3 ms·

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,

by 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?
    - rini17 4y ago
      This thread is about engineers not surgeons. And it happens all the time when an engineer does not feel competent for certain problem, they ask friends for help. Would you ban such practice or what?
      - kortilla 4y ago
        I sure as fuck wouldn’t want an engineer responsible for anything important if they cheated. The problem with engineering is that if you cheated through the fundamentals, you won’t even recognize when to ask for help. You’ll just build build something shitty or (depending on the field) sign off on something that puts people’s lives at risk because you missed fundamental flaws.
    - kqr 4y ago
      I'd much, much rather have the surgeon who asks a colleague for a second opinion when they are unsure, rather than just going ahead on the wrong assumption because "otherwise I would be cheating". In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
      - renlo 4y ago
        In this case, the surgeon isn’t conferring with a colleague; the surgeon is wholly unable to perform the operation. Collaboration is not cheating. A WhatsApp group used to collaborate on simple assignments or complicated projects is one thing, wholesale copying multiple choice answers or plagiarizing whole essays or projects is something completely different.
- bawolff 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. Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true. The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
  - bruce511 4y ago
    I'm not saying you can be a moron, or have no understanding at all, but Google and stack overflow are tools that more people (engineers) should learn how to use. I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan. Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  "you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others" This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them. My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit." At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >You can't just coast forever on the people around you. // I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt). Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
- paulpauper 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. Companies would fail if everyone worked in isolation.
lodovic 4y ago
Some say it's only cheating if you get caught.
cycomanic 4y ago
I disagree, much of the cheating is not "desirable cooperation", but blatant copy pasting. I guess it's no wonder that there are so many bits of open source code or stack overflow answers copied into proprietary (and sometimes open source) codebases. A significant fraction of engineers seems to think that ethical standards don't apply to them and in my experience the percentage is higher than in other technical areas (lawyers are much worse still in my experience, but that's a different story).
- Heyso 4y ago
  In chinese, copying and learning are the same word. Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves. I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society): 1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory) 2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me). The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding. To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane. Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation. "I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed. When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading. The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that. Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable). What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to". In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student. In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts). Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning. When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity. Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful. If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves ! (I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).

by kqr 4y ago

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?
  - rini17 4y ago
    This thread is about engineers not surgeons. And it happens all the time when an engineer does not feel competent for certain problem, they ask friends for help. Would you ban such practice or what?
    - kortilla 4y ago
      I sure as fuck wouldn’t want an engineer responsible for anything important if they cheated. The problem with engineering is that if you cheated through the fundamentals, you won’t even recognize when to ask for help. You’ll just build build something shitty or (depending on the field) sign off on something that puts people’s lives at risk because you missed fundamental flaws.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I'd much, much rather have the surgeon who asks a colleague for a second opinion when they are unsure, rather than just going ahead on the wrong assumption because "otherwise I would be cheating". In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
    - renlo 4y ago
      In this case, the surgeon isn’t conferring with a colleague; the surgeon is wholly unable to perform the operation. Collaboration is not cheating. A WhatsApp group used to collaborate on simple assignments or complicated projects is one thing, wholesale copying multiple choice answers or plagiarizing whole essays or projects is something completely different.
bawolff 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. Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true. The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
- bruce511 4y ago
  I'm not saying you can be a moron, or have no understanding at all, but Google and stack overflow are tools that more people (engineers) should learn how to use. I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan. Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
inglor_cz 4y ago
"you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others" This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them. My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit." At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>You can't just coast forever on the people around you. // I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt). Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
paulpauper 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. Companies would fail if everyone worked in isolation.

lodovic 4y ago

Some say it's only cheating if you get caught.

cycomanic 4y ago

I disagree, much of the cheating is not "desirable cooperation", but blatant copy pasting. I guess it's no wonder that there are so many bits of open source code or stack overflow answers copied into proprietary (and sometimes open source) codebases. A significant fraction of engineers seems to think that ethical standards don't apply to them and in my experience the percentage is higher than in other technical areas (lawyers are much worse still in my experience, but that's a different story).

Heyso 4y ago
In chinese, copying and learning are the same word. Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves. I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society): 1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory) 2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me). The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding. To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane. Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation. "I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed. When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading. The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that. Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable). What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to". In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student. In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts). Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning. When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity. Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful. If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves ! (I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).