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.
