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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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UC school? Even when I was in school in the mid 00's, I heard stories about how terrible the cheating was in the UC schools. And who was doing it.

Over on the east coast, in a technical degree, cheating really didn't get you that far. There were tons of projects you could ostensibly cheat on. But you'd flunk all the test, and thus the class. I never cheated, and regularly broke the curve on tests, so I can't say how much other cheating was going on. I will say I did notice lots of people constantly grappling with an ever growing intellectual debt they never payed off. Turns out you can't cheat all the way from the equivalent of addition and subtraction to calculus. There comes a point where you don't even recognize the material well enough to cheat anymore.

Only thing that hurt my prospects in school was my own laziness towards non-technical required courses I had. As well as one professor that literally told me the wrong date/time for the final exams, and when I showed up and nobody was there, gave me a big fat 0 for the final exam. It was something like 20% of my grade, and I still got a C for the course, so I passed. Complained to the dean and they also didn't give a fuck because I passed anyways.

Not in the US, but keep in mind this was when Universities went online during covid. I would say base rates of cheating are not that high during normal times but online you would have had to go through the haystack to find someone not cheating.

Yeah, everything about education during the COVID era seemed a twist on that old Soviet joke. "They pretend to pay us teach and we pretend to work learn.".

There was only one subject where I encountered widespread cheating and that was programming/computer science.

It was easy to cheat and a lot of people hated programming and didn't imagine that they would work doing actual programming when they started working. Only, this was the worst subject to cheat in because like 70% ended up doing some kind of programming work after school and this was one of the subjects that actually had real world use, unlike multivariate calculus or smth.

Fascinating. I'm curious how the classes were structured in terms of how homework, projects and exams were weighted. Also exactly how these people were cheating. Cheating on projects was common, and people would regularly copy each others work wholesale, making only minor tweaks to defeat the "cheating detection" programs. Exams were far harder to cheat at, as they were not multiple choice, were rarely rote memorization, and frequently required you to write out pseudocode to solve slightly more novel problems than you'd already encountered. I can imagine someone cheating getting up to a passing grade in these classes. I cannot imagine them outperforming me.

There was a fad (?) in the 90s (and presumably going forward from there) to weight projects in general CS/SE very highly because "we need to train people to work in a team so they are ready for the workplace environment".

Even when there wasn't outright cheating this resulted in the one or two competent people involved in any group project essentially doing all the work because everyone else was actively harmful -- so, pretty much like the workplace environment I guess.

"Individual" assignments were often treated similarly -- this wasn't such a problem for competent people because the assignments were pretty easy, but sometimes the sheer volume could be a bit much for those not in the cheating ring.

Yeah, now that you mention, I had 2 or 3 classes in my bachelors program that would fit that bill. I hit on them by accident because of a frustrating series of events. I have no idea what the total proportion of classes were like that, but I suppose someone forewarned could maximize the number of "group work" classes they had.

Here's a funny story. During one of my group work, do all the actual work sessions, my lazy good for nothing group mate showed up to "help", even though all that was left to do was a single task which could not be broken up and which he said he didn't know how to do. He's sitting around making mouth sounds about "I wish there was something I could do" and I tell him "Get me a beer". He laughs. "No, I'm serious, get me a beer from the fridge."

"Can I have one too?" And like the little bitch I was at 20 I said "Yes".

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