17 ms·

How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical exam?

200 points by scns 3y ago

idontwantthis 3y ago
The went to university for a music degree and they can’t already play scales?
- yellowapple 3y ago
  I'm just as confused by that. Most people I know who had some goal to earn a degree in music were already able to play any scale on a substantial number of instruments by the time they graduated from high school. Hell, I was in that camp and I didn't even plan on going to college. Granted, not everyone goes into a music program knowing every instrument, but scales and arpeggios ain't terribly hard to practice, be it on a keyboard or a woodwind or a brass or whatever.
  - idontwantthis 3y ago
    Seems like you always encounter students willing to work harder to cheat than to learn. My freshman year some students got expelled for keylogging TA passwords and using them to mark assignments passed. The assignments weren’t that hard…
    - robga 3y ago
      A lot of cheating is about time not difficulty. Rather than spend several evenings practising they partied instead, perhaps justifying cheating by deeming the exam topic an irrelevance. One of the takeaways here should be for the exam setters. If cheating was widespread (it sounds like a one off here) then they should consider whether the exam itself was an appropriate task, or whether there was an alternative task that may have been more engaging and ultimately a better test for all.
    - aksss 3y ago
      > weren’t that hard Maybe that’s part of the problem. One of those things is way more intriguing than the other, speaking as someone who wrote fake login screens for my high school’s PS/2 lab. Had like thirty passwords in a couple hours, including one teacher, by running it on the workstation closest to the door.
- robga 3y ago
  The degree they were studying for led to a job where for many of them the ability to play arpeggios in 24 keys may have been irrelevant. For example, teaching the history of music, or perhaps musical therapy. When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing exam. I couldn’t sing, didn’t want to sing, would never need to professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I couldn’t avoid it being part of the exam system. Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there is a better example but you get the drift.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    This seems more along the lines of studying only one basis in which to implement fizzbuzz. You're not really supposed to need to prepare your scales and arpeggios.
  - amelius 3y ago
    So we would get chips that perform well on just that one sorting algorithm?
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    I get that people don't want to waste time, but you lose a lot from taking this attitude. When I went to school we had a lot of kids who were only temporarily in the country. Their parents were diplomats or corporate expats. The government still made the kids learn the local language, with the predictable outcome that these kids had no motivation whatsoever to learn the language. Now with the debate in America being the way it is, a lot of these kids would actually have had a place to go back to, if they only spoke the language. Similarly with a lot of things you learn in education, most of them seem to be of no use, but it's only because you don't learn them properly they are of no use.
  - data_maan 3y ago
    I get this drift! And I think a bit of cheating is healthy. The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1] Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential. For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself! [1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html
- jimmytidey 3y ago
  I don't know, but I'm guessing there's a big difference between knowing how to play your scales and playing perfectly evenly and fluidly.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Correct. The conservatory music exams require scales to be played from first level to last level. However each level demands faster tempo, evenness in volume, and a smooth “pulse” (like BB gun pellets hitting a wall)
- nlnn 3y ago
  I don't know about these exact exams, but often there are a lot of variations to play. E.g. multiple octaves, arpeggio inversions, scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc. Plus there's often a requirement to play at a certain tempo, legato/staccato, with correct intonation (for certain instruments), and also to use the correct fingerings as taught in other cases. So can be a lot more involved than playing a simple scale.
  - djtango 3y ago
    I'll admit that I kind of enjoyed scales on the piano because I could mindlessly practise them when I was forced to practise, but I feel like there's a point where if you don't know them, you're limiting yourself in all kinds of ways. Improv and harmonisation benefit from you knowing all the keys on the keyboard inside out. Likewise, if you start going for volume of music you can play, at some point not having those foundations start to limit you. Anyone can memorise 3 pieces perfectly and over-practice them then ace a test. But what if the spirit of a grade and level represented more than that? My final teacher (who I met long after finishing exams) was very traditional and had a policy that was vaguely "you shouldn't take more than 3-6 months" to prepare for your grade exam. If you can't reach distinction level within that time, you're not ready so you should work more on your actual playing ability and musicianship. If you're learning like that, scales will be the least of your worries as we worked on so much repertoire that the need for it was self-evident (and well baked into a good routine). I guess it's a bit like driving - if you memorize a few routes you can probably perform like a real driver, but that's not really the same as being a real driver.
    - nlnn 3y ago
      Same for me, I really enjoy playing scales and the like as studying jazz has made the application and benefit of practice a lot more clear. I did some classical study and grades years ago and remember there being a big disconnect - my teacher just gave me scales and pieces as totally separate entities, and just taught them as things necessary to pass the exam, with no real application or purpose explained to me.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
- seanhunter 3y ago
  You’d be amazed. I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical. A frikkin’ guitarist. For those of you who don’t know, playing a scale in a different key on a guitar literally involves moving your first finger to a different fret and starting from there. There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger. But it’s not hard. I told him he should be ashamed of himself and to stop whining. Playing in all keys on a sax or trumpet or whatever is a totally different kettle of fish. Still necessary to learn. Still ridiculous to be doing a music degree and not be able to just do but definitely much harder.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    You can study computer science without writing a single line of code. It's no different for music. Learning all the keys by heart is like learning your text editor keybindings, useful, but ultimately has little relevance to actual music theory and composition.
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      You’ll definitely be hampered in composition if you don’t have decent keyboard fluency and I would say this is table stakes for that. But yes this is more directly relevant to performance. The guitarist in the anecdote above wanted a soloist career so was definitely squarely in the group for which playing scales is a minimum requirement.
      - watwut 3y ago
        I doubt he plays scales on concerts. It is actually requirement that is not directly related to ability to play music.
        bonzini 3y ago
        https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o are you sure?
- homami 3y ago
  We had a CS undergrad intern that didn’t know what i++; means in JavaScript for loops.
  - etothepii 3y ago
    They didn't know what it means or what it does or that it's important. I'm not sure it matters for most practical uses what i++ means so long as you know it is required. Much as with {} being used for scoping. Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know about how anything works.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      Except it's not required :-P
    - maccard 3y ago
      > Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know about how anything works. I've worked with GenX'ers and Millenials (I'm a millenial), and this isn't unique to GenZ at all. A large number of people don't understand, and are just getting by. Anecdotally, I've seen people at very senior engineering positions who just don't understand the basics of what they're doing. Does that mean that it's jarring how many GenX'ers don't understand?
      - wholinator2 3y ago
        Yeah, we see this a lot with younger people because they are just starting in the world. Also, they're the predominate generation right now that's video taping and posting every even possibly interesting moment of their lives, irrespective of whether some 30 year old thinks it's embarrassing. If 60 year olds were posting every strange thought or funny moment we'd have some opinions about them too (Facebook, anyone?) They're just thinking about and misunderstanding a different set of things. But i think the kids are somewhat closer to a humility that might be hard to find elsewhere.
        3y ago
- _ngbr 3y ago
  Scales can get very very tricky. There are multiple modes of minor, for example, that have different notes ascending and descending. When you combine that with some requirements, like playing the scales the full length of the keyboard up and down at a consistent quick tempo, perhaps in triplets, missing just one note is extremely easy to do. Depending on the requirements of the exam, missing just one note may be enough to hurt your score.
  - tgv 3y ago
    Come on. Scales are not very, very tricky. And you can't really play scales in quavers or triplets: there's no time signature. And there were only two modes (if the story can be trusted to get all details right).
    - _ngbr 3y ago
      Strange that you would feel a need to debate this. Triplets have nothing to do with time signature. Just that point reveals lack of experience in this area. Triplets exist in any time signature or lack of one. They are about beat subdivision. I could explain each of these points in greater detail but I am not compelled to take the time. Playing scales to meter is a common technique. And if I asked even a professional to sit down right now and whip out, say a melodic minor in five flats, four octaves at a quick consistent pace, many would indeed need a quick try first. They do get tricky indeed.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Professional musician here. That would be trivial to do, even on my weaker instruments, and even with triplets. Though just give me the tonic name, no need to call it five flats. Edit to add: To be fair I'm about a decade further in my career than someone going to study music for the first time.
        _ngbr 3y ago
        That’s great to hear, but allow me to offer a common example. Ask a pianist to quickly play four octaves of melodic minor in thirds, and especially as one hand is ascending and the other is descending at the turning point, and there are two different modes being played simultaneously, many will indeed miss a note. Now make it a less common key, and you can see why it can be tricky for some. Certainly not everyone, for students yes and even some experience pianists may need to practice a bit first. This kind of request is very common at many music schools for these kinds of exams.
- vjk800 3y ago
  I took piano classes for several years as a child and they made me learn all the scales somewhere around the age of 12 or something. It was standard practice and I can't imagine anyone who took classes in the same music education system as I did and couldn't play all the scales.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I played classical piano too, but never learned scales. It seemed completely useless to me and I was still was able to pass. It still seems completely useless to me, to be honest. The # I am supposed to play are right there in the music sheet notation.
    - oriolid 3y ago
      I did the same, and found out that it's a great way to paint yourself in a corner. In this corner you can learn very complex pieces by practicing learning them from the sheet music, but on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch, and it won't help at all with playing by ear, improvising or even much for playing from lead sheets. Yes, I was able to pass the exams by just knowing how scales work and coming up with fingerings on the fly, but in hindsight it wasn't the best idea.
      - watwut 3y ago
        If we did some improvising, it might be useful. We did no improvising at all, therefore it was just completely useless theory that had literally nothing to do with anything. I think that if they taught us some little improvising, we might see value in scales and maybe I would even ended up liking the piano more. > on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch Not really. You still have memory of previous ones and you do hear how it sounds. The intuition builds up, so to say. You do learn to hear and distinguish what sounds good or bad. I kind of do not see how theoretical knowledge of the scales would help here. But also I dropped out the first moment I could, so there is that too. But remembering the pieces was not issue at all. Issue was that I did not even liked music I had to play all that much and playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- schwartzworld 3y ago
  Sure. I went to music school for trumpet where I learned: - new scales I didn't know about - new ways to play scales I did know - new instruments which required relearning scales. If you're learning to be a music teacher this is often a big part of it
- zsaffir 3y ago
  While students getting a music education degree have to learn all the instruments, they typically have a primary instrument that may or not be piano. If piano isn't their primary instrument there's no reason they would know how to play all the scales before starting the degree.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    That's still concerning. If your mental model of a scale is via the notes, the piano has helpful colour coding. Not being able to use that implies that the scales have instead been memorised by how they're played - frets, valves, etc. - that will stop working when a more in-depth application of keys is needed.
    - markatto 3y ago
      The piano is not the canonical model of a scale - it’s just a bit more visual than some other instruments. I went to music school and primarily play guitar and violin but can sort of play some keys. I could definitely figure out pretty much any scale on a piano but couldn’t just sit down and immediately play most of them.
- picardythird 3y ago
  Typically at this level the scales will be performed in more difficult variations, e.g. the right hand plays starting on the third or 6th note of the scale. There are also cases of concert pianists who notoriously refused to practice scales for these kinds of exams.
- slaymaker1907 3y ago
  Everyone who majors in music has to learn piano (at least for most majors) even if you aren’t a pianist.
- ashtonbaker 3y ago
  I got into Berklee for piano performance, couldn’t do more than a few scales fluently despite lessons my whole life.
- rvba 3y ago
  To be honest, the world is quite strange. You are supposed to know how to play the piano - and well, before you go to music university. Somehow people who study medicine are not expected to have medical knowledge. Precursors sure. Of course I understand that it is a question of supply and demand, for some reason tons of people compete to finish the relatively scarce music university, so the university can demand them to know stuff.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Just like in a Chinese musical school, something like 98% are supposed to have perfect pitch. Because they have enough applicants to fill the school even with that bar.
jzellis 3y ago
I'm imagining this story as an Everything Is Terrible educational video from the 90s about the evils of cheating and it's much better frankly
tester756 3y ago
To be fair I expected some crazy Windows related way to cheat on musical exam :P
- bombcar 3y ago
  I'll try to make one for you! Not being musically inclined, beyond liking a bit of the Beatles now and then, I did not expect to get anything out of the music class my wife wanted us to take. Though it had no particular recognized value, the class did award a certificate of completion after finishing the course, which was about a semester-hour spread over most of a year. The music history we talked about was interesting, especially as I enjoy trivia such as the differences between various apparently similar instruments - did you know the viola is the only instrument to use the alto clef for notation? The "final exam" had us play a relatively simple (or so they said) piece by Beethoven - Pathétique II. Adagio - and it was making me feel pretty pathetic. My wife had some previous piano history, and was doing quite well; but for me, the notes seemed to always end up in alphabetical order, or arrive long after they should have already left to go home. I began to slightly despair; I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't at least get a (barely) passing grade. The evening came for the exam, and my wife reported that she'd done quite well. I stepped into the room with apprehension, knowing that the instructor's usual smile would soon turn to disappointment - but wait! The instructor wasn't there?! He'd been called away to fill in for the Seattle Symphony, and had left instructions on how to take the test - a simple MIDI keyboard connected to an older PC. A slight ray of hope beamed through the window along with the setting sun - could it be? Would the PC be old enough? Sure enough, it was running Windows 98 (not Second Edition, that would have been disastrous)! I could do this! The Windows 98 MIDI handler had a buffer overflow! All I would have to do is start the exam, hold down the right keys on the keyboard to trigger it, and the program would crash. Since the way it "scored" your playing was to start by writing your name and 100 points to the database, it would record that I had begun, and then there would be no recording of me making any mistakes. I now have my certificate, and a photo of me with a slightly sheepish grin, as I was the only student to get a perfect score. I think my wife might suspect something, as she was perhaps near enough to hear that what I played sounded more like the Cascades trying to clear the track than anything Beethoven would have written, but I just told her that he was mostly deaf and probably played loud.
graemebenzie 3y ago
Puts a dig in at teaching near the end.
- damagednoob 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean? I think that was still aimed at the students who, presumably if they were to become teachers one day, would expect their own students not to cheat.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  He does no such thing. He points out that these cheaters were studying to be teachers, the very role that they were trying to cheat in the test.
riwsky 3y ago
Please play a C major scale, but for every third note instead sing “Fizz”, every fifth note sing “Buzz”, and every 15th note instead sing “FizzBuzz”
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  This should actually be easy for anyone who practices scales in thirds.
  - tremon 3y ago
    But "thirds" occur every other note in the scale, since intervals are 1-based rather than 0-based. "Every third note" would more closely match the progression of a circle of fourths than a regular triad.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Even easier then!
- brudgers 3y ago
  Major or minor third?
  - gnulinux 3y ago
    If it's a major scale, you're not supposed to play minor third. Besides "every third note" will eventually be every note because there are 7 notes in a major scale. So, by the second octave major second will be one of the "fizz" notes (similar to ninth chord, stacked 4 thirds, having a major second). This can be a legit exam BTW, some contemporary Western classical styles use these kind of patterns to make music.
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      E->G is a minor third.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sriram_malhar 3y ago
I often tell this Latin phrase to my students that I came across in the TV show West Wing: "corruptio optimi passima" : The corruption of the best, is the worst.
- tremon 3y ago
  *pessima
tgv 3y ago
> to look pretty The author might have missed on some of life, because I don't think "effort to look pretty" necessarily has to do with the looks you were born with, but rather with styling: hair, make-up, clothes.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
That is so sad.
divan 3y ago
Exams and sports competitions are a particularly nasty example of Campbell's Law (or Goodheart's Law) – collapsing the correlation between metric and the true goal. Exams, for example, are supposed to measure how much students progressed. "True goal" - learn some knowledge or master some skill. "Metric" is the quiz/tests/exam result. If you try to design an exam for any new skill or knowledge, you'll come up with a pretty good metric. But soon, people will start ignoring the true goal and focus on the metric. Instead of "measuring" how well they learned the skill, your metric measures "how well they overfitted for the exam". In a way, the mere fact that people need to "prepare for exams" is a testament to how failed the system is. Sport is similar. The initial idea of the judging system and competitions is to "measure" the performance of the athlete. Rewards and rules are introduced to make this metric clear and unambiguous. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and athletes and coaches don't care about overall performance – they care about winning the medal, so they focus only on the subset of a skill that gives points. This problem is especially horrifying in the sports like figure skating after introducing the IJS system in 2006. Correlation between "true goal" (skating skills) and "metrics" (points given for specific elements) is collapsed – people chase points, not the skill. It's not a simple problem. There are few neat papers on how to approach solving Goodheart's problems ([1] [2]). But on a practical level, the number one tool seems to be to decrease the importance of the metric. Some sports, for example, have "one major competition" once in 4 years (Olympic Games). The price of winning it is insane. Who cares about the true goal if it's almost life-and-death importance? You chase the points. But other sports have a more healthy approach – tennis, for example, doesn't care much about the Olympics. They have Slams and different surfaces competitions throughout the year. You lost a game - not the end of the world. There will be many more. The higher prize is to win all four Slams in your career, so the price of the metric at a single competition is not that huge. And this collapsing metric is a reason why people cheat. You can't cheat on a true goal, only on a proxy metric. [1] Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 [2] Building Less Flawed Metrics: Dodging Goodhart and Campbell's Laws - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_Less_Flawed_Metrics_Dodging_Goodhart_and_Campbell%27s_Laws https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_...
- devnullbrain 3y ago
mdek 3y ago
A music theory instructor from my past told us a story about his equivalent practical exam. He had to demonstrate proficiency with multiple string instruments. Instead of learning fingering for each instrument, he claimed he tuned them so they could all be played the same way. I don’t have any training in string instruments, so I’m not sure how feasible this actually is...
- ludston 3y ago
  It's bizarre. It's certainly possible to do this but there isn't much point given the different instruments need different fingering tequniques to reach notes anyway, and getting a feel for these fingerings ought to be harder than the transposition.
- analog31 3y ago
  It is and it isn't. All of the violin family instruments are tuned in fifths, but the strings have limited tuning range and would either break or produce no sound if you tried to force-fit a single tuning onto all of them, e.g., tuning a violin like a viola or vice versa. The double bass is its own beast, usually tuned in fourths, but in fifths is virtually unplayable without injury by mere mortals. And fifths require careful choice of strings. You still have to read the clefs. A remote possibility is that the person was a guitarist or bassist, and tuned the instruments in fourths. I have a friend who studied classical guitar as an undergrad, and music theory in grad school, while earning a living as an electric bassist in R&B bands, then became a theory professor, now retired. Disclosure: Double bassist.
FrankyZunim 3y ago
Are we supposed to believe this actually happened? If it did, the author has done a great job of making it sound fake.
- analog31 3y ago
  The story sounded apocryphal to me too, or maybe it evolved through re-telling and re-remembering. Most people are in the dark about what college level music education consists of. If piano was being taught in a classroom, then it wasn't a music performance major program. Also, there are tiers of colleges, and a school with an easy music program for rich kids is not unthinkable. I have two kids who are both music performance majors in college (yes, we had the conversation about jobs), and I'm a musician myself. I learned the scales in middle school. A remote possibility is that this is a freak occurrence. I think you can't design a training program that absolutely bars creative cheating, without also degrading the program for the majority of students who don't cheat.
  - jcpst 3y ago
    I could just be confused, but I thought I remembered the folks doing performance majors alongside us in Keyboard class to get prepare for the piano proficiency exam. Obviously not the Pianists- but I thought every music major had to pass keyboard proficiency.
    - hecanjog 3y ago
      Yes, that was my experience too. Everyone needed to pass a basic keyboard skills class the first year (or test out of it) regardless of their focus in performance, composition, teaching, etc.
      - analog31 3y ago
        It's true, but it tends to be a pretty lightweight class. Neither of my kids learned to play the piano in any useful way.
hgsgm 3y ago
> The students who are prone to cheating aren’t the smart ones.³ This is a pernicious bias that helps smart people cheat. Plenty of cheating in major by non-legacy admits at my prestigious university.
robswc 3y ago
What a ridiculous plan in the first place. It hinges on: 1) Things going exactly as they do in the past. 2) The student being chosen. 3) The student remembering the keys. 4) The instructor not getting suspicious (it was brought up in the post) 5) The instructor never seeing the paper. What do they even teach these kids, lol. Seems it would only ever work in a perfect world.
- euroderf 3y ago
  "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." (in this case, teaching staff)
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Maybe it's graded on a curve, so you just have to beat the median. Or hope you're luckily a "C" student. It is a bit ironic that liberal arts students have to have demonstrated competency, while engineering students who will go on to build things your life depends on just have to do better than other students.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    it better represents reality, at your job you also don't have some objective measure you're being evaluated against. you just have to do well enough not to get fired
effnorwood 3y ago
[dead]
dfan 3y ago
I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise: > The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors. but B major is pretty much the easiest scale to play on the piano there is!
- tomsmeding 3y ago
  In terms of fingering if you know it. It's also one of the least common; there's a lot of music in F major, there's less accidentals in the scale and hence music in the key is more easily readable, chords are more easily deduced (less black keys involved), etc.
jancsika 3y ago
> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who do not care about teaching." By the fourth "F major" announced, any musician with a working brain would know something is up. > Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors. B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other fingers. For both hands. It's a key that fits like a glove. F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it. Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale. Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct way. So now the student has less time for dates because they didn't cheat properly to begin with. To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  As an advanced amateur pianist, F major and C major are my least favorite scales. F major has the awkward B flat and C major has no good reference by feel for where you are on the keyboard. Personally, 3 sharps/flats are the easiest scales for me. A lot of people like B and C# because you have 5 and 7 sharps that make it really easy to find the notes (F# is marginally harder...).
  - kthejoker2 3y ago
    I second this as another advanced amateurist who mostly fakebooks, D, A, and Bb are my favorite scales because you can play them blind.
tptacek 3y ago
I'm not sure I understand how this cheating compact was supposed to work; didn't the conspiring students need to control who was the first student, or the student selected to pull keys from the hat?
- stagger87 3y ago
  It only needed to be one of the students in the cheating ring, which sounds like most of the students, so the probability was high.
dehrmann 3y ago
As someone who dabbles in guitar, I'm astonished how pianists happily accept an instrument that so heavily favors specific keys.
- yadingus 3y ago
  Is this sarcasm? 90% of rock songs are in Em or Am because of guitars.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    Am (especially) and Em happen to be very easy piano keys, too. What I meant is that playing a C major scale is easy, but it gets weird as you work through different keys. There's no consistency, so transposing is non-trivial. Compare that to a guitar and barre chords and capos.
    - abruzzi 3y ago
      all white keys is easy to play a scale without thinking, but I find it much harder to play well than keys that have some sharps or flats. that pattern of 2-space-3-space on the black key shelps to anchor your hands. I'd take e-flat major--its far easier to play than c-major. Transposing is harder, but the vast majority of piano litature is never played tranposed--you play the notes on the sheet music. I've tried some of those new layout keyboards like the Linnstrument, and I'd never try to play a Beethoven sonata on one.
      - yadingus 3y ago
        To be fair, perhaps most sonatas include transposition within them, only it's written out. This actually presents a hurdle for me, because if I learned a theme in G, and now I have to play it in D I feel like I know it, so I don't practice it as much as I did initially and it ends up in this weird limbo where I know what I'm supposed to play, but haven't properly trained my fingers. But there's plenty of stories of Liszt or Chopin transposing music on the spot. Jazz too.
    - 3y ago
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
I strongly suspect this story is nonsense. 1. It seems unlikely that all the students were conspiring except one. Why leave one student - and exactly one - out? Was s/he incredibly unpopular? Did s/he have minimal contact with the others? I suppose it's possible, but it's also quite strange. 2. It seems unlikely the students didn't understand that if the schedule was random there was a non-zero chance of non-cheating Student 1 doing the admin. 3. It's more likely the schedule was posted ahead of time. Given that, it seems unlikely that anyone would be surprised or flustered when the schedule went as scheduled and the alleged plan failed. 4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be chosen out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no need for randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less familiar keys because they're less likely to know them well. If someone gets C major and someone else gets Gb major for random reasons it's really not much of a fair test. 5. It seems quite unlikely that a student would be asked to hang around and do admin for an entire day - especially when the admin is essentially trivial anyway. 6. It seems unlikely that anyone who could play the short and long pieces well would be completely put off by being asked to play a scale they hadn't practiced. 7. It seems unlikely that a student would literally say "Oh we didn't practice because we wanted to spend our time partying and dating." That sounds like something someone would say about students, not something students would say about themselves. (This isn't about whether it's true, but whether someone that age would use those words.) To be clear: this isn't about defending cheating. I just find don't this story very plausible. Also, the irony that this article about cheating may be somewhat elaborated isn't lost on me.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  Additionally, by the time you're an undergraduate you should be able to play any scale and arpeggio smoothly without hesitation. I'm an idiot and played for about 8 years and really, scales and arpeggios are not that difficult. For someone who aspires for a teaching degree these should be cake and you should not be getting flustered by these at all. Programming equivalent would be something like needing to write a syntactically correct for loop in a random language pulled out of a hat. A basic exercise with some challenge but simple to do if you have put any practice in it.
  - 3y ago
nayuki 3y ago
Playing in different musical keys would be a lot easier if the piano keyboard was like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard , https://www.lumatone.io/ https://www.lumatone.io/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout
orestis 3y ago
I studied classical guitar for a few years, and let me tell you, scales on the guitar do not involve just moving a finger or a barre or a capo: look up the Segovia scales, that’s what I was learning and it’s physically demanding…
jrockway 3y ago
The way I'd cheat on this exam would be to just play whatever scale I've practiced and assume the examiner doesn't have perfect pitch. Having said that, I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played. I don't know why people training to be professional instructors are even worried about this sort of exam. Full disclosure: I took piano the first semester of college and got an F. (I don't really know why. I think I made the professor mad or something. I got a B in "intro to Java" despite getting a 100% on every homework, lab, and exam because the instructor told the class that a "d" after a numeric literal tells the compiler that the number is represented in base 10 or "decimal". That is not what that does, and I corrected him. F for participation! Yes, I did go to a terrible school.) It was at that point that I stopped taking any classes that weren't directly required to graduate; why better yourself and become more well-rounded when internships sort by GPA descending? But I digress ;)
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  There are basically 3 patterns of finger movement for piano scales with ~2 special cases that don't fit into any of them. I'm guessing that most of them were training to be music teachers on some instrument other than piano, and had to take an Intro to Piano course to get their degree.
- rvba 3y ago
  > I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played. The fact that you dont have a problem, doesnt mean that others wont have a problem. The article even states that the piano students cant play piano. Just like tons of managers cant manage, or tons of programmers cannot code. Seriously why do people even make this logical fallacy that "everyone is as smart / decent / talented as me"? I would add thinking too, in certain countries cheating is blantant, in some encouraged.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    That's fair. I just assume that people who want to make a career out of music can do everything music. I don't really have a point of reference, but I kind of totally understand the product designer type of person that just wants to make nifty shit in React and has no idea how to code up a bloom filter. Maybe it's the same thing. Scales are just trivia that make a good test question, but has nothing to do with music? If that's the case, then I hate this exam. It's just making talented people suffer for the mathematical types. I have listened to music before and I think that scales are probably somewhere in between React and bloom filters, though. I got an F in music, though, so don't ask me!
carldaddy 3y ago
In college the night before a big computer programming project was due, all of us students met in the computer lab and basically copied one student who had his working. The Professor obviously noticed and told us all to do it again.

200 points by scns 3y ago

idontwantthis 3y ago

The went to university for a music degree and they can’t already play scales?

yellowapple 3y ago
I'm just as confused by that. Most people I know who had some goal to earn a degree in music were already able to play any scale on a substantial number of instruments by the time they graduated from high school. Hell, I was in that camp and I didn't even plan on going to college. Granted, not everyone goes into a music program knowing every instrument, but scales and arpeggios ain't terribly hard to practice, be it on a keyboard or a woodwind or a brass or whatever.
- idontwantthis 3y ago
  Seems like you always encounter students willing to work harder to cheat than to learn. My freshman year some students got expelled for keylogging TA passwords and using them to mark assignments passed. The assignments weren’t that hard…
  - robga 3y ago
    A lot of cheating is about time not difficulty. Rather than spend several evenings practising they partied instead, perhaps justifying cheating by deeming the exam topic an irrelevance. One of the takeaways here should be for the exam setters. If cheating was widespread (it sounds like a one off here) then they should consider whether the exam itself was an appropriate task, or whether there was an alternative task that may have been more engaging and ultimately a better test for all.
  - aksss 3y ago
    > weren’t that hard Maybe that’s part of the problem. One of those things is way more intriguing than the other, speaking as someone who wrote fake login screens for my high school’s PS/2 lab. Had like thirty passwords in a couple hours, including one teacher, by running it on the workstation closest to the door.
robga 3y ago
The degree they were studying for led to a job where for many of them the ability to play arpeggios in 24 keys may have been irrelevant. For example, teaching the history of music, or perhaps musical therapy. When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing exam. I couldn’t sing, didn’t want to sing, would never need to professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I couldn’t avoid it being part of the exam system. Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there is a better example but you get the drift.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  This seems more along the lines of studying only one basis in which to implement fizzbuzz. You're not really supposed to need to prepare your scales and arpeggios.
- amelius 3y ago
  So we would get chips that perform well on just that one sorting algorithm?
- lordnacho 3y ago
  I get that people don't want to waste time, but you lose a lot from taking this attitude. When I went to school we had a lot of kids who were only temporarily in the country. Their parents were diplomats or corporate expats. The government still made the kids learn the local language, with the predictable outcome that these kids had no motivation whatsoever to learn the language. Now with the debate in America being the way it is, a lot of these kids would actually have had a place to go back to, if they only spoke the language. Similarly with a lot of things you learn in education, most of them seem to be of no use, but it's only because you don't learn them properly they are of no use.
- data_maan 3y ago
  I get this drift! And I think a bit of cheating is healthy. The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1] Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential. For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself! [1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html
jimmytidey 3y ago
I don't know, but I'm guessing there's a big difference between knowing how to play your scales and playing perfectly evenly and fluidly.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Correct. The conservatory music exams require scales to be played from first level to last level. However each level demands faster tempo, evenness in volume, and a smooth “pulse” (like BB gun pellets hitting a wall)
nlnn 3y ago
I don't know about these exact exams, but often there are a lot of variations to play. E.g. multiple octaves, arpeggio inversions, scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc. Plus there's often a requirement to play at a certain tempo, legato/staccato, with correct intonation (for certain instruments), and also to use the correct fingerings as taught in other cases. So can be a lot more involved than playing a simple scale.
- djtango 3y ago
  I'll admit that I kind of enjoyed scales on the piano because I could mindlessly practise them when I was forced to practise, but I feel like there's a point where if you don't know them, you're limiting yourself in all kinds of ways. Improv and harmonisation benefit from you knowing all the keys on the keyboard inside out. Likewise, if you start going for volume of music you can play, at some point not having those foundations start to limit you. Anyone can memorise 3 pieces perfectly and over-practice them then ace a test. But what if the spirit of a grade and level represented more than that? My final teacher (who I met long after finishing exams) was very traditional and had a policy that was vaguely "you shouldn't take more than 3-6 months" to prepare for your grade exam. If you can't reach distinction level within that time, you're not ready so you should work more on your actual playing ability and musicianship. If you're learning like that, scales will be the least of your worries as we worked on so much repertoire that the need for it was self-evident (and well baked into a good routine). I guess it's a bit like driving - if you memorize a few routes you can probably perform like a real driver, but that's not really the same as being a real driver.
  - nlnn 3y ago
    Same for me, I really enjoy playing scales and the like as studying jazz has made the application and benefit of practice a lot more clear. I did some classical study and grades years ago and remember there being a big disconnect - my teacher just gave me scales and pieces as totally separate entities, and just taught them as things necessary to pass the exam, with no real application or purpose explained to me.
- seanhunter 3y ago
seanhunter 3y ago
You’d be amazed. I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical. A frikkin’ guitarist. For those of you who don’t know, playing a scale in a different key on a guitar literally involves moving your first finger to a different fret and starting from there. There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger. But it’s not hard. I told him he should be ashamed of himself and to stop whining. Playing in all keys on a sax or trumpet or whatever is a totally different kettle of fish. Still necessary to learn. Still ridiculous to be doing a music degree and not be able to just do but definitely much harder.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  You can study computer science without writing a single line of code. It's no different for music. Learning all the keys by heart is like learning your text editor keybindings, useful, but ultimately has little relevance to actual music theory and composition.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    You’ll definitely be hampered in composition if you don’t have decent keyboard fluency and I would say this is table stakes for that. But yes this is more directly relevant to performance. The guitarist in the anecdote above wanted a soloist career so was definitely squarely in the group for which playing scales is a minimum requirement.
    - watwut 3y ago
      I doubt he plays scales on concerts. It is actually requirement that is not directly related to ability to play music.
      - bonzini 3y ago
        https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o are you sure?
homami 3y ago
We had a CS undergrad intern that didn’t know what i++; means in JavaScript for loops.
- etothepii 3y ago
  They didn't know what it means or what it does or that it's important. I'm not sure it matters for most practical uses what i++ means so long as you know it is required. Much as with {} being used for scoping. Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know about how anything works.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Except it's not required :-P
  - maccard 3y ago
    > Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know about how anything works. I've worked with GenX'ers and Millenials (I'm a millenial), and this isn't unique to GenZ at all. A large number of people don't understand, and are just getting by. Anecdotally, I've seen people at very senior engineering positions who just don't understand the basics of what they're doing. Does that mean that it's jarring how many GenX'ers don't understand?
    - wholinator2 3y ago
      Yeah, we see this a lot with younger people because they are just starting in the world. Also, they're the predominate generation right now that's video taping and posting every even possibly interesting moment of their lives, irrespective of whether some 30 year old thinks it's embarrassing. If 60 year olds were posting every strange thought or funny moment we'd have some opinions about them too (Facebook, anyone?) They're just thinking about and misunderstanding a different set of things. But i think the kids are somewhat closer to a humility that might be hard to find elsewhere.
      - 3y ago
_ngbr 3y ago
Scales can get very very tricky. There are multiple modes of minor, for example, that have different notes ascending and descending. When you combine that with some requirements, like playing the scales the full length of the keyboard up and down at a consistent quick tempo, perhaps in triplets, missing just one note is extremely easy to do. Depending on the requirements of the exam, missing just one note may be enough to hurt your score.
- tgv 3y ago
  Come on. Scales are not very, very tricky. And you can't really play scales in quavers or triplets: there's no time signature. And there were only two modes (if the story can be trusted to get all details right).
  - _ngbr 3y ago
    Strange that you would feel a need to debate this. Triplets have nothing to do with time signature. Just that point reveals lack of experience in this area. Triplets exist in any time signature or lack of one. They are about beat subdivision. I could explain each of these points in greater detail but I am not compelled to take the time. Playing scales to meter is a common technique. And if I asked even a professional to sit down right now and whip out, say a melodic minor in five flats, four octaves at a quick consistent pace, many would indeed need a quick try first. They do get tricky indeed.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Professional musician here. That would be trivial to do, even on my weaker instruments, and even with triplets. Though just give me the tonic name, no need to call it five flats. Edit to add: To be fair I'm about a decade further in my career than someone going to study music for the first time.
      - _ngbr 3y ago
        That’s great to hear, but allow me to offer a common example. Ask a pianist to quickly play four octaves of melodic minor in thirds, and especially as one hand is ascending and the other is descending at the turning point, and there are two different modes being played simultaneously, many will indeed miss a note. Now make it a less common key, and you can see why it can be tricky for some. Certainly not everyone, for students yes and even some experience pianists may need to practice a bit first. This kind of request is very common at many music schools for these kinds of exams.
vjk800 3y ago
I took piano classes for several years as a child and they made me learn all the scales somewhere around the age of 12 or something. It was standard practice and I can't imagine anyone who took classes in the same music education system as I did and couldn't play all the scales.
- watwut 3y ago
  I played classical piano too, but never learned scales. It seemed completely useless to me and I was still was able to pass. It still seems completely useless to me, to be honest. The # I am supposed to play are right there in the music sheet notation.
  - oriolid 3y ago
    I did the same, and found out that it's a great way to paint yourself in a corner. In this corner you can learn very complex pieces by practicing learning them from the sheet music, but on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch, and it won't help at all with playing by ear, improvising or even much for playing from lead sheets. Yes, I was able to pass the exams by just knowing how scales work and coming up with fingerings on the fly, but in hindsight it wasn't the best idea.
    - watwut 3y ago
      If we did some improvising, it might be useful. We did no improvising at all, therefore it was just completely useless theory that had literally nothing to do with anything. I think that if they taught us some little improvising, we might see value in scales and maybe I would even ended up liking the piano more. > on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch Not really. You still have memory of previous ones and you do hear how it sounds. The intuition builds up, so to say. You do learn to hear and distinguish what sounds good or bad. I kind of do not see how theoretical knowledge of the scales would help here. But also I dropped out the first moment I could, so there is that too. But remembering the pieces was not issue at all. Issue was that I did not even liked music I had to play all that much and playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
schwartzworld 3y ago
Sure. I went to music school for trumpet where I learned: - new scales I didn't know about - new ways to play scales I did know - new instruments which required relearning scales. If you're learning to be a music teacher this is often a big part of it
zsaffir 3y ago
While students getting a music education degree have to learn all the instruments, they typically have a primary instrument that may or not be piano. If piano isn't their primary instrument there's no reason they would know how to play all the scales before starting the degree.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  That's still concerning. If your mental model of a scale is via the notes, the piano has helpful colour coding. Not being able to use that implies that the scales have instead been memorised by how they're played - frets, valves, etc. - that will stop working when a more in-depth application of keys is needed.
  - markatto 3y ago
    The piano is not the canonical model of a scale - it’s just a bit more visual than some other instruments. I went to music school and primarily play guitar and violin but can sort of play some keys. I could definitely figure out pretty much any scale on a piano but couldn’t just sit down and immediately play most of them.
picardythird 3y ago
Typically at this level the scales will be performed in more difficult variations, e.g. the right hand plays starting on the third or 6th note of the scale. There are also cases of concert pianists who notoriously refused to practice scales for these kinds of exams.
slaymaker1907 3y ago
Everyone who majors in music has to learn piano (at least for most majors) even if you aren’t a pianist.
ashtonbaker 3y ago
I got into Berklee for piano performance, couldn’t do more than a few scales fluently despite lessons my whole life.
rvba 3y ago
To be honest, the world is quite strange. You are supposed to know how to play the piano - and well, before you go to music university. Somehow people who study medicine are not expected to have medical knowledge. Precursors sure. Of course I understand that it is a question of supply and demand, for some reason tons of people compete to finish the relatively scarce music university, so the university can demand them to know stuff.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Just like in a Chinese musical school, something like 98% are supposed to have perfect pitch. Because they have enough applicants to fill the school even with that bar.

jzellis 3y ago

I'm imagining this story as an Everything Is Terrible educational video from the 90s about the evils of cheating and it's much better frankly

tester756 3y ago

To be fair I expected some crazy Windows related way to cheat on musical exam :P

bombcar 3y ago
I'll try to make one for you! Not being musically inclined, beyond liking a bit of the Beatles now and then, I did not expect to get anything out of the music class my wife wanted us to take. Though it had no particular recognized value, the class did award a certificate of completion after finishing the course, which was about a semester-hour spread over most of a year. The music history we talked about was interesting, especially as I enjoy trivia such as the differences between various apparently similar instruments - did you know the viola is the only instrument to use the alto clef for notation? The "final exam" had us play a relatively simple (or so they said) piece by Beethoven - Pathétique II. Adagio - and it was making me feel pretty pathetic. My wife had some previous piano history, and was doing quite well; but for me, the notes seemed to always end up in alphabetical order, or arrive long after they should have already left to go home. I began to slightly despair; I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't at least get a (barely) passing grade. The evening came for the exam, and my wife reported that she'd done quite well. I stepped into the room with apprehension, knowing that the instructor's usual smile would soon turn to disappointment - but wait! The instructor wasn't there?! He'd been called away to fill in for the Seattle Symphony, and had left instructions on how to take the test - a simple MIDI keyboard connected to an older PC. A slight ray of hope beamed through the window along with the setting sun - could it be? Would the PC be old enough? Sure enough, it was running Windows 98 (not Second Edition, that would have been disastrous)! I could do this! The Windows 98 MIDI handler had a buffer overflow! All I would have to do is start the exam, hold down the right keys on the keyboard to trigger it, and the program would crash. Since the way it "scored" your playing was to start by writing your name and 100 points to the database, it would record that I had begun, and then there would be no recording of me making any mistakes. I now have my certificate, and a photo of me with a slightly sheepish grin, as I was the only student to get a perfect score. I think my wife might suspect something, as she was perhaps near enough to hear that what I played sounded more like the Cascades trying to clear the track than anything Beethoven would have written, but I just told her that he was mostly deaf and probably played loud.

graemebenzie 3y ago

Puts a dig in at teaching near the end.

damagednoob 3y ago
Not sure what you mean? I think that was still aimed at the students who, presumably if they were to become teachers one day, would expect their own students not to cheat.
nkrisc 3y ago
He does no such thing. He points out that these cheaters were studying to be teachers, the very role that they were trying to cheat in the test.

riwsky 3y ago

Please play a C major scale, but for every third note instead sing “Fizz”, every fifth note sing “Buzz”, and every 15th note instead sing “FizzBuzz”

AlecSchueler 3y ago
This should actually be easy for anyone who practices scales in thirds.
- tremon 3y ago
  But "thirds" occur every other note in the scale, since intervals are 1-based rather than 0-based. "Every third note" would more closely match the progression of a circle of fourths than a regular triad.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Even easier then!
brudgers 3y ago
Major or minor third?
- gnulinux 3y ago
  If it's a major scale, you're not supposed to play minor third. Besides "every third note" will eventually be every note because there are 7 notes in a major scale. So, by the second octave major second will be one of the "fizz" notes (similar to ninth chord, stacked 4 thirds, having a major second). This can be a legit exam BTW, some contemporary Western classical styles use these kind of patterns to make music.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    E->G is a minor third.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sriram_malhar 3y ago

I often tell this Latin phrase to my students that I came across in the TV show West Wing: "corruptio optimi passima" : The corruption of the best, is the worst.

tremon 3y ago
*pessima

tgv 3y ago

> to look pretty The author might have missed on some of life, because I don't think "effort to look pretty" necessarily has to do with the looks you were born with, but rather with styling: hair, make-up, clothes.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

That is so sad.

divan 3y ago

Exams and sports competitions are a particularly nasty example of Campbell's Law (or Goodheart's Law) – collapsing the correlation between metric and the true goal. Exams, for example, are supposed to measure how much students progressed. "True goal" - learn some knowledge or master some skill. "Metric" is the quiz/tests/exam result. If you try to design an exam for any new skill or knowledge, you'll come up with a pretty good metric. But soon, people will start ignoring the true goal and focus on the metric. Instead of "measuring" how well they learned the skill, your metric measures "how well they overfitted for the exam". In a way, the mere fact that people need to "prepare for exams" is a testament to how failed the system is. Sport is similar. The initial idea of the judging system and competitions is to "measure" the performance of the athlete. Rewards and rules are introduced to make this metric clear and unambiguous. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and athletes and coaches don't care about overall performance – they care about winning the medal, so they focus only on the subset of a skill that gives points. This problem is especially horrifying in the sports like figure skating after introducing the IJS system in 2006. Correlation between "true goal" (skating skills) and "metrics" (points given for specific elements) is collapsed – people chase points, not the skill. It's not a simple problem. There are few neat papers on how to approach solving Goodheart's problems ([1] [2]). But on a practical level, the number one tool seems to be to decrease the importance of the metric. Some sports, for example, have "one major competition" once in 4 years (Olympic Games). The price of winning it is insane. Who cares about the true goal if it's almost life-and-death importance? You chase the points. But other sports have a more healthy approach – tennis, for example, doesn't care much about the Olympics. They have Slams and different surfaces competitions throughout the year. You lost a game - not the end of the world. There will be many more. The higher prize is to win all four Slams in your career, so the price of the metric at a single competition is not that huge. And this collapsing metric is a reason why people cheat. You can't cheat on a true goal, only on a proxy metric. [1] Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 [2] Building Less Flawed Metrics: Dodging Goodhart and Campbell's Laws - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_Less_Flawed_Metrics_Dodging_Goodhart_and_Campbell%27s_Laws https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_...

devnullbrain 3y ago

mdek 3y ago

A music theory instructor from my past told us a story about his equivalent practical exam. He had to demonstrate proficiency with multiple string instruments. Instead of learning fingering for each instrument, he claimed he tuned them so they could all be played the same way. I don’t have any training in string instruments, so I’m not sure how feasible this actually is...

ludston 3y ago
It's bizarre. It's certainly possible to do this but there isn't much point given the different instruments need different fingering tequniques to reach notes anyway, and getting a feel for these fingerings ought to be harder than the transposition.
analog31 3y ago
It is and it isn't. All of the violin family instruments are tuned in fifths, but the strings have limited tuning range and would either break or produce no sound if you tried to force-fit a single tuning onto all of them, e.g., tuning a violin like a viola or vice versa. The double bass is its own beast, usually tuned in fourths, but in fifths is virtually unplayable without injury by mere mortals. And fifths require careful choice of strings. You still have to read the clefs. A remote possibility is that the person was a guitarist or bassist, and tuned the instruments in fourths. I have a friend who studied classical guitar as an undergrad, and music theory in grad school, while earning a living as an electric bassist in R&B bands, then became a theory professor, now retired. Disclosure: Double bassist.

FrankyZunim 3y ago

Are we supposed to believe this actually happened? If it did, the author has done a great job of making it sound fake.

analog31 3y ago
The story sounded apocryphal to me too, or maybe it evolved through re-telling and re-remembering. Most people are in the dark about what college level music education consists of. If piano was being taught in a classroom, then it wasn't a music performance major program. Also, there are tiers of colleges, and a school with an easy music program for rich kids is not unthinkable. I have two kids who are both music performance majors in college (yes, we had the conversation about jobs), and I'm a musician myself. I learned the scales in middle school. A remote possibility is that this is a freak occurrence. I think you can't design a training program that absolutely bars creative cheating, without also degrading the program for the majority of students who don't cheat.
- jcpst 3y ago
  I could just be confused, but I thought I remembered the folks doing performance majors alongside us in Keyboard class to get prepare for the piano proficiency exam. Obviously not the Pianists- but I thought every music major had to pass keyboard proficiency.
  - hecanjog 3y ago
    Yes, that was my experience too. Everyone needed to pass a basic keyboard skills class the first year (or test out of it) regardless of their focus in performance, composition, teaching, etc.
    - analog31 3y ago
      It's true, but it tends to be a pretty lightweight class. Neither of my kids learned to play the piano in any useful way.

hgsgm 3y ago

> The students who are prone to cheating aren’t the smart ones.³ This is a pernicious bias that helps smart people cheat. Plenty of cheating in major by non-legacy admits at my prestigious university.

robswc 3y ago

What a ridiculous plan in the first place. It hinges on: 1) Things going exactly as they do in the past. 2) The student being chosen. 3) The student remembering the keys. 4) The instructor not getting suspicious (it was brought up in the post) 5) The instructor never seeing the paper. What do they even teach these kids, lol. Seems it would only ever work in a perfect world.

euroderf 3y ago
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." (in this case, teaching staff)
dehrmann 3y ago
Maybe it's graded on a curve, so you just have to beat the median. Or hope you're luckily a "C" student. It is a bit ironic that liberal arts students have to have demonstrated competency, while engineering students who will go on to build things your life depends on just have to do better than other students.
- somsak2 3y ago
  it better represents reality, at your job you also don't have some objective measure you're being evaluated against. you just have to do well enough not to get fired

effnorwood 3y ago

[dead]

dfan 3y ago

I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise: > The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors. but B major is pretty much the easiest scale to play on the piano there is!

tomsmeding 3y ago
In terms of fingering if you know it. It's also one of the least common; there's a lot of music in F major, there's less accidentals in the scale and hence music in the key is more easily readable, chords are more easily deduced (less black keys involved), etc.

jancsika 3y ago

> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who do not care about teaching." By the fourth "F major" announced, any musician with a working brain would know something is up. > Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors. B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other fingers. For both hands. It's a key that fits like a glove. F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it. Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale. Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct way. So now the student has less time for dates because they didn't cheat properly to begin with. To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!

pclmulqdq 3y ago
As an advanced amateur pianist, F major and C major are my least favorite scales. F major has the awkward B flat and C major has no good reference by feel for where you are on the keyboard. Personally, 3 sharps/flats are the easiest scales for me. A lot of people like B and C# because you have 5 and 7 sharps that make it really easy to find the notes (F# is marginally harder...).
- kthejoker2 3y ago
  I second this as another advanced amateurist who mostly fakebooks, D, A, and Bb are my favorite scales because you can play them blind.

tptacek 3y ago

I'm not sure I understand how this cheating compact was supposed to work; didn't the conspiring students need to control who was the first student, or the student selected to pull keys from the hat?

stagger87 3y ago
It only needed to be one of the students in the cheating ring, which sounds like most of the students, so the probability was high.

dehrmann 3y ago

As someone who dabbles in guitar, I'm astonished how pianists happily accept an instrument that so heavily favors specific keys.

yadingus 3y ago
Is this sarcasm? 90% of rock songs are in Em or Am because of guitars.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Am (especially) and Em happen to be very easy piano keys, too. What I meant is that playing a C major scale is easy, but it gets weird as you work through different keys. There's no consistency, so transposing is non-trivial. Compare that to a guitar and barre chords and capos.
  - abruzzi 3y ago
    all white keys is easy to play a scale without thinking, but I find it much harder to play well than keys that have some sharps or flats. that pattern of 2-space-3-space on the black key shelps to anchor your hands. I'd take e-flat major--its far easier to play than c-major. Transposing is harder, but the vast majority of piano litature is never played tranposed--you play the notes on the sheet music. I've tried some of those new layout keyboards like the Linnstrument, and I'd never try to play a Beethoven sonata on one.
    - yadingus 3y ago
      To be fair, perhaps most sonatas include transposition within them, only it's written out. This actually presents a hurdle for me, because if I learned a theme in G, and now I have to play it in D I feel like I know it, so I don't practice it as much as I did initially and it ends up in this weird limbo where I know what I'm supposed to play, but haven't properly trained my fingers. But there's plenty of stories of Liszt or Chopin transposing music on the spot. Jazz too.
  - 3y ago

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

I strongly suspect this story is nonsense. 1. It seems unlikely that all the students were conspiring except one. Why leave one student - and exactly one - out? Was s/he incredibly unpopular? Did s/he have minimal contact with the others? I suppose it's possible, but it's also quite strange. 2. It seems unlikely the students didn't understand that if the schedule was random there was a non-zero chance of non-cheating Student 1 doing the admin. 3. It's more likely the schedule was posted ahead of time. Given that, it seems unlikely that anyone would be surprised or flustered when the schedule went as scheduled and the alleged plan failed. 4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be chosen out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no need for randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less familiar keys because they're less likely to know them well. If someone gets C major and someone else gets Gb major for random reasons it's really not much of a fair test. 5. It seems quite unlikely that a student would be asked to hang around and do admin for an entire day - especially when the admin is essentially trivial anyway. 6. It seems unlikely that anyone who could play the short and long pieces well would be completely put off by being asked to play a scale they hadn't practiced. 7. It seems unlikely that a student would literally say "Oh we didn't practice because we wanted to spend our time partying and dating." That sounds like something someone would say about students, not something students would say about themselves. (This isn't about whether it's true, but whether someone that age would use those words.) To be clear: this isn't about defending cheating. I just find don't this story very plausible. Also, the irony that this article about cheating may be somewhat elaborated isn't lost on me.

bentcorner 3y ago
Additionally, by the time you're an undergraduate you should be able to play any scale and arpeggio smoothly without hesitation. I'm an idiot and played for about 8 years and really, scales and arpeggios are not that difficult. For someone who aspires for a teaching degree these should be cake and you should not be getting flustered by these at all. Programming equivalent would be something like needing to write a syntactically correct for loop in a random language pulled out of a hat. A basic exercise with some challenge but simple to do if you have put any practice in it.
- 3y ago

nayuki 3y ago

Playing in different musical keys would be a lot easier if the piano keyboard was like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard , https://www.lumatone.io/ https://www.lumatone.io/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_table_note_layout

orestis 3y ago

I studied classical guitar for a few years, and let me tell you, scales on the guitar do not involve just moving a finger or a barre or a capo: look up the Segovia scales, that’s what I was learning and it’s physically demanding…

jrockway 3y ago

The way I'd cheat on this exam would be to just play whatever scale I've practiced and assume the examiner doesn't have perfect pitch. Having said that, I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played. I don't know why people training to be professional instructors are even worried about this sort of exam. Full disclosure: I took piano the first semester of college and got an F. (I don't really know why. I think I made the professor mad or something. I got a B in "intro to Java" despite getting a 100% on every homework, lab, and exam because the instructor told the class that a "d" after a numeric literal tells the compiler that the number is represented in base 10 or "decimal". That is not what that does, and I corrected him. F for participation! Yes, I did go to a terrible school.) It was at that point that I stopped taking any classes that weren't directly required to graduate; why better yourself and become more well-rounded when internships sort by GPA descending? But I digress ;)

pclmulqdq 3y ago
There are basically 3 patterns of finger movement for piano scales with ~2 special cases that don't fit into any of them. I'm guessing that most of them were training to be music teachers on some instrument other than piano, and had to take an Intro to Piano course to get their degree.
rvba 3y ago
> I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played. The fact that you dont have a problem, doesnt mean that others wont have a problem. The article even states that the piano students cant play piano. Just like tons of managers cant manage, or tons of programmers cannot code. Seriously why do people even make this logical fallacy that "everyone is as smart / decent / talented as me"? I would add thinking too, in certain countries cheating is blantant, in some encouraged.
- jrockway 3y ago
  That's fair. I just assume that people who want to make a career out of music can do everything music. I don't really have a point of reference, but I kind of totally understand the product designer type of person that just wants to make nifty shit in React and has no idea how to code up a bloom filter. Maybe it's the same thing. Scales are just trivia that make a good test question, but has nothing to do with music? If that's the case, then I hate this exam. It's just making talented people suffer for the mathematical types. I have listened to music before and I think that scales are probably somewhere in between React and bloom filters, though. I got an F in music, though, so don't ask me!

carldaddy 3y ago

In college the night before a big computer programming project was due, all of us students met in the computer lab and basically copied one student who had his working. The Professor obviously noticed and told us all to do it again.