructing such a test is more straightforward than 90% gets A, 80% gets B, etc
          • FabHK 4y ago
            So, you are suggesting that if we have a class of 100 people, and we want to measure their height, we should just order them by length, and then the tallest one we call 2.1 meters, the one in the middle 1.8, and the smallest one 1.5, no matter how tall they actually are? Wouldn't it be better if we measure their actual size?
• hackernewds 4y ago
  Students will cheat. the solve is to get rid of curving classes in this manner
  • burntoutfire 4y ago
    The Polish university I went to never even heard of grading on a curve, and yet cheating was rampant. I think it's just human nature - as long as cheating is not heavily penalised, many people will choose to do it. During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you another attempt at later time. Also, during the written exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at all - it just didn't pay off. Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.
    • L3viathan 4y ago
      I don't think the comment you replied to meant to say that getting rid of grading on a curve would stop cheaters, merely that it would stop some of the bad effects cheating can have on those not cheating.
• grp000 4y ago
  This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make the best effort to understand the material as opposed to leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade. On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications. Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
  • derac 4y ago
    option B, report the cheating
    • chii 4y ago
      I think this is the right move, but only if you can do it without being known (at least, by the group).
    • eastbound 4y ago
      In the best case, you get nothing. Most probably half of the students turn against you. And possibly the teacher himself takes revenge on you for snitching. Some teachers are of the opinion that “snitches get stitches”, often as a way to cope with their own lack of teaching, and sometimes they see it as a good life lesson for the student.
      • AareyBaba 4y ago
        As Electrical engineering TAs in the late 80's, we knew who was copying class homework assignments from their classmates based on transcription errors in the handwritten work that was turned in. Since the class professor couldn't care less about the cheating, we would consistently score the source assignments a few points less than the ones that had copied the assignment. We kept this up for the entire semester.
• kqr 4y ago
  > it screws up the class curve This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.
  • rtpg 4y ago
    Curve grading is such a messed up thing. It leads to professors assuming you should get all A's in all of your classes basically, cuz of this nonsense from US unis. I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up). Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.
    • strombofulous 4y ago
      I don't get it, don't curves limit the number of people who get an A each semester? But potentially everyone in a class that isn't curved could get an A (or F)
      • derevaunseraun 4y ago
        it depends on the curve. "curve" is kind of vague here, sometimes a prof will curve by adding so many percent to everyone's grade to get enough people over a certain threshold but also the prof will know if the class is full of overachievers and curve in a way commensurate to the class
      • rtpg 4y ago
        Well for example, in my school, basically nobody would get 90% on an exam. Very good people would get 80% but the average is more around 60%. So you stuff that into the grade conversion for foreign universities and ... well lots of people get C!
  • 4y ago
• lock-the-spock 4y ago
  You somewhat seem to miss the wood for all the trees. The problem is the curve - grading on a curve is inherently unfair and irrelevant. Why should it affect your grade if others in the class cheat/struggle/..? Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.
  • seoaeu 4y ago
    Maybe not a literal curve, but tons of instructors will compensate if an exam ends up being too hard (or too easy). Except the main way they tell whether the test difficulty was off is by looking at the grade distribution which obviously ends up skewed if some people cheat
• failTide 4y ago
  I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.
  • silversmith 4y ago
    It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
    • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
      In theory the purpose of the university is to help you develop skills independently, so that you can bring something to the table when you do consult with colleagues in the workplace.
      • chii 4y ago
        > develop skills independently ... bring something to the table this assumes that those skills are somehow unique and others cannot learn it.
        • didibus 4y ago
          That's basically the point of university isn't it? It assumes that not everyone can be qualified to do everything and imposes restrictions on who can be hired based on their known qualifications.
    • derac 4y ago
      Perhaps because these aren't equivalent environments. In school you are expected to learn, not copy answers...
    • bcrosby95 4y ago
      Or IP theft, depending upon the exact scenario. Off to prison you go.
• discardable_dan 4y ago
  You should read up on Nash equilibriums. In general, the equilibrium only holds with information sharing. In the real world, winning due to a lack of information sharing is called things like "good business." Academia, and cheating in general, is rotted to the core because of ranked grading and curves. They fundamentally incentivize cheating, because of the game theoretical gain therein.
• elihu 4y ago
  Another thing (that the story goes into in depth) is that cheating creates a whole lot of extra work and stress for professors who would rather just be teaching material and not exerting enormous effort into policing other people's behavior and enforcing rules. (And that's really hard to do if you're afraid of making a mistake somewhere and punishing someone too harshly, or for something they didn't do.) The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.
• deleted 4y ago
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• TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Yes - it's similar to the situation in high school where there are kids who want to learn and kids who disrupt the class because they're lazy/not motivated/have issues/want attention. Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion. But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse. Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence. It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge. Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most profs won't. The underlying issue is that there's been far too little research into the social consequences of automating all kinds of interactions. The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns were automated and enhanced. Culture as a whole has no defences against this because hardly anyone has realised that it's a problem inherent within the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and who knows why?
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
    > Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence. So they're ideally qualified for a career in politics.
    • mathattack 4y ago
      Or middle management at a large company.
  • hoosieree 4y ago
    I really appreciate this comment, especially the bit about how automation amplifies culture - that's something I've felt for a long time but you've stated it eloquently. Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues. I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.
• Gareth321 4y ago
  >imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  On the other hand you studied way harder than you normal would have, which if your goal is to learn the material, is in fact a good thing. But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to employment and life success. People cheat because they don’t want to learn but they do want a good job. I don’t know how you separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is probably to snitch.
• DantesKite 4y ago
  I never thought about it that way, but that's such a good point.
• ok123456 4y ago
  This happened to me in an ML class. Somehow people went from not knowing what eigenvalues were to solving all the problems in Bishop's book correctly and exactly the way the TA wanted them. A bunch of them would go to his office hours and have him do a problem, then they would share his answers. I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.
• Avamander 4y ago
  > This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much. Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question. It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads). I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"
  • mcv 4y ago
    Not at university, but at a company I worked for: the company had legal requirements to train its employees and contractors in various aspects of integrity. They'd made an app that gamified this, and at the end of every month, we should have out score above 70% in that app. A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.
• FabHK 4y ago
  > imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. Well, people shouldn't cheat for a whole lot of reasons. But the main take away from this is, in my opinion, that people should not be "graded on a curve".