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It makes me sad that so many engineers seem to think cheating is a just and or good solution. Cheating is objectively bad system design (for society, we're desi

• eastbound 4y ago
  Cheating is related to human problems, and engineers aren’t psychologists. It’s human problems when there is a mismatch between teachers and students, between schools and expectations, and students are at the bottom of the ladder and aren’t in a position to discuss what is demanded.
• kushan2020 4y ago
  If you get away with cheating it’s not cheating. The real problem is whether it’s worth the risk of getting caught and/or losing an opportunity to learn something which will help you later.
  • metamet 4y ago
    > If you get away with cheating it’s not cheating. Yes it is? Cheating is cheating. You can get caught cheating, but you're still cheating if you're aren't.
    • kushan2020 4y ago
      Only to yourself, just to be clear I’m not in favour of cheating but just stating that a fact. Think of a hypothetical situation - you cheated and no one in the world knows and you also donot know, can you really prove cheating happened ? In real world you have to weigh in the risk of getting caught, but if no one can ever know (very very improbable) you didn’t cheat according to them. And make it even more absurd - after cheating you can cheat again by saying I didn’t cheat. This is applicable to a lot of things like crime, faking it, copying it, you name it.
  • duped 4y ago
    No, the real problem is dishonesty and unfairness to your classmates and teacher.
    • rocqua 4y ago
      It takes a lot of cheating to harm honest students (unless graded on a curve). The real problem with cheating is that you don't learn. Cheating is a symptom of something worse. Viewing studies as a means to get a diploma, rather than a means to get an education. This is a deep issue, that stems from things like using the threat of failing a test to get people to engage. The educational system presents itself as a bunch of hoops to jump through to get a successful life. Parents tend to see it the same way. Society often does aswell. This ruins a lot of the intrinsic value of education.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • mschuster91 4y ago
        The problem is, a lot of what you learn in university is shit you won't need for at least half a decade in your actual career and by the time you could need it you'd have forgotten it anyways. Universities used to be the place where the best brains of the country studied and advanced science itself afterwards. Nowadays, with university r&d budgets slashed and those that remain in r&d being forced to waste half their time chasing grants and another quarter in administrative bullcrap, it's a place to weed out people with adhd or otherwise disadvantaged so employers can pick up the "creme de la creme" without violating a ton of anti discrimination law or the risk of hiring a dud. It's obvious when large companies require a BSc for an accountant or other paper pushers of all things. Students know this and optimize accordingly - as usual, when something becomes a KPI it becomes useless.
        • rocqua 4y ago
          It sounds like we agree that university education has changed for the worse.
  • gmd63 4y ago
    Cheating could grade the honest student below you lower on a curve and deny them employment in a competitive job market. Then there'd be a dishonest person earning more economic influence on the world than an honest one.
    • kushan2020 4y ago
      Honesty is a very subjective experience, but for this comment I guess you are using honest as a proxy to people who didn’t cheat. Yes cheating does affect a group adversely and that is why institutions invest heavily in making risks not worth it. But my original comment stays, if you get away with cheating you did not cheat unless proven guilty.
• kqr 4y ago
  I don't think people are defending cheating. People are saying that what in the normal world goes under "desirable cooperation" is called "cheating" in school, and for as long as that is the case, students who exhibit normally desirable cooperative behaviour will be called "cheaters" and that's not a reasonable thing to do to them.
  • cowtools 4y ago
    Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school. These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.
    • kqr 4y ago
      And there are ways to engage students in learning. In fact, my experience humans basically come out of the womb with a burning desire to learn. It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is extinguished a little. Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise. Give them more interesting things to do and they will cooperate in more productive ways too! ---- I also disagree that you have to learn everything for yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to the ability to rely on others. I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning with other people before going on to spend time on things. I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second of the day. Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each other.
      • kenjackson 4y ago
        Curious would you go to a surgeon who said he has his friend do all his brain surgeries? His friend might be out of town when yours is scheduled. Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don’t take a math class to simply say “I’ll just skip the classes and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn as little as possible.” Why even take the class then?
• alexashka 4y ago
  Systems that produce so much cheating, are bad system design. You're at 'cheating = bad', which is the level of a 5 year old naive little boy. Try upgrading that system instead of pointing fingers. You only have one life to live and all that.
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay too?
    • bornfreddy 4y ago
      They have a point though. If exam is testing for things that can be looked up easily, what's the point? Test for understanding and make tests individual enough to make mass cheating not feasible. > Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay too? Students are hardly in a position where they can express their views freely. Do you consider laying out rules and punishing anyone who voices objections okay too? Things are never just black and white.
    • alexashka 4y ago
      Yes. Read any introduction to moral philosophy for an explanation of why that is.
  • rocqua 4y ago
    The problem with cheating is not just "it's not fair". In fact, it takes a whole lot of cheating before that becomes a problem (through diploma inflation). The problem with cheating is that students aren't learning. This sets them up for failure on further classes that build on the current one.
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  I'm very jaded. I see students who are experts in cramming a set of material, vomiting out the answers, and doing this repeatedly for every exam. I see other students who are experts in cheating without getting caught. It's hard for me to see a distinction between these two groups in practice since they're both committed to passing the exam rather than learning anything, but one is apparently imbued with honour since they're gamifying the exam within the written rules instead of breaking the rules. It's not that I like or respect cheaters, it's that I'm just entirely unbothered by them. They're just students taking a high risk strategy and they'll sink or swim and I'm not angry about them or shedding any tears for them. Students who actually focus on trying to learn instead of trying to pass tests are screwed even if there wasn't a single cheater in the classroom. They won't go to the best schools or get the best jobs because they aren't cramming flash cards of likely test answers.
  • bruce511 4y ago
    There are two ways to look at this. One is that those that cram for tests are doing "what the employer requires" and do will make good employees, so the system is working. Those that go this approach probably learn stuff along the way as well. The group that focuses on pure learning, and engaging with the material, may not end up with the best marks, but they have a deep understanding, and delight in the subject that will serve them very well over their working career. Equally though, not all courses are equally useful (to one person). I enjoyed oceanography, I went to class, did the work (mostly) and learned something. But I don't like boats (get seasick) so I've never "used" any of that knowledge. Ditto astronomy. Comp Sci on the other hand consumed all my spare time. We gave ourselves extra tasks, read far beyond the textbook, and pushed the envelope. This would be our career and we were all in. Sometimes test scores suffered (I didn't actually study for tests) but I got a job (one I still have and love) and 30 years later I'm still applying those fundamentals I learned. Maybe I don't have the highest paying job, but I'm where I was made to fit, and money can't tempt me away. Those that cheat, well, you can fool some people some of the time, but it's a lot of work. And a career spans a long time.
  • int0x2e 4y ago
    I think we need to stop looking at the students and start looking at the system. The students are responding to incentives set out by their faculty. If you really want change, you must evaluate alternative incentives. Personally, I was an honors student until college, and I was often the one in my group of friends to figure out how to solve an exercise, yet I would often get average (or lower) results compared to some of my friends, because some of them were just great at drilling themselves until they could repeat every single style of solution quickly. I admit - that made me a little frustrated at the time, but 10 years later some of those folks that did really well in the exams are not doing as well in their careers because real life requires innovation and deep understanding, not just rapid application of past solutions.
• nivertech 4y ago
  Agile is cheating Scrum is a gc (group chat)
  • Skunkleton 4y ago
    Professionally we collaborate with our peers to achieve some goal. In school, the goal is individual achievement. If you "collaborate" in this way in school, you absolutely aren't achieving the purpose you are spending so much time and money working towards.
• eimrine 4y ago
  Sometimes cheating is a smart way to save some time. Scammers are just the other world, it is like when somebody with too much of spare time goes for hunting. All scammers do cheating but only a minority of cheaters go into scam.
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  I think that cheating is wrong, but I also think that building school systems that incentivize students to cheat is even more wrong, because it is a systemic bad decision. During my schooling years, I observed that people most driven to cheating were the ones who could not absorb enormous amounts of material needed to pass an exam. I never had problems with that, so I wasn't tempted to cheat, but I also noticed that a year later, I barely remembered anything from what I have learnt so painfully to pass. This isn't a good preparation for a job in modern world, where if you do something, you always have Google (or StackOverflow etc.) at your hand. And people who have a good ability to put 2 and 2 together tend to be more successful at such jobs.
• Siira 4y ago
  If this kind of thinking was prevalent, it might work. It is currently not, and I doubt posting about it will help much. Besides, there are lots of incompetent people who prefer the current dishonesty, so breaking this Nash equilibrium is hard.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  By cheating, you're voting for a society of scammers, and you think you deserve more than the honest student because you're willing to eat honor instead of preserving it and growing it for future generations. Scammer implies there is a victim. Who is the mark here? The college that charges huge tuition despite having a huge endowment? The professor who is being paid a salary to tech courses ppl are uninterested in? The employer for requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them? If cheating became so widespread that degrees stopped mattering, employers would have to find other ways.
  • bumby 4y ago
    The victim is the person who did the actual work and has the same credential as the person who did not, as well as the group who is using that credential as a decision filter. By cheating, you distort the information that credential is meant to convey.
    • paulpauper 4y ago
      if you take pride in doing the work, who cares then if other cheat.
      • bumby 4y ago
        Do you care if someone you enter a transaction with cheats, even if you take pride in your side of the bargain? Humans (and other primates) have an innate desire for fairness. Ethics helps guide human interactions. If you don’t think interpersonal ethics are important, it’s hard to have a functioning society.
• anonymoushn 4y ago
  Students cannot do much on their own about the system of incentives that rewards cheating. You may as well post "By tax-optimizing, you're voting for a society of rent collectors who do no useful work and just understand the tax system better than other people" If someone realizes that they have become an agent of a much larger system tasked with the grunt work of a harmful and illegitimate process like college education as a career credential, and if that person wants to avoid being evil, they need not lift a finger. It is easier not to do the paperwork than to do it!