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A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem. You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate y

A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem. You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.

hackyhacky 1y ago
You don't think it's a problem for the university to graduate students who don't know the material?
- scotty79 1y ago
  It's a problem for those students. But it's self inflicted by their choices. EDIT: sorry, I misread your question.... I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them. This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly. Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation. It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates. When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people. I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students. Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody. I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.
  - hackyhacky 1y ago
    That was not my question.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
You judgement depends a lot on the cultural environment. There exist quite a lot of countries in which it is very common that the respective company will look a lot at your marks.
mhb 1y ago
Right. There are two problems. The first is that the entity being paid for teaching is the one evaluating how good a job they did. The second is how to measure how well someone knows a topic.
Aurornis 1y ago
Part of the value of a degree is the University vouching that the student has learned the topic to their standards. Different Universities have different standards and everyone knows this. It’s why a degree from Stanford is a stronger signal than a degree from an average institution. It doesn’t guarantee the Stanford grad is better, but it’s a strong signal that people know they can trust. If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed.
- scotty79 1y ago
  The argument in the article isn't that they should prevent more cheating from happening, but they should work hard to reduce cheating. > If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed This also means that any effort put into reducing cheating would lead to benefits (if any) far removed from the actions undertaken.
jiggawatts 1y ago
The problem is that others cheating their way to a diploma devalues the diploma for those that earned it legitimately.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Devaluation happens only if they start cheating more. If they cheat as much as they used to there's no devaluation. And appreciation of diploma value if cheating was reduced is just not worth the effort.

hackyhacky 1y ago

You don't think it's a problem for the university to graduate students who don't know the material?

scotty79 1y ago
It's a problem for those students. But it's self inflicted by their choices. EDIT: sorry, I misread your question.... I think it's a problem for the university because it might mislead universities into keeping terrible teachers on the payroll because too many of their students are getting too high grades because they copy because teacher was unable to teach them or motivate them. This problem is solved cheaper and easier just by monitoring teachers directly. Another problem I can see is that if a lot of particularly terrible students graduate suddenly it might spoil the reputation of the university, but it's a problem with increase of the cheating level, not with the cheating level itself, it's already calculated into university's reputation. It really doesn't matter all that much because the main source of university graduates success and as a result university's reputation comes from how picky they are when admitting students. Good freshmen usually make good graduates. When students are taught nearly every university does similarly good as long as they try to do a decent job and not just scam people. I don't see any other problems. And I see zero incentive for the university to reduce cheating. This would just reduce the number of graduates and they can already do that on admission if they want that. Unless they can somehow earn money from catching cheating students. Heck, top universities even admit more on the affluence of the student's family not on how smart they are. And that's because affluent graduates are also sought after by the business so this works for everybody. I think the person who wrote that article is cynical enough to understand the incentives to not care about cheating too much at the level of individual teacher but they are not cynical enough to understand that at institutional level there's also lack of incentive to care about that because university is not really about teaching and grading. It's for selecting and it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be useful and valuable.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  That was not my question.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

You judgement depends a lot on the cultural environment. There exist quite a lot of countries in which it is very common that the respective company will look a lot at your marks.

mhb 1y ago

Right. There are two problems. The first is that the entity being paid for teaching is the one evaluating how good a job they did. The second is how to measure how well someone knows a topic.

Aurornis 1y ago

Part of the value of a degree is the University vouching that the student has learned the topic to their standards. Different Universities have different standards and everyone knows this. It’s why a degree from Stanford is a stronger signal than a degree from an average institution. It doesn’t guarantee the Stanford grad is better, but it’s a strong signal that people know they can trust. If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed.

scotty79 1y ago
The argument in the article isn't that they should prevent more cheating from happening, but they should work hard to reduce cheating. > If a University starts allowing cheating (by ignoring it) the value of their degree will fall over time. Not at all once, but these things get noticed This also means that any effort put into reducing cheating would lead to benefits (if any) far removed from the actions undertaken.

jiggawatts 1y ago

The problem is that others cheating their way to a diploma devalues the diploma for those that earned it legitimately.

scotty79 1y ago
Devaluation happens only if they start cheating more. If they cheat as much as they used to there's no devaluation. And appreciation of diploma value if cheating was reduced is just not worth the effort.