3 ms·

This kind of thing is only ever going to get easier, not harder. Overall it's a good thing that sharing knowledge has become so easy. So we need to rethink the

by ef4 14y ago

This kind of thing is only ever going to get easier, not harder. Overall it's a good thing that sharing knowledge has become so easy. So we need to rethink the way we structure education and credentials. Why is there an incentive to cheat like this? Frankly, because most of the hoops a student jumps through during their education really don't impart any lasting measurable value. What fraction of educational content is still usable in the average student's brain ten years after they learned it? Very little. Mostly this comes down to the rigid and one-size-fits-all way we teach most things. Learning is orders of magnitude more effective when the learner has a personal motivation for why they want to learn something and how they intend to apply it in their life -- factors that are frequently missing from our traditional classroom model. The real value in school is the meta skills. Learning how to learn. Today we expect students to get those as a side effect of learning a bunch of pointless (to them personally) stuff, but more often than not they pick up the wrong set of meta skills: they learn how to cram information just long enough to regurgitate it for the test and then forget it forever. If you want people to learn the really valuable meta skills, you need to let them practice those meta skills in domains the students actually care about.

bunderbunder 14y ago
The value is not in getting the answer. The value is in the mental exercise of figuring out how to get the answer. Supplying your professor with the answer is merely a token you provide as evidence that you have done so. As far as whether any "lasting measurable value" is imparted by these sorts of exercises, I can say that at my workplace I've seen more than one freshout who clearly hadn't made it through college without significant assistance from Stack Overflow and other people's blogs. None of them lasted very long. Perhaps knowing how to solve problems for yourself isn't necessary to get a college degree nowadays, but it's surprising how useful it can be in a career where you solve problems for a living.
- ef4 14y ago
  I don't disagree at all. I sure as heck did every problem myself and took pride in it, and I'm sure I'm more capable because of it. But that's not the point of my post. I'm asking why somebody who clearly doesn't care about learning this bit of math feels the need to go through the motions in the first place. It's a suboptimal way to learn anything.
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    Because they are buying a credential.
    - ef4 14y ago
      Yes, but the credential is supposedly tied to actual abilities that matter. If they use their fraudulent credential to get a job and then perform well, then the material really was pointless and the system really is a big show without substance. I can hardly fault someone for gaming such a system. On the other hand, if they fail miserably because they lack relevant skills, then they didn't really prosper from their cheating.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    The freshouts I spoke of before all seemed to be genuinely shocked at their first experience of the real world. Not only were they wholly unprepared for their chosen career; they also seemed wholly unprepared for the revelation of how unprepared they were. I can't say for sure why that might be, but I could speculate on it for days. Perhaps they never really understood the point of school in the first place. Perhaps they were seeing so much success at Googling their way through school that they were never given any reason to suspect they might not be able to get away with Googling their way on through the rest of their lives. Perhaps they knew how dependent they had become on being hand-held through everything by others, but didn't know how to escape that pattern. shrug All I know is that at this point, if I were to find out that there were a university that had a policy of flunking students for asking, "Is this going to be on the exam?" I would immediately write a letter to HR suggesting that we aggressively recruit graduates of that program.
46Bit 14y ago
> Why is there an incentive to cheat like this? Frankly, because most of the hoops a student jumps through during their education really don't impart any lasting measurable value. What fraction of educational content is still usable in the average student's brain ten years after they learned it? Very little. You're overcomplicating things to push your agenda. There's an incentive for a dishonest student to cheat because it's significantly easier than actually doing the work. A student is unlikely to cheat on a topic they really love, but the value of learning something isn't judgeable on that basis. A lot of things I questioned the value of at school have come in handy, and I only left 2 years ago. I agree that a big value of school is the ability to learn and reason, but students don't know best.
- ef4 14y ago
  > There's an incentive for a dishonest student to cheat because it's significantly easier than actually doing the work. That's only true if cheating gives you the same benefit as actually doing the work. In many fields (especially science/technology/engineering/math), I would argue that the cheater doesn't capture much benefit. It's pretty easy to verify their abilities and see that they don't know what they're doing. In these areas, even where the credential is necessary it is not sufficient. On the other hand, there are cases where it seems that a cheater is just as capable of doing the work. Where that's true, it calls into question the wisdom of using such credentials in the first place, since mastery of the material ends up being uncorrelated with performance. > but students don't know best. True, but that's only a problem if we assume learning is a one-shot thing. If learning is a continuous, iterative process then there's plenty of chances for the learner to self-correct based on real-world experience. That's one reason I went off on my "agenda" about why education in general needs to change.
illuminate 14y ago
"Why is there an incentive to cheat like this?" Because there will always be some amount of "incentive" to cheat to reach any reward with the minimum amount of effort.
- ef4 14y ago
  Yes, but that's my point. What is the reward here, and do you still achieve it if you cheat? If the cheater who fails to learn anything is rewarded with a successful career, what does that say about the real value of the material he didn't learn? If he gets a job based on his credential and then performs well, then the material really didn't matter, and so we as a society are wasting vast amounts of time and money subsidizing education that doesn't matter. On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior." The impostor will still gain a privilege from their ill-gotten degree and claims of expertise in a subject, even if the coding-related job screens them out. Those charismatic persons may also receive their jobs because of cronyism/nepotism, their lack of skillset given a pass because of the credentials. Worry is a loaded term. I didn't worry about the cheaters when I was getting my degree, but I would still prefer to see them removed from the system, once found.

by ef4 14y ago

bunderbunder 14y ago

The value is not in getting the answer. The value is in the mental exercise of figuring out how to get the answer. Supplying your professor with the answer is merely a token you provide as evidence that you have done so. As far as whether any "lasting measurable value" is imparted by these sorts of exercises, I can say that at my workplace I've seen more than one freshout who clearly hadn't made it through college without significant assistance from Stack Overflow and other people's blogs. None of them lasted very long. Perhaps knowing how to solve problems for yourself isn't necessary to get a college degree nowadays, but it's surprising how useful it can be in a career where you solve problems for a living.

ef4 14y ago
I don't disagree at all. I sure as heck did every problem myself and took pride in it, and I'm sure I'm more capable because of it. But that's not the point of my post. I'm asking why somebody who clearly doesn't care about learning this bit of math feels the need to go through the motions in the first place. It's a suboptimal way to learn anything.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Because they are buying a credential.
  - ef4 14y ago
    Yes, but the credential is supposedly tied to actual abilities that matter. If they use their fraudulent credential to get a job and then perform well, then the material really was pointless and the system really is a big show without substance. I can hardly fault someone for gaming such a system. On the other hand, if they fail miserably because they lack relevant skills, then they didn't really prosper from their cheating.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  The freshouts I spoke of before all seemed to be genuinely shocked at their first experience of the real world. Not only were they wholly unprepared for their chosen career; they also seemed wholly unprepared for the revelation of how unprepared they were. I can't say for sure why that might be, but I could speculate on it for days. Perhaps they never really understood the point of school in the first place. Perhaps they were seeing so much success at Googling their way through school that they were never given any reason to suspect they might not be able to get away with Googling their way on through the rest of their lives. Perhaps they knew how dependent they had become on being hand-held through everything by others, but didn't know how to escape that pattern. shrug All I know is that at this point, if I were to find out that there were a university that had a policy of flunking students for asking, "Is this going to be on the exam?" I would immediately write a letter to HR suggesting that we aggressively recruit graduates of that program.

46Bit 14y ago

> Why is there an incentive to cheat like this? Frankly, because most of the hoops a student jumps through during their education really don't impart any lasting measurable value. What fraction of educational content is still usable in the average student's brain ten years after they learned it? Very little. You're overcomplicating things to push your agenda. There's an incentive for a dishonest student to cheat because it's significantly easier than actually doing the work. A student is unlikely to cheat on a topic they really love, but the value of learning something isn't judgeable on that basis. A lot of things I questioned the value of at school have come in handy, and I only left 2 years ago. I agree that a big value of school is the ability to learn and reason, but students don't know best.

ef4 14y ago
> There's an incentive for a dishonest student to cheat because it's significantly easier than actually doing the work. That's only true if cheating gives you the same benefit as actually doing the work. In many fields (especially science/technology/engineering/math), I would argue that the cheater doesn't capture much benefit. It's pretty easy to verify their abilities and see that they don't know what they're doing. In these areas, even where the credential is necessary it is not sufficient. On the other hand, there are cases where it seems that a cheater is just as capable of doing the work. Where that's true, it calls into question the wisdom of using such credentials in the first place, since mastery of the material ends up being uncorrelated with performance. > but students don't know best. True, but that's only a problem if we assume learning is a one-shot thing. If learning is a continuous, iterative process then there's plenty of chances for the learner to self-correct based on real-world experience. That's one reason I went off on my "agenda" about why education in general needs to change.

illuminate 14y ago

"Why is there an incentive to cheat like this?" Because there will always be some amount of "incentive" to cheat to reach any reward with the minimum amount of effort.

ef4 14y ago
Yes, but that's my point. What is the reward here, and do you still achieve it if you cheat? If the cheater who fails to learn anything is rewarded with a successful career, what does that say about the real value of the material he didn't learn? If he gets a job based on his credential and then performs well, then the material really didn't matter, and so we as a society are wasting vast amounts of time and money subsidizing education that doesn't matter. On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior." The impostor will still gain a privilege from their ill-gotten degree and claims of expertise in a subject, even if the coding-related job screens them out. Those charismatic persons may also receive their jobs because of cronyism/nepotism, their lack of skillset given a pass because of the credentials. Worry is a loaded term. I didn't worry about the cheaters when I was getting my degree, but I would still prefer to see them removed from the system, once found.