The previous university I worked at had a problem even one level more sophisticated. The school had a lot of international students, mainly from China and the Middle East. Mostly these were children of rich (but not obscenely rich) parents and often not particularly smart (the school was not super highly ranked).
Now the ghostwriting was also an issue, but that theoretically still can be caught (and it was from time to time). One way to do that was requiring in person exams and you always had to cary your uni I'd for the exams.
However, what the University administration realised is that there were some students essentially hired someone at the beginning of their studies to impersonate them at registration, where they got their photo taken. The "impersonator" would then complete the full studies for the student.
Now you need to id yourself at registration, however if the hired person looked somewhat similar it would just go through.
I was doing some genetic algorithm research at UO and I was approached by some kid who basically demanded that I do one of his electronics projects. I got some details, reported him to his academic advisor, and was then told that he was the son of one of the diplomats in town and that nothing could really be done.
So I agreed to help him do the project. He took that to mean that I would do it for him, he did no work and didn't show up on 2 of the 3 times that we had scheduled to work on it together.
And then he got mad at me when the project literally caught fire because of an absolutely obvious short that I put there on purpose to see if he'd catch it. I told him that if he couldn't be arsed to write the schematic he should at least have read it.
(This was between 10 and 15 years ago, and all this guy had to do was look at the breadboard for 2 minutes)
Yeah, petty revenge, basically :) I put a nichrome wire, in yellow plastic cover, between Vcc and Gnd. I told him to ensure that the circuit matched the schematic. He didn't remove the wire, so once he powered the thing up, it caught fire. I don't know if the circuit worked with it removed (it should have, but I wasn't present when the assignment was due).
I had a small class in engineering and was surprised at the exam time to see a few faces I hadn't seen all year. I assumed it must be people coming back to sit a second time or something. I'm so Naive.
Unless he finds someone who looks really similar, these international students should bring their passports/F1 visas? My guess is that the administration is turning a blind-eye because of the international $$.
I know it's popular to blame malice on part of organisations, but I don't think it's in the interest of the school to overlook this. In fact I heard about this in a discussion/information saying how this was a problem and what to do about it.
Yes they require a passport at registration, but it's difficult to decide for an admin who sees someone for 2 min and looks at the passport for maybe 10s that that person is not the person on the passport. Especially so if you are not expecting it and the person comes from a different background (we struggle more with distinguishing people from other ethnicities)
I think this is how they got wind of the scheme though, someone got suspicious.
I heard rumors about similar stuff when I was a student - but not to that extent, that you had someone impersonate someone for the whole semester.
In majors with huge classes, no compulsory attendance, and schools where ID cards don't require a picture - this was apparently a thing. Some people would simply hire people to take the exam for them.
Obviously this wouldn't fly in a small class with 15-20 students or so, but very feasible in classes with 200-300 students, and where the exams are also open to previous year students.
I'm not sure if this is a serious comment, but I'd think professors generally aren't in a position to know their students' standardized test scores (never mind whether they'd care).
At my university we can see any student's transcript including scores through our faculty portal. But you're right, generally no one cares to look these things up.
This was largely a technical university. I also doubt that the hired students were getting top scores. That often was not the goal, for those privaledged kids, getting a foreign degree almost certainly guaranteed a cushy job back home. The grades didn't matter too much.
In my country universities get money for foreign students. In fact more than they get for local students from the government. This is also the reason why universities switched to English in the 1990s.
Yes long term this can damage your reputation but in capitalism nobody cares.
In France since the 1990" roughly one third of the university students are foreigners with a higher proportion in PhD studies (41%) than in bachelor studies (11%) [0].
No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He claimed he stopped when one of his clients was caught.
The unfortunate lesson I got from university is that they were very aware of cheating, but not all that enthused about penalizing people for it. 11 people in one of my freshmen classes got copying an assignment to keep a journal over the semester. In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.
I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.
> I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.
...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.
Let’s be real though, the honest students are getting far more out of this than the ones cheating. I promise you the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were. It’s still ultimately all about who you know, and those kids likely have a cushy job awaiting them back home. The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers.
Foreign students are absolutely a grift at US universities, though I suspect COVID may have ended that one. A great many will come to the US hoping to land a job but most will go home with a name-brand degree and a stake in the moderately successful family business.
> the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were.
I guarantee you they do. I guarantee you I know people with PhDs in neuroscience who've been asked their SAT scores.
I guarantee you that Boeing or some other major defense contractor (it's hard to keep track with how many were on campus) has made it well known at my school that if you graduate with a 3.7, you automatically get a job.
I guarantee you that when a school like mine does grade deflation to the point where the average engineer gets a 2.7, the people who cheat make it such that the people who didn't cheat struggle to find a job. Then when they do find a job their success is delayed substantially.
I guarantee you that people who already study their ass off for tests also cheat so that they guarantee that A. They also guarantee what would have been an A ends up as a B. There are only so many spots at top universities, guess who those spots go to.
Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace. Guess how hard it is for the smart ones who didn't cheat to find a good job.
Cheating does a lot more damage than you give it credit for.
(I've also met a lot of brilliant people that didn't cheat but there are far more smart people who do than don't)
Working on a PhD in Neuroscience or for Boeing is not the end goal (in fact you should probably avoid Boeing if you have a degree in Aerospace)
There is a huge demand for tech workers, its all over the published media. As long as you get that degree, and can pass the entrance interview (for which a degree is far from a requirement), you can get a job.
Also
>Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace.
Literally nothing. Entrance interviews are a thing, and there is enough "padding" to absorb the lack of skill, especially in jobs with goverment contracting involved, where the company places someone on the project just to charge the goverment a certain rate for them, even if they don't do anything.
Worse, the contractor probably gets a benefit in the contracting process for having X new graduates from Y tier of university on the project.
Some of these cycles are self-perpetuating. If cheaters make it high enough in the corporate world the "you don't need to know that skill anyway" mentality can sink in (after all they were successful) and then nothing really matters except the school that someone came from.
If that was the case, it would be just that much more important than the effects while in the workforce. In actuality, a lot of these things can affect you when you already have a job and are looking for another. It also turns out that you can go to grad school while being in the workforce.
> The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers.
A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults.
Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.
I specifically try to hire TAs who struggled in my classes and demonstrated that they increased their competency through the semester. A student who got a C on the first exam but an A on the final and a B+ average makes a much better TA than one who got As on every assignment. They are able to empathize with the kinds of students who come to see them during office hours.
My College roommate had a friend as his partner in his circuits design class. His partner did less and less work on the group projects as the semester went on. On the final project my roommate did the whole project (And elevator control circuit with a little spinning disk). He was exhausted. They had to demo to the professor, who asked who did what on the project. "Dave did most of the work." "What did you do?" the prof asked.. "Actually Dave did all the work."" The friendship was salvaged, but the freeloader had to take the class again.
Professors cheat also. I've seen several of them invite someone with a reputation to a meeting or just talk with them, then offer to add that person to a paper they are working on "because they contributed to the meeting or conversation". It's a way of buying influence for their paper and getting in good with the person with the reputation. It's very similar to ghost-writing or freeloading, the distinguished person usually does no actual work on the paper (they are asked if they want to add their name when the paper is finished and ready to be submitted) yet everybody involved benefits from reputation enhancement for no effort. Students see this happening and learn from it.
This is a sad thread. I guess institutionalized cheating is a very real and acceptable thing. I remember "cheating" once during a physics exam. It wasn't "cheating" really. He said we could use the internet, and it turns out a couple of the questions were on the internet. It's not ethical, and I shouldn't have done that, but technically it was allowed.
Thankfully I was never the type of person who had to cheat their way into prestige. I did that because I was an immature kid. What's worse is that I was smart enough to solve the problems anyway, but I was just lazy.
Corruption is incentive-based. There is always an incentive to lower effort. Indeed to a certain extent it may be essential for survival. It seems it can only be counterbalanced by the constraints imposed by ethics (i.e. guilt and shame) and punishments (i.e. fear). The only positive mindset way to reducing corruption is to inculcate the view that life is for service - but that does not gel well with capitalism, I guess.
In fairness, if you didn't have to worry about where your next meal was coming from, it might be easier to not want to violate your ethics to get ahead in life. This is not an endorsement of socialism, rather, a defense of criticism of capitalism.
The market economy I live in, where you imagine we spend our time worrying about our next meal, has fostered the largest cohort of morbidly obese people in the history of our species. And I am utterly incapable of imagining anything less in need of defense than criticism of capitalism.
It indeed achieves both, at the same time! Here's how it works: a typical person - particularly an American - gets enough money to buy more food than they'd ever need, but at the same time, they're ~two random events (e.g. sudden medical or car repair bill, and losing their job) from becoming homeless.
It's really not that hard to imagine living in luxury and fear at the same time. That's how rich and/or powerful people feel in less democratic countries - they simultaneously have more money than they know what to do with, and are one random event (mistake, shifting political winds) from losing it all, possibly along with their lives. It's actually one of the main reasons democracy is considered the superior system - powerful people living in fear is a combination that often leads to blood being spilled.
In theory it would. But either the schools are so good they can make cheaters good in the workplace or the workplace doesn't need the best and brightest (I guess cheating the the workplace could be a third answer).
Or, the cheaters don't end up in good workplaces - some will get washed out early, some won't get accepted, some won't even apply. A good diploma doesn't mean immediate, effortless transfer into best companies - you have to do some work applying and interviewing. In particular, I believe the kind of roles your rich family can get you through their network probably aren't the best ones - you're more likely to be given irrelevant make-work that doesn't disrupt the actual business, and your paycheck is just a price of your sponsor's friendship.
Also, some of the cheaters - particularly of the lighter kind - still absorb enough knowledge through osmosis + self-study that they can back up their diploma with actual knowledge.
Ultimately, I think looking at the aggregate outcomes, the correlation between students cheating and university getting bad feedback from the market is weak enough that it just doesn't form a strong incentive for universities to do anything about it. It takes a widely-published scandal to temporarily change that.
> In theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing and just gave them a zero for the one assignment.
It's likely that this decision was not up to the professor. Unless you have massive proof, deans (and the administration in general) hesitate against taking serious action. I'm talking from my own experiences.
The TAs caught it because the students copied the text exactly, so there was no issue of evidence. The administration didn't get a say because she never reported it to them.
In retrospect I could have made a stink and gone to the dean, but Freshmen me wasn't willing to do that sort of thing.
Universities discuss this all the time. It's incredibly hard to prove.
This is one reason we keep exams -- while they have many problems (particularly in Computer Science), forcing someone to sit in a room and answer questions gives a way of checking the student really does understand the course.
While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the students to pass individually each of the homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course.
This nipped HW cheating in the bud by the 3rd semester, because the students knew that you couldn’t game the system by maximizing HW grades to bring up exam & quiz grades. Exams & quizzes were autogenerated from a set of parametric problems, and put in random order on the print out — made side-by-side and answer-sheet cheating basically impossible.
Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.
Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work?
I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and routinely expressed frustration when first year students could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of the class would have failed. And cynically that homework weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a problem with their course instruction and they covered up presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading...
The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown?
And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in y.
> Are there any downsides to removing the potential for students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong homework and take-home work?
It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible to counteract.
The other way around works though, where you work hard to make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades. This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety but it does help.
You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the result is at least fair.
Once we realized that these same graduate assistants were treating some folks to a different standard, a group of us got together and basically forced them to grade us the same way.
It was bullshit, we were all neck deep in debt paying some incompetent to not teach us, and then haze us with capricious grading and classroom policy.
Weeeelllll... it depends on how you calculate it. Minimum course credit grade was a "C" and total A-C were unaffected; or, at least, in the noise. There was some motion from D-to-F, which affected total GPA average for the course. Honestly, I don't remember the magnitude of the change.
These courses had 600+ students in them.
I'm also certain they stopped a lot of this when I stopped teaching. The "cheaters" would get caught, later, anyways.
What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated entire classes of error that could result in loss of life from flying.
It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing.
The silly part is that post-secondary education is something that is far older than the flight industry yet no such standardization of controls over testing / grading have been implemented.
It seems like it's almost a choice.
> Faculty weren’t as charmed with the cratered grades, though.
The scientific research that goes on in post secondary education is the cornerstone. The academic setting is just the way we do it now and can, and I would argue should, change. Grad students could just as easily be junior employees if the same work were done in the private sector and would be financially much better off for it.
> It is especially troubling because post-secondary education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the material that they need to be better at their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane crashing.
This is insane. Most people never attend university and do plenty of productive work. Most people who do attend university never work a day in the field they did their degree in. Most people who do work in the field they did their degree in never use the large majority of what they leaned there. On top of this a large majority of professionally relevant material is learned on the job.
The reason that there’s no real effort to check people aren’t cheating is because school isn’t primarily about learning, it’s about ranking and sorting.
That says more about the ruling class from which presidents are selected than it says about universities. No doubt the management of AT&T said similar things about Bell Labs, even after they invented the transistor.
The sad thing is that the person who said this actually cared. Being a student at uni makes little sense unless you know that you can afford to not earn any income
Lawyers, doctors, nurses, engineers, and teachers are all educated at universities.
These are the people who create our standards bodies that dictate how the rest of society functions. Whether it's the legal system, the standards regarding medical practices, the standards regarding electrical and mechanical safety our entire society is built on the education and credentials that these people receive from attending university.
Think about this: Nearly every single person if not every single one that you have ever met was taught to read by a university educated teacher. If they were home-schooled, their syllabus was likely prepared by a university educated teacher.
We are all literate and numerate because of university educated teachers. That fact alone proves that university is (for better or worse) is a cornerstone of all human endeavours.
> We are all literate and numerate because of university educated teachers. That fact alone proves that university is (for better or worse) is a cornerstone of all human endeavours.
No. People were literate and numerate for millennia before universities existed. Universities are not necessary preconditions for literacy or numeracy. At least 10% of children are able to read before they start school at all because their parents taught them. The first society with near universal literacy, Puritan New England did so without any universities and their teachers were in the large majority not university educated.
Then what are you trying to say? If we agree that universities are unnecessary for literacy or numeracy then university is no more a cornerstone of contemporary societies than supermarkets or libraries.
For most people, first years at university is also the first years of independent adulthood, with all its challenges. I sometimes wonder if universities would work better at educating people if everyone was given a year or two to focus on getting their shit together - interests, romances, whatnot - and only then the real education would start.
At my university in the U.K. evaluation was almost entirely done with exams at the end of the year. For undergrad, the exams had questions from all the courses so one could choose whichever questions one wanted to answer (this meant each course only turned up in the exams for one year. Also I did a subject which didn’t require anything like labs).
It meant homework was an opportunity for difficult questions to be used for teaching rather than a test for knowledge—the only thing preventing one from skipping homework was the shame one would experience turning up to go through the solutions and discussion without having made attempts. One could also choose how collaborative to be with the problems and discuss them with peers. The downside was that there was a lot of pressure on exams and if you were ill on exam week you’d be SOL (also no resits because why not). And some people just don’t perform to their true ability under exam conditions (though to be fair the university selected for it with entrance exams.)
This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.
Maybe 15 years ago, Georgia Tech rolled out a pretty great homework copy detector for the Java kids. The guy who wrote it was well aware that students knew to change variable names and such, so he just had it compare generated byte code instead. It caught something like 200 cheaters. It was a huge problem because Tech really, really didn't want to just expel or fail everyone like the academic rules required, so they created a sort of case-by-case comparison and punished students to various lesser degrees based on some rubric or other.
Anyway, the next year they adjusted by saying "it's absolutely fine to collaborate on homework and projects. Go nuts. Copy off each other all you want. Also, homework is just 25% of your grade now, quizzes and exams are everything." This made for pretty terrifying quizzes, but things worked out for everybody (except folks with a lot of test anxiety) because folks who actually did the homework tended to be the ones that did well on exams anyway.
Back when I was an undergrad studying Applied CS, we[0] had a really friendly, cooperative attitude - we would help each other learn, do homework together; people who turned out to be good at a particular topic would often compile guides and learning material and FAQs for everyone else. Late in my studies I discovered this was seen as a highly unusual thing about our sub-faculty[1]. Other faculties had much more competitive, every person for themselves attitude.
It turns out, the driving factor was that our sub-faculty had different rules about scolarships: you had to cross a threshold of high grades on a given year to be eligible for one, and the amount of money you got was purely determined by your grade average. Everywhere else, scolarships were limited to top % best students. Where everyone else competed and kept their hard-won knowledge to themselves, we'd routinely assist each other, so that everyone could get a shot at getting the scolarship.
I hear that after I graduated, they normalized the incentive scheme to % top students everywhere, and that new Applied CS groups got as unfriendly as everyone else was.
--
[0] - All years studying Applied CS in our sub-faculty[1], not just my year. Don't know what the proper English term for it is, in Poland we call it "kierunek" (literally: direction), vs. "rocznik" meaning a class of a particular year studying on a "kierunek".
[1] - Not sure what's the right term for this either. Our faculty had essentially two branches that dealt with overlapping fields of study; as I was graduating, they ended up splitting into two separate faculties.
Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the push-back on standardized testing is partly because students cannot chea— I mean rely on “social collaboration”? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But part of it..)
Not OP, but it could still be an average (either weighted or not) and have a requirement to pass certain things to be eligible to pass. One of my core CS classes had the requirement that you had to complete at least 1 project, complete all daily assignments, and pass at least 4 of the 6 lab tests. However the overall grade for the class once you met those requirements was just an average like it was for my other classes.
People love to complain about whiteboarding but it's extremely effective at assessing knowledge, far more than even most exams. Exams are used in an academic context b/c they're less resource intensive, though.
"To understand if coding interviews—as administered today—can induce stress that significantly hinders performance, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 48 Computer Science students,comparing them in private and public whiteboard settings.
We found that performance is reduced by more than half, by simply being watched by an interviewer. We also observed that stress and cognitive load were significantly higher in a traditional technical interview when compared with our private interview.
Consequently, interviewers may be filtering out qualified candidates by confounding assessment of problem-solving ability with unnecessary stress."
This has been widely discussed on this site and is a pretty contentious topic.
For my view, consider a very bright problem solver, who bursts into tears every time a person watches or criticizes their code. Do you think that's relevant to performance?
Certainly is a balance, but studies like this usually wilfully ignore all of the other aspects of software work, that aren't sitting in a chair alone writing code.
The stakes are completely different, which is the main problem.
When being interviewed, an entire career is resting on your 45 min - 3 hr performance. And at certain places, that could potentially mean the difference between $50k/year, and $250k/year.
On the other hand, you're not risking your job every time you discuss something with your co-workers.
There will always be absolute edge cases (like the person you described, which by all means sound like an extreme case) - and I think it's fine that some tests manage to exclude these, but the problem is that it's also potentially removing candidates far away from the edge.
White-boarding or "oral exams" are effective in proportion to the skill of the person giving them. Most people have little natural skill in this even (perhaps especially) if they are expert in the domain being examined.
I learned this rather well studying abroad in Ireland. I got a final grade of 92 in a class on protein modeling, which in the UK/Irish grading system is really high.
The professor asked me if I had taken the class before.
I hadn't, but the exam was all short answer and multiple choice. Which was very different from the long-form work most of his students did, but absolutely in an American student's wheelhouse.
I was okay in the class. What I was really, really good at was the test.
I also personally appreciated the time limits of exams as well. They seemed like a good balance to projects whose outcome was primarily decided by how much time one could spend (there's a clear balance in the real world utility of performing well under unstrained time, and time management, etc).
Projects are great. But the best ones are time-consuming because, as you suggest, you can often iterate one more time. This is especially true if the problem space is at least somewhat unconstrained even if the result isn't. I probably got more out of project-oriented courses undergrad/masters (and my Masters thesis) but it doesn't scale to the whole curriculum.
Hey HN admins! This is actually an ad! The website "unemployedprofessors.com" has a really really strong guerilla marketing campaign going on all over the web. They've used a bunch of instagram meme accounts to do undisclosed promotions (such as @russiansinlondon) and spread these articles about the "problem" of ghostwriting while actually just promoting them.
The real article on HN should be about how this company is using all these crazy tricks to get them traffic.
Just wanted to nit pick
>No doubt the rise of the Internet – and today’s “cut and paste” culture -- has cheapened the value of “original” work.
I think broad statements like these, that blame a shift in culture, do so out of a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary past. Isn't it more likely that the effect the author sees is simply part of the culture and that changing technology allowed for new expressions of it?
Whenever an author says "No doubt" or similar, there are doubts the author can't answer. It's a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, something to get you looking over here while the hole in their logic slips quietly past over there. Do it deftly enough and you can get people to swallow camels in your article, even if they'd strain at gnats in an article written without such devices.
The scale matters when classes are graded on a curve. If a few students cheat the score distribution doesn't change too much, if a significant fraction of students cheat it really hurts those who don't.
I had exactly one class in college where cheating was rampant. I don't know why, but most of that class cheated on exams; the prof reused exams, and frats had bibles. I didn't see much cheating in my other classes; it was exceptionally rare.
That class was graded on a curve.
I got a 'B', and I would say I was in the 90th percentile for understanding the material. It would have been neigh-impossible to get an 'A' without cheating.
Where I'm from, previous exams are public and you can request previous students' answers (with names and PII censored) from the university for a small processing fee. This forces the professors to not reuse exams.
I've seen a case where about half the class was cheating. People would pay those who took the test earlier to give the exam. Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any particular student for cheating.
Only if you come down equally hard on paid academics for being so incredibly lazy that they encourage cheating. Yes students should resist that temptation but man alive what the academics are doing to put that temptation in their way is completely unconscionable.
An academic with a cheating problem in their course has a problem they need to solve it they are knowingly screwing the honest. From a position of power.
Just like a lot of things where the best thing to do for the individual only works out if only a tiny minority of parasites do it.
e.g. getting a vaccine. You're arguably best off if you're part of the 1% of the population who choose not to get one but still get protected by herd immunity. But if that 1% grows to 10/20/30%, suddenly, not only does the defection advantage disappear, but the whole herd starts to suffer. Tragedy of the commons.
We're all stuck between a rock and a hard place of simultaneously not wanting to restrict individual freedom, autonomy, and privacy, but also recognizing that when being a parasite is a disproportionately advantageous role for an individual to choose, it eventually kills the host.
The main character in the film Grease 2 (released in 1982) was paid by his fellow students to write their essays. I remember because he inspired me to set up a similar business in the 90s.
I think you're right. It's even has interesting formatting in one paragraphs, and description that sounds like the ad.
One of the first and best known academic ghost-writing web sites is
SITENAME.com based out of Montreal, Canada. It’s been in business for nearly 20 years, longer than most.
It is and good pickup. That site has some really good pull and has managed to put itself in some really big name articles for pure seo purposes over the past couple years
At a society level, companies and billionaires are outsourcing every goddamn thing they can to anywhere but America and Americans, and unfortunately that extends to other Western nations as well now.
They only got pissed off because for once, the little guy was winning here and outsmarted the greedy sons of bitches.
If you want a powerful Western society, you have to pay Western residents Western wages. Now China is on the rise and clearly the most dangerous threat not just to the United States, but the rest of the Western world, but no one sees it because they want their $999 iPhone that would be $1999 if it were actually assembled in California by people asking for a measly $15 an hour.
I'm pretty sure they were pissed off because they are a "critical infrastructure" company whose employee exfiltrated their entire source code. Not to mention, if they were doing any government work, they may have inadvertently let in foreign actors- not great for "critical infrastructure" since management aren't likely to have been the worst hurt had anything gone more wrong.
Bear in mind he was getting a 6 figure salary- he was hardly the little guy making under $15 an hour.
There’s no way that assembly in California or anywhere else in the US would even come close to doubling the price of an iPhone. Assembly cost is not that high[1].
Basically, "all" (haha) you have to do to make this happen is hire people who have have already implemented the process you want to replicate somewhere else and then put them under people who have operated comparable industry in your target country of manufacture. I've seen people do it with various degrees of success, IMO it's never worth trying without a really good reason (eg you have a brand advantage for being made in the Japan/Germany/Switzerland/USA and etc) which sometimes you do.
I've been a part of electronics manufacturing and I absolutely agree that moving this kind of manufacture has never really been done in the US (specifically, moving an assembly process developed and executed in the east to the USA) especially for a product as complex as a smartphone. That said, I've seen it done at a small scale several times and generally I can say it's quite possible to do it, as long as you can accept a premium of 5-15%.
It’s not obvious what grades have to do with anything. I’m referring to the idea that if you are teaching people you know enough about them to recognize what they’ve written.
What I mean specifically is that students aren't necessarily paying for work that couldn't be reasonably attributed to them. It's pretty obvious when, for example, an essay is grad-level quality.
This was when internet was either dial-up or not at all, so the class could not have practicably been online (I remember downloading a 40 minute video heavily compressed with quicktime; it took multiple days).
The fact that we haven't seen some massively decline in productivity when there started to be rampant "ghost writing" means it's probably fairly meaningless.
It reminds me of the fact that when I was five to nine, my school assigned loads of academic busywork that was completely pointless.
My mum did it for me and let me go out and play. Our class ranks were based solely on exam performance, and I was top of every class.
University probably has loads of pointless busywork too. Though I recall my Masters degree in CS actually being a rather enjoyable experience all around with fun assignments.
For CS classes at least, it seems like you're missing out if you don't do the work because it's so much fun!
Technological productivity has been increasing, but social productivity seems to be declining. Compare the 2020 Presidential debates to JFK vs Nixon's debate, for instance. I don't think that ghostwriting is to blame though.
University is, at least in the classical form, a scientific institution. And science is communicated in writing. So at least in principle, exercising the writing of papers and essays under time pressure is completely natural.
In practice, though, the writing is often hardly instructive. There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of Style" seriously. And the subjects are usually quite trivial.
But calling writing per se is as much "busywork" as learning a programming language, CAD modeling, or working out mathematical proofs by induction.
> There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of Style" seriously.
That's because it's garbage. Learning to write is great. But that is best done by reading good writing and practicing. A list of rules that constantly violates its own advice because obeying it would make the text hard to read is not of any value.
First of all, uttering criticism is taking something serious, no?
Second, I cannot judge the grammar part, and style is always debatable. But the rules for style were hardly inconsistent when I read the book. "Omit needless words." is the most useful one, especially for academic writing.
galaxy-brain: a great deal of resources are wasted in the university signalling game, by devaluing university these cheaters are contributing to societal progress in the long run.
This seems to indicate that some careers require a college degree without actually requiring the knowledge dispensed at the university.
If a job really required university knowledge you would be fired pretty quickly if you didn’t do the assignments but because people keep investing money in paying ghost writers it would indicate that it’s paying off.
I personally see this on CodeMentor: “I don’t care how it works, I don’t need to understand it, I just need it done in the next 60 minutes”.
Enterprise Rent-a-car used to have commercials all the time about how they're one of the largest employers of college grads. Why on earth does someone at a counter handing out car rentals even need a college degree?
Idiots armed with statistics perhaps showing college graduates were less likely to steal or take risks with a car while ignoring other variables like wealth and what is "worth committing crime for"? Auto insurance companies were known to charge those with college degrees less.
It's going to be interesting when these people figure out GPT-3 exists. The days of the take-home essay as a useful grading tool are definitely numbered, at least in non-science disciplines.
I'm looking forward to GPT-3 (or its successor) as something to do phrase-level autocomplete, rather than word-level as we have now. It will help as my finger joints get worse.
There are many things you get for texts, not just degrees. Academic degrees are just the ones that are regulated, so it's against the law to get them with the help of a ghostwriter.
But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for all kinds of publications.
> But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for all kinds of publications.
Yeah, but those are for the low end of the hiring market. Personally I mostly just ignore 'awards', unless it's a Nobel Prize or something.
In fact, too much award fluff is a big negative weighting for me. Same with patents and ECs.
I assume it's similar anywhere that ability actually matters. Sure you might get a boring entry-level IB job at some meat factory whose mild 'prestige' will impress your parents/schoolmates, but who cares in the grand scheme of things.
There are also political ones both of the incredible petty internal politics and salt at them contradicting or not promoting their ideology sufficiently in their view. Although the first could be argued as jobs/employment on an internal level.
Wait a minute .... "getting a good education is easier than it used to be?" No, not that.
"Not getting a good education, but saying you did." is easier.
What is the point? Why not spend the best years of your life struggling to understand things? Why just bug out and waste your time?
It's not like rich kids hiring people to be drafted in their place, and sent to the Battle of Gettysburg to be praised by Abraham Lincoln in their graves.
Going to university is good. If it's isn't good, why do it?
Why fake it? So the patients you treat die because you're incompetent? "Anatomy? I hired somebody to take that exam for me. My bad."
Why don’t these cheating services ever get investigated by the police? They are obvious, organised, profitable frauds. How is this any different to selling fake IDs or stolen usernames and passwords?
It's not clear that it's illegal. The federal fraud statutes cover obtaining "money or property" through false statements. A prosecutor would have to convince a jury that the site is engaged in conspiracy to commit fraud and that a degree is property. If I were on that jury I'd convict, but it's a riskier bet than prosecutors usually like. I'd be interested in seeing a well crafted law here that makes it obviously a crime, although federal felony is a bit harsh but that's what let's you coordinate across state lines.
I think that case [1] is largely based on bribery, a recognised form of honest services fraud [2] for which it’s not necessary to prove that the defendant ‘obtained money or property.’
Thanks for prompting me to look a little further into this. Leaving aside the legal technicalities, I suppose there is a fundamental difficulty here in that academic cheating itself generally is not (and in my opinion shouldn’t be) dealt with as a legal issue. I think that it should be illegal to profit from it, but it does fundamentally differ from other kinds of fraud because the person who pays isn’t deceived, and the person who deceives isn’t paid.
The U.S. mail and wire fraud statutes are notoriously broad and on their face, seem to cover academic cheating services. Indeed, there is a precedent to this effect: United States v. International Term Papers, Inc., 477 F.2d 1277 (1973) [1]. However, I think it was overcome by the Supreme Court’s rejection of honest services fraud in 1987 [2]. While Congress reinstated the concept [3], the Supreme Court cut it down again in 2010, limiting it to bribery and kickbacks [4].
So that could explain why the newer online services haven’t been prosecuted federally. Several U.S. states have statutes explicitly dealing with this issue [5], but I suppose they are not being enforced for jurisdiction or resourcing reasons. Perhaps the newer legislation in Australia [6] and New Zealand [7] will be more effective.
It was during one of the first assignments of an infamous class I took during my bachelors. For context, the course was in Danish, but it was optional whether the hand-in, was in Danish Or English.
My group had written our assignment in English and had handed it in to the (public) repository.
The funny thing about this course was its structure, each group had to write a assignment, and then peer review two other assignments. This was done to take some load of the professors, as well as teach the students about collaborating on a long running project.
The first peer-review we had, was an exact copy of our own hand-in, though translated to Danish. it was quite unfortunate, I believe they got off with only a remark. But it was quite an experience to review your own work, plagiarized to that extend. Especially as it was in the beginning of the semester.
I always cringe when I have to interview someone with a masters degree in computer science because in my interview I ask a FizzBuzz style question and CS masters people, for whatever reason, don't have a good record (for me) with questions like that. Plus, it's just more awkward watching someone flub the question and thinking about CS education (which I assume from my undergrad experience is much more math, algorithms, theory, and pseudocode) versus programming in practice which, in our case, is much more about "implement this straightforward logic".
As someone with a masters in CS from a big name US school, the demographics of my cohort were super interesting. With the exception of a very small number of folks (<5% of total), everyone either had specific outside support (mainly government computer security scholarships of some kind) or was from outside the US.
I think this is because the cost of getting a masters doesnt make sense for someone with a CS undergrad who can easily apply to FAANG/etc.
I guess I would have assumed that the typical CS masters didn't cost the person much (other than the opportunity cost). When I got an engineering masters (non-CS) most of it was covered via stipend.
As a counter-point, here are three examples of highly successful individuals in the tech industry with an M.S. in computer science as their highest degree:
If we include successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, the list becomes larger still.
Of course, these examples are cherry-picked, but I'd be careful with your assumptions.
Many people who pursue Master's degrees in the U.S. are international students who didn't have the luxury to do their undergrad in the U.S., a large number of whom have gone on to great success in the tech industry. At the high end, M.S. in computer science grads represent the best and brightest of three groups: international students, PhD dropouts, and those curious enough about CS to pursue it at the graduate level.
I don't think that's a counter point. I'm not saying that CS masters people can't be successful employees or entrepreneurs, just that in my experience the ones I've interviewed tend not to do well on simple "implement this function" type questions. I'm not making a broader claim, just stating my experience.
It is a counter-point to "I always cringe when I have to interview someone with a masters degree in computer science", because there seems to be a generalization encoded there that people with master's degrees tend to be weak at interviewing and weak on practical skills (based on the rest of your comment).
Were they "real" M.Sc degrees or "conversion course" M.Sc degrees (the equivalent of an expensive boot camp with a official piece of paper at the end)? I'm part time staff at a UK university which offers a 'conversion course' degree. It is vaguely annoying (from my vantage point of 25 years in industry) that these students are getting M.Sc degrees - the good students learn the basics of programming, so I'm not throwing shade on them, but I would hire someone with a B.Sc over them if I had to choose. Those with a B.Sc are more knowledgeable due to having 3 years experience in IT stuff versus just one.
But they are getting M.Sc degrees because part of the course involves learning how to "do research", i.e. the process. That apparently is a general requirement for students getting an accredited M.Sc degree. But it doesn't have to be original research... or even good research. Honestly, the whole program is sort of a diploma mill and given that students typically go into the program in order to retool and get a job in IT, they would be better served learning more focused stuff like one does in a boot camp than "how to do research". Or maybe a not-MSc degree, but something that indicates they're good enough to be junior programmers but are not really MSc level. The uni is trying to play the "boot camp" game while adhering to "academic standards".
I OTOH went thru a "real" MSc program from a much better uni (Edinburgh) and you absolutely had to have the basics of IT under your belt before taking that program.
What point are you trying to make? Every hiring manager should know that a CS Master's degree focuses mainly on theory and doesn't necessarily teach much coding. If you just need programmers to do simple stuff then you'll obtain better results by hiring from trade schools, or finding candidates who are self taught.
I was responding to "credentials don't mean much" with my experience. People with what some might assume is a relevant credential don't seem to be that suitable.
E: Another point - I know people who do more complicated things when programming, the thing is, they are also able to do simple things. I'd be really uncomfortable about hiring someone to do something complicated if they couldn't do something simple.
My favorite bit of the story is that he had been known as the best developer in house, and in a different article I can't find anymore there were more quotes from his coworkers about how it seemed like he could do anything, no matter the technology / programming language.
In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior. I'll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may appreciate the details so I've included them.
I'm currently going back to school and my experience in doing so is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes, English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a full formal essay or test.
In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were "evolving" into man/machine "centaurs" such as the super powers of "ESP" that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other was an article from The Atlantic titled "Is google making us stoopid?" (no, I did not misspell "stupid", that was the title). The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive.
I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought about by an industry of attention battling (too many distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the portion where the article's author talked to a neurologist.
In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response displaying how intelligent robots actually are.
So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay explaining that even though computers played chess (a main sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state championships as a child and currently after not playing for a long time have a rating of around 1600-1700).
I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis "side-stepped the entire point of the exercise". I wrote my professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected. The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back to the "gist". My final essay was scored poorly on the summary section for "only capturing the gist". I also pointed out that in my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks.
He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I was three weeks into our next essay. It's interesting to note that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this "formal research essay" as well because it contained "too much research" and was not "opinionated enough".
The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work: better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc.
My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for understanding what you should study for the test. However, you are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from this approach to learning.
Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am not one of those people but the design of the institution, at least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and further circumvent actual practice and learning.
On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading software. Something I had not before known existed and was mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of the subject matter my class was concerned with.
Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing their jobs.
An older relative once gave me the hint to bury a question in my text to see whether the examiner would address it. I was actually surprised to get an answer when I tried that.
I once caught a fellow grad student out on hiring someone to do our assignment. I was looking for free-lance work and happened upon an ad, which contained a copy of the assignment instructions. I felt no compunction at all at reporting to the instructor. The assignment was a lot of work.
Big Pharma uses this heavily to bias research in academia for their marketing purposes. It used to be that academic research was rigorous and objective. An academic title had prestige and respect. Now it's so watered down.
Maybe we just should not care?
In the end, if someone claims sth., she always has to give proof.
If da Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. super plus claims sth. without proof, and a pink hair colored teenager claims sth. with proof, everyone _should_ believe the teen (actually believing the proof, not the person).
Sadly thats not the case, lots of people still believe "eminence based proof" instead of "evidence based proof".
which comes from peer-review and other scientists verifying it.
.. there are too many Prof. Dr. Dr. that did not "cheat" but still claim covid isn't real .. so the title really doesn't mean anything at all to me .. also having studied myself seeing what kind of idiots also got their exams .. it's maybe just a proof they can 'write' and 'read', but even believing this would proof 'understanding' is a big overestimation of the title itself ..
Most people don’t “need” a high level education nor do they actually want one, a degree is just another metric about a person and when you make something a metric you tend to ruin it.
Most people would benefit from a liberal education, that is the literal meaning of liberals to make one free, but most don’t actually get it at university because it’s hard to do and to measure (and not many actually care).
I saw somewhere that Paul Graham whole set of academic credentials are a farce. Through means similar to this story he basically paid others to do the majority of his work, all the way through grad school.
Partly explains why his language projects like Arc have been a hot mess.
That site was very hard to read on my browser. Every couple of seconds the author's byeline would flicker (too fast for me to see what it changed to) and the text would jump up and down.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
I don't mean to pick on you personally—the problem is more that these things tend to get upvoted to the top of the thread, where they choke out on-topic conversation. This happens because the annoyances are real, not because they're unreal. At the same time this comes up so often that we have to try to avoid the repetition.
In this particular case, the way the site semi-periodically twitches is kind of interesting itself. Way more than the common annoyances that you rightly chastise people for complaining about.
1. There are no apparent ads on the site. There are three things uBlock origin blocks, but they don't seem to be things doing anything visible (I'd guess trackers).
Usually it is sites infested with ads and a ton of trackers where you encounter visual glitches this jarring.
2. The interval between glitches varies, and sometimes it is a double glitch instead of a single glitch.
3. If I open the site in both Firefox and Chrome, their glitches are in sync. Same if I open it in more than one Firefox or Chrome window.
This suggests whatever it is doing is based on clock time, not on time since page load which is what I would have expected.
I agree in general. In this particular case, though, it was jarring. Having the screen jump every few seconds without the user interacting at all is a bit extreme.
does anyone know how AMP seems to avoid this (despite the hate here). On AMP sites I rarely get the post paint jumping around insanity.
My own metric - non AMP site + clickbait headline = jank and constant jumps as dynamic stuff happens (be it ads changing or show off or attention grabbers or analytics maybe).
Yes, keep on eye on HN posts, especially mobile browsers often have a very jumpy experience - common issues are various permissions pop-ups for things like cookies, and weird reflow issues as you scroll etc. Would it be helpful if I provided specific examples of crap laden or janky websites?
This is such a common issue HN site guidelines actually have a rule for this:
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. ..."
I've become more and more convinced the AMP haters just have total blinders on to the crap that websites spew - or are browsing with ad blockers or javascript blockers or something.
There are a lot of courses that people are forced to take that have nothing to do with what they are trying to do in life. For example, nurses being forced to take an algebra (equivalent of HS algebra 1, algebra 2, trig, and and some analytic geometry). It is a big impediment for those students to pass that class and many cannot. So, nurses are selected on a skill they will never use or see again.
I can't blame students in that predicament for cheating on those kinds of courses.
They are merely jumping through the hoop. A hoop that serves no purpose, and is itself unethical.
I've seen many such students cheat on those courses so they can focus on their core learning and get on with their lives.
Now the ghostwriting was also an issue, but that theoretically still can be caught (and it was from time to time). One way to do that was requiring in person exams and you always had to cary your uni I'd for the exams.
However, what the University administration realised is that there were some students essentially hired someone at the beginning of their studies to impersonate them at registration, where they got their photo taken. The "impersonator" would then complete the full studies for the student.
Now you need to id yourself at registration, however if the hired person looked somewhat similar it would just go through.