Threads like these are always frustrating, because as usual people (programmers in this case) freely air their opinions on how schools are broken with phrases like “we need to fix the system”.
As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cases not a teacher, nor someone with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
People love to rant about how bad tests are. “We just study for the tests” and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be international. Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).
> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.
The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.
Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.
I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.
What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
I don't know if it's popular in France, but another very simple idea that eliminates cheating entirely is oral exams. They're still done a lot in Italy. I once literally inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard :)
Totally agree.
I might a bit partial to that, because I tend to underperform multiple choice tests for overthinking, but I've really the impression that open ended questions test knoledge much better and make it more difficult to cheat.
Beside that, having almost nothing to do with cheating, another good thing in the French system is the continuous grading: labs were graded, projects were graded, small intermediate tests were graded, so you really do not study for just the exam (actually often you do not study at all for the exam).
(beware: my experience is limited to a single grande école I attended).
I'm currently grading an open book test as you describe. It turns out that someone put their attempt at answers on chegg.com shortly after I posted the test. The temptation to use chegg is too great for students to resist. When chegg has the wrong solution (which is often the case), students will doubt themselves and will go with the wrong chegg answer.
To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its copies did not exist.
Yeah I came from uk undergrad to us grad school and was shocked to see that even some advanced undergrad classes, with grad students in them, were tested by infantile multiple choice questions (this was at harvard). It almost makes one wonder whether the us dominates academia to the extent it does because of the foreign influx.
> I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory.
As a US citizen, many tests were open book essay style, especially once we got to college.
In public school however, lots of "standardized" multiple choice tests that were used to grade the school. Some of those tests also include an essay portion.
Teachers in the US aren't paid to do grading, they typically do it at home in their own time, thus very few essay style tests.
I never gave a fuck about grades. For some courses I had below average marks, for others I was the best.
I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea.
And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z.
I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp.
Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and architecting software.
> I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one idea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea.
> programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them
Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.
Even in medicine, the first triage will probably be done by a nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to require such a high standard everywhere.
People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and the buyers get good value from it.
Sorry but I’m gonna be very blunt. I think sound pretentious as fuck.
> I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work
I don’t think you do.
Genuine curiosity forged in one’s own mind. It is not something that can be bounded, repackaged as a curriculum, and sold in university. It’s like ether, it’s everywhere and can be captured by anyone, through multiple means.
University degrees for any professions are useless. Even in medicine! There are shit doctors and good doctors. Most people here would’ve run through a couple of them before picking one. I’ve been with my current doctor for 10 years now, because they are really good, empathic, and teach me rather than just pushing pills.
Software in my humble opinion works the same way. I care more about what someone does with the tools they have, rather than them being made of wood or metal or gold
I doubt it, but I downvoted you for saying that. No comment anywhere has ever been improved by adding "I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but". Please don't do it.
In retrospective now I know that I unconsciously sabotaged myself, I knew the best way to pass subjects was to have a basic understanding of the theory and then practice a lot of exam question examples, but I just couldn't get myself to do that until I had in fact understood the theory in depth.
That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in the most difficult course in my degree. Everyone, specially those who were normally top of the class, were like "WTF did you do??" lol
But you don’t need a degree to understand the fundamentals. Jus because you don’t have a degree from an institution it doesn’t mean you don’t count as a programmer. You can learn all of this things on your own pace even if you started by learning how to modify Wordpress themes or got into the field after taking a boot camp. My point is (from the original comment) that grading knowledge and ability to produce quality work is a very hard thing to achieve. I would even go further and question whether it’s even necessary. For example you’re likely not getting a job straight after college without facing the company’s interview process. And every company has its own way. So even if you were to solve the issue in academics, it’s likely to not reflect on the student’s ability to get a job and perform properly
Well it's probably down to the harm done if the standards are lowered vs. the gain.
Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People die, or at least there's substantial material damage.
When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something practical. Does that make them programmers? Probably I guess.
Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where a poorly written program will cause anyone any harm especially since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected before being used for real, unlike a doctor who must use their skills on the fly and get it right first time, every time. So the bar for entry is obviously much lower and lowering standards doesn't do much to increase harm.
> I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos
Yet real doctors actually believe the bullshit they get from medical reps when it comes to prescribing actual drugs that goes in patients bodies. I will let you ponder how successful that strategy is.
Because most of what is needed out there doesn't require an equivalent of a doctor's degree.
The truth is, is that programming languages themselves have evolved far enough that knowing exactly what's running underneath the hood isn't needed anymore, outside of niche specialist cases. Most people don't even need to worry about seeing a single 'index out of range' issue, or worry about CPU cycles. And it's only going to become easier and easier.
I'd compare it to bricklaying. Yes, you need to use the correct formula for the cement you use, but figuring out that formula has already happened. For niche cases that require special cement, you go to the cement specialists that know the ins and outs of it.
I think you’re over-estimating the difficulty of the average programming job. The simple fact is we have great frameworks to work off of and building things from scratch is a waste of time and money for most business applications. Wordpress is a great jumping off point for like 75% of businesses. If you know how to write some custom theme code I’d call you a programmer. Doesn’t mean you’ll get a job in system-level design, but you’ll be able to pull a paycheck and sustain your life (and potentially support others). What exactly is wrong with that?
I have seen plenty of bad code monkeys who had high grades, the idea that the current 'high standards' give us better programmers is unfounded.
The issue is that modifying a Wordpress theme is just as much of a job as optimizing a low level 3D rendering pipeline or writing facial recognition software. One of these is not like the others and the issue is that universities fail to realise this and just try to teach everything.
In my mind we would need to abolish the idea of a general programmer and move towards specialization.
> Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
It doesn't, a good programmer is self evident to good peers.
And schooling isn't the only way to get there. I know plenty of academically educated CS grads that aren't a great programmer not because they didn't do well in school (I have no way of knowing but I assume they did well), but because they lacked curiosity and interest into programming.
The reason why doctors have to jump through so many hoops is that the stakes are higher for failure.
While there are times where a piece of code failure or poorly worded instructions can cause injury to others, those are exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking- the cost of failure for writing and software is lower than it is medicine, and it makes sense not to gatekeep these industries behind theory, and rather just let results speak for themselves.
My position on this has been pretty controversial when I've shared it before, but I still think it's correct:
Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of their value while building an ever-expanding series of increasingly meaningless hoops for people to jump through to get what they actually need. We have deemed it necessary to create assessments to prop up the idea that education can be easily measured and should gate meaningful life outcomes for most people. Most if not all "cheating" behavior is either just a rational, strategic response to this situation, or a disconnect between how people actually solve problems (e.g. often collaborative and laser-focused on the part of the problem that drives the outcome, in this case the assessment) and some weird cultist notion of what it means for an individual to do it "correctly".
Effective pedagogy will never scale unless we get some really AGI-like technologies (I loved The Diamond Age as a kid, but A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is from the perspective of extant tech a total pie-in-the-sky fantasy, illustrative of how meaningful teaching requires individualized approaches), and we see time and time again that teacher-to-student ratios as well as particularly good specific teachers are overwhelmingly the drivers of even the stupid metrics we are optimizing for
In short, this whole system is broken because its fundamental premise is flawed
What you are saying is not at all controversial, but it is incomplete, which is probably why you have received pushback in the past. Criticising the existing system is easy. Giving an alternative is harder. Implementing that alternative and showing that it's actually better on some metric is MUCH harder than that. But you have not even given an alternative!
> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was done in class, in longhand.
There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the approach, and the solution, and you got points for that even if the ultimate result was wrong.
"Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense.
This system didn't "scale" very well; in fact it didn't scale at all.
If you build a system that let one person "teach" classes of hundred of students and generate quizzes that can be instantly rated by a machine, then some (most?) students are going to try to game that system.
This is inevitable, and I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
> "Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense.
In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of problems so we can't copy off each other because people sitting one sit away from each other have different sets.
I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him).
In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in USA).
Yes, although many of the students in the story weren’t interested enough in learning, had “low morals”, “no honor” and some apparently were scumbags, as a group they were somewhat efficiently solving the problem of passing the class… that’s not nothing!
In the real world the solutions to your problems can’t be found online, or if they can it’s valid to search them there (and lawyers will charge you a lot to do that). Collectively searching and distributing a solution is something young people are quite adept at (e.g. gaming wikis).
>> HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale.
Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for.
Hence, the system is not broken - it's working exactly as intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at this scale.)
Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or
B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge.
College does not prepare people for the working world (and never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
In the case of testing, it very much can scale. Tests need to be based on long form questions that test comprehensive knowledge. Open book, Open notes, and hell even open-collaboration up to some limit.
If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer questions.
This obviously doesn't translate for multiple choice tests where there is no partial credit but at least in engineering those don't really exist outside of first year and maybe one or two second year classes. And honestly, every intuition tells me that those classes that I remembered doing no-partial-credit multiple choice should not be doing so in the first place.
Maths classes like algebra, precalc, calculus, statistics, and linear algebra should by no means be using no-partial-credit exams. That defeats the entire purpose of the classes as those classes are to teach techniques rather than any particular raw knowledge.
Same for the introductory hard sciences like chemistry and physics.
And for the ability to handle those more "bespoke" exams, we really need to be asking the question of why certain students are taking certain classes. Many programs have you take a class knowing that only maybe 30% of that will be relevant to your degree.
Instead of funneling all the students through a standard "maths education" class, maybe courses would be better suited by offering an "X degree's maths 1-3" or even simply breaking up maths classes into smaller semesters where you are scheduled to go to teacher X for this specific field up to week A, then teacher Y for this other unrelated maths field up to week B, and teacher Z until the end of the semester. In-major classes need not do this but general pre-req classes could benefit by being shorted and split up through the semester into succinct fields of knowledge so that maths or physics departments aren't being unnecessarily burdened by students who will never once apply the knowledge possibly learned in that class.
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The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world. No artificial handicaps and at most checks should be made for obviously plagiarized solutions. If that's not a viable testing mechanism, it's probably worth asking why and considering reworking the course or program.
The solution to students not wanting to absorb knowledge is to stop forcing students to learn topics & techniques they'll never use because maybe some X<25% of them will. Instead split up courses into smaller chunks that can be picked and chosen when building degree tracks.
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Edit: I forgot to include it but this is largely based on my experiences not necessarily just on my own as a student but as a tutor for countless peers and juniors during my time at university, and as a student academics officer directly responsible for monitoring and supporting the academic success of ~300 students for an organisation I was part of. This largely mirrors discussions I've had with teaching staff and it always seems to boil down to "the administration isn't willing to support this" or some other reason based on misplaced incentives at an administrative and operational level (such as researchers being forced to teach courses and refusing to do anything above or often even just at the bare minimum for the courses they are teaching).
> Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount
I have some thoughts about the education system, and despite not being a teacher or academic I like to believe that my opinions have some value because I'm an expert programmer that has worked in the field for over 50 years. I attended three different major universities and have degrees in Math, EE, and CS. I still code almost every day (my Emacs configuration is never finished!), and I have in the past taught or been a teaching assistant for both undergrad and graduate courses for four semesters. Cheating has always been a concern, but now things are different.
The original article highlights the scale of exam cheating during the pandemic, but for us, the readers of HN, there is another problem with university learning that happens because of the internet. I've seen this affect virtually all of my younger friends pursuing degrees in CS. Programming assignments in school are unrealistically difficult, and it causes everyone to cheat.
Here's a typical real-life example: after covering doubly linked lists in the undergrad data-structure's class the programming assignment is to write a GUI based text editor in Java using doubly linked lists. This isn't especially hard for a professional programmer, but this is the first programming assignment of the course. Students had to wrestle with Eclipse, learning the AWT/Swing interfaces, event loop programming, and how to translate low level pointer based data structures into non-idiomatic Java based imitations of linked lists that kind of simulated using pointers. Most of the students really couldn't do this on their own, but they didn't have to because they can find the solutions to this very problem right on the internet.
Why would professors give such a program to beginning programmers to write? Because every student turns in a solution, and this causes the professors to lose touch with how difficult their assignments are. Over and over again difficult assignments are given, but the students are seemingly keeping up. The bomb lab assignment is a great assignment for CS students[1], but I've seen it given out with far too few attempts allowed to solve it. Again professors feel like a small number of attempts is all the students should need, they keep turning in the answers. The reason they can is that the complete solution is available on dozens of public Github repos and web sites.
The consequence of such hard and challenging programming assignments is a kind of inflation of the difficulty. The high difficulty causes students to cheat more, since their fellow students are cheating by downloading, cutting and pasting, or simply sharing their programs. There are commercial web-sites like chegg.com that sell the solutions to virtually every homework problem found in CS textbooks. Why should an undergrad spend so much time working on their own homework solutions while other students work openly in big teams at table in the university library?
This kind of cheating is pervasive at the undergrad level. How do we prevent our students to being pushed into cheating to keep up? Graduate school is different, the classes are smaller and more interactive. In my grad school classes I've often had to go to the board to demonstrate my code or proof to the class. Professor Dijkstra used to give individual oral exams to his students. So small interactive classes would help.
I've also seen assembly language programming classes given that require all work to be done on lab computers. The lab computers weren't on the internet and students had to sign in with the lab proctor to use the machines for their assignments. This at least helped some with the problem.
If I was teaching a programming class now, I would require everyone to maintain a git repo that could be checked for realistic commits of the programs as they are written. This might discourage the simple copying of a solution from GitHub the day before the assignment was due.
[1] The text for the bomb-lab assignment (highly recommended by the way):
Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, 3rd edition,Bryant and O’Hallaron, Prentice-Hall, 2016 (ISBN: 0-13-409266- X), a google search will return many bomb-lab assignments and solutions from colleges all over the world.
> Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2) teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning that the job is attractive to competent people.
Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution.
ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work across widely different cultures.
As a Norwegian who lived in Finland for a year, it struck me that the parents I met actually CARED what the kids learn in school, instead of just treating school as daycare for older kids.
This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.
> do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.
1. Spreading knowledge
2. Certifying competence
To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.
Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.
If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.
Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!
Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!
Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.
Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.
Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.
This is it. To expand on further on why it's so crazy to couple education and credentialing - already know all the material in a class? Too bad, you have to pay for it and spend time taking it anyway. Is it a class that's completely unconnected to your field? Too bad, the university is making you take it, so you take it. Is the class taught poorly, so that you need to teach yourself outside of it? Too bad, you still have to pay for it and put time into it, in addition to actually teaching yourself the subject.
The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
So true. And another benefit would be that domain experts giving a course could focus on teaching and sharing their knowledge instead of being forced to deal with all the organisational fluff around final grading and "catching cheaters" that is a giant waste of their time. (I see only usefulness in grading as a feedback mechanism for students – but not as "certification" of student's knowledge for the outside world. I also believe it would be more healthy for both students and teachers if you the grades were just a guidance tool, not something that will affect your future prospects at life).
At the end of the day the final grades from school / college grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more important than the actual learning and so much time and stress is spent on them.
In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers", separate from colleges, where you could go and get a certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private companies that want to hire the best people actually have a good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as possible.
To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the college would act as a generative part and "exam center" would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D
I've thought engineering licensure found a reasonable balance.
Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to having a college engineering degree.
It seems to me that a lot of problems in the real-world can be tracked down to unnecessary dependencies (in this case, having to attend college in order to get certified).
>These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured, distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement - where everything, including education can be improved.
My opinion is that the educational system in most industrialized countries today rewards the wrong things and that the quality of education suffers to allow an easier time of mass-grading and classifying.
Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.
> Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
No, we should listen to the people when deciding what the purpose of school should be, THEN refer to the experts on those purposes. Is it teaching random factoids? Making people "cultured"? Separating out people who follow instructions and learn well from those who don't? Introducing habits useful in a workplace? Good habits of thought? Teaching the knowledge required to vote sensibly? To provide some foundational knowledge for later vocational training? To navigate and function in the modern world? Is it just day care for kids?
First decide on the purpose(s) (and their weightings if many) and only then can we have a plan. I think there hasn't been anywhere near enough thought given by most people about what the purpose(s) of schooling is(are).
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits.
If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.
Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful.
I think there are a few constructive things that can be done. One is allowing curious students to design their own academic career (with guidance and supervision). I think students usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant to their future lives. Sure people need to be exposed to new things, but a semester on something you know you will never care about is torture. I have a computer science degree, but I remember being forced to take geology. To this day I can't think of a bigger waste of time, I remember nothing from it, and even if I did I would never use it.
Vocational schools and apprenticeship should also really come back. I know parents want their kids to be part of the affluent elite, but in a good society being a car mechanic should be a good life. There's no point saddling people with student debt if their degree gets them a job at starbucks.
I also think that things like essays are a lot better than quizzes. Sans plagiarism, it's hard to fake knowledge if you have to write it out.
> Students are just as much a part of the system as teachers, so I don't think this elitism about who can have an opinion is helpful.
Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these truly likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not. Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills to comprehend and advocate for better solutions.
Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government over others. However, I'm under no illusion that democracy's broad, sweeping claims about what government are "best" are really defensible when applied to the general problem of collective problem solving under real-world constraints.
Having one person, one vote seems intuitive and valuable for certain decisions. In particular, it seems useful and practical for selecting certain representatives. But I (and many others) don't think it is a great way of making policy decisions in general. Just as one example: committees of experts can make sense in some contexts.
But in general, we can do better than what most of us have seen so far. We have to do better than that. Look at how well government(s) at all levels are serving their constituents. I think it is self-evident that all can stand tremendous improvement.
So, for any particular context, think about how to design mechanisms that are likely to work well. In so doing, one must account for many factors, including: human biases, cognitive limitations, cultural differences, imperfect communication, economic costs, time constraints, factions, self-interest, lack of experience, and so on.
Keeping these in mind, how exactly would you select, organize, and structure an ongoing set of interactions between, say 1,000 people such that one can maximize the quality of their resulting collective recommendations?
One option is to choose 1,000 people at random and weight their opinions evenly. But this is underspecified. How do you compress those recommendations into a form that others are likely to read? How do you discover collective preferences? There are dozens of key questions even if you generally adhere to the idea of "equally weighting each person's opinion".
But there are manifold other options where each individual's starting opinion is not the driving factor.
I encourage everyone here to study political economy, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Disregard your preconceived framings of how people make decisions. Look at how others have done it. Look at what theorists suggest might be alternatives. It is an amazing journey. I've been thinking about it for almost twenty years, and it is just as fascinating, if not more, as when I first got exposed to these ideas in policy school.
I can't see how this addresses the main problem mentioned in the article. My take is that if a student cheats, they should be expelled from university. If you're very lenient, introduce three strikes. The first two strikes will nullify your course as if it hadn't been taken, the third will get you expelled from university. I personally think that would be too lenient, though, and believe that nobody who cheats in any way should have a place in academia. This question has nothing to do with the quality of teaching or problems with tests, etc. It's a matter of intellectual integrity.
When I first heard that students often cheat in higher education not too long ago, I was shocked. When I studied during the 90s at two good German universities, I had not ever heard of anyone who cheated in any course. A cheating student would have been a huge scandal. To be fair, I studied philosophy and general linguistics. I guess people in more practical disciplines cheated even then, e.g. economics -- more specifically, "BWL" in Germany -- always had a bad reputation. However, even in these disciplines cheating was rare. Its incomprehensible to me why lecturers and universities nowadays appear to be so lenient about it.
The AP classes in American high school, which include a test which can provide college credits if passed were great in my opinion. Mostly because I felt the tests were really good. I took 11 of these tests and I learned a ton that has been relevant and stuck with me ever since. In particular statistics, comp sci, and Spanish seemed really good.
Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses.
Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar.
I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested.
Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered.
Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.
> do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues
I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so many people to share their opinions on the matter is that nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so much of what was taught but what was written down as the result of the teaching.
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Yes, because they've proved they know things by passing through the system and getting good grades. Oh wait...
Sorry for the joke, but seriously, you can't expect us civilians to shut up. Leaving education to educators is as pernicious as leaving law just to lawyers, or journalism just to journalists. In all cases, the outcomes are everyone's business, and because there are real conflicts of interest here (and not just disagreement on facts) it can't just be delegated to experts. Even calling for it will make people rightly suspicious of your agenda.
Unlike with law or journalism though, pretty much everyone has A LOT of experience with the educational system in practice, by being on the receiving end of it for 12+ years. There's a challenge with sharing our experiences in a fruitful way and not just shouting over each other, sure, but suck it up: we have opinions about what education should be and can be, and we won't shut up and leave it to you.
FWIW the teachers lack perspective. I've dated several teachers and listened to their side about why they teach the way they do. I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross referenced to build new models. They had never considered these ideas before.
When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration.
Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.
> I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross referenced to build new models. They had never considered these ideas before.
I've never met a teacher who didn't do those things; I have met many who wouldn't phrase it like that. Just because they're not using the same terminology as you doesn't mean it isn't happening.
It's very easy to look at a system from the outside and think that they're missing the obvious [1]; things become more complex the more you understand them.
And then us engineers come in and fix education just like we did taxis (regulatory arbitrage, offloading costs to the ordinary workers in surprising ways they aren’t aware of, increasing traffic congestion throughout cities, but hooking people onto the rides with unsustainable loss making introductory prices long enough that alternatives such as regular cabs and public transport become worse).
Or the way we fixed productivity in ways that has led to no measurable increase in productivity despite nearly everyone having the most powerful device ever invented in the palm of their hands.
Or the way we fixed housing through regulatory arbitrage, once again, converting housing for residents into short term rentals for vacationers, making housing for residents more expensive globally and making their communities worse.
Or the way we fixed cable by going from bundled cable packages where we have to pay $70-$100 to get all our channels, to unbundled walled gardens where we have to pay $70-$100 to get a fraction of content plus we also have to pay internet fees in addition.
Or the way we fixed messaging and phone calls by taking something like a $1/yr WhatsApp membership that offered safe encrypted chat and converting it into a data harvesting machine.
Or the way we fixed stock investing by gamifying investing, bringing in a lot of people into active trading who have no business being in active trading and should just park their money in Fidelity, and then promising “free” trades by allowing big banks to trade against, leading to a massive wealth transfer from naive individuals to sophisticated banks at the best of times.
The teachers I've known don't really care about measuring knowledge. They're looking for a reasonable way to motivate engagement with the class, that's not too disruptive of the overall flow of the course. One professor told me, "A student who has made an effort to work through the homework problems a couple times should be able to easily get a B on the exam.
Testing also acknowledges that you're competing for your students' attention, and if you give no assessments, your students will rationally focus all of their effort on the courses that do. Preparation for the test becomes a reasonable measure, not of your knowledge, but of how much effort you need to apply to a course. Since students have been taking exams for years, each student knows how to calibrate their own level of effort.
As a student, after some trial and error, I developed a pretty good routine for getting A's in the two kinds of classes I was taking: Those that were dominated by solving problems and proofs, such as math and physics, and those that were based primarily on written assignments, such as art history.
I can tell you that almost every teacher who is not burnt out, does care about how we measure knowledge, mainly because they have to. The big difficulty is that there are two roles for teachers, on one hand you are a mentor and supposed to impart knowledge onto your students (the teaching part). On the other hand you are a gatekeeper, you are supposed to check that the thresholds for some qualification are met. Now if we had an ideal way to measure knowledge those two roles would not really be in conflict with ech other, but because we don't teachers have the difficult job of trying to teach a subject and at the same time find a good way to see if the students actually learnt what the were supposed to. All that with a limited amount of time that is available.
You make it more important to be eventually right than initially right.
Allow tests to be continuously regraded as the things students get wrong are corrected.
Automation would go a long way towards making that more feasible (i.e. easier for a multiple choice test than a written one).
But the emphasis on being right initially as the only thing that matters is unhealthy, and certainly in part what leads to the majority of people doubling down on confirmation bias rather than admitting being wrong and learning/incorporating the knowledge for the future.
Yes, there are practical issues with improving the system. But I've had a few select teachers that had that policy in some form years ago, and it was often the best teachers that did. We'd benefit from a widespread adoption of similar and it might lower the inventive for trying to cheat to be right the first time, as to the kids being brought up in these systems and reflecting these systems, that's the only thing that matters.
This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
You DON'T measure knowledge.
You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.
And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.
Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
CONTROVERSIAL
On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.
The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
> Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators.
>Teachers are not doctors
Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it.
> schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job?
> teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead
Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade.
Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there.
As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.
> You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
> Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.
>This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
>You DON'T measure knowledge.
>You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
>Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
"You should measure the satisfaction of the students"
OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
> ...input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
That last paragraph shows the real issue: that schooling is government controlled and provided.
The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school.
The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well.
If government does it, that literally opens the door for everyone else to be involved, muddying otherwise clear waters.
The real question is even higher.
Why should we measure knowledge?
If it's learning for the joy of learning you don't need a test.
If it's to get a piece of paper you need for a job, then schools are just shitty interviews mostly uncorrelated to real world tasks.
I think we should move to learning for the sake of learning (free, open door lessons or pick your own on the internet at your own time - no frontal lessons but still provide a space for students to socialise) and give the chance to students to work on projects that can prove they know something. Workplaces can look at these projects and find someone who fit with them.
You built a robot? I can reasonably expect you to know something about electrical engineering and math.
why do we need to "measure knowledge"? school should be to teach knowlege. Measuring is not our problem. It is the problem of the employers. Test the teachers not the students. We only need to make sure the teachers are of good quality, not the students.
Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are not put into positions where they can do harm.
Assume for a second that your goal is to teach knowledge, as you say.
How are you telling whether you are successful at that?
Even if you do not care about the personal individual achievement level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be able to measure to understand where you are successfully teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc teaching.
As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these problems away, and they are not easy things.
The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems.
They can't be "solved" through simplistic answers
Classic "tell me you have never been a teacher without telling me you have never been a teacher". Are there bad teachers? Of course. There are bad employees in all industries. But teaching is an extremely difficult job that underpays so most people are in the profession because they want to help kids.
Some things to understand about teaching. You must always teach at the middle kid in terms of ability and intelligence. By default this already means that some kids will be lost and some kids will be bored. This is made worse by conflating age with competence. Additionally, teachers have no understanding of what the kids are going through at home. Say you have a kid that never does homework? Is that the teacher's fault? Is it because the kid is lazy and just plays fortnight at home? Or is it because the parent's only job is night shift and the kids is a de facto parent watching two other kids? Or is it because the parent has a substance abuse problem and the kid hides out at playgrounds until late at night after everyone is passed out and it is safe to come "home"? Statistically, kids with problems at home also tend to be lower on competence scales. The real problem here is social help for the parents but we don't have the political will for this. Do you have any idea how often a teacher has had a student's parent come to a conference to discuss concerns about the kid falling behind just to be told that "It is YOUR job to teach my kid, not mine!" Tell me how testing teachers fixes that? And these are the same teachers that must buy paper/pens/supplies with the other salary because we ration school supplies.
We have some similar problems at the collegiate level. I worked full time while carrying 12+ credits paying my own way through college. I had to cut corners and ration my time. This meant lower grades for some classes but luckily I have the aptitude to get away with it. We also are sending kids to college that shouldn't be there. They don't have a real desire for a professional career outside of something like Social Media Manager. Of course they are going to cheat and use all the tools they have at their disposal having grown up digital. They aren't interested in the subject matter they just want to check the boxes and get through it. There is an issue here that needs solved at the institution level that kids will always be better at tech than the teachers but that is silly to lay at the feet of the teachers. In the end they are trying to lay a foundation of knowledge but the students have to care. Most college classes don't take attendance, is that the teacher's fault too?
Having the best software engineers doesn't mean anyone will use the product. Having the best doctors doesn't mean patients will do what they are told. Having the best trainers doesn't mean people will workout on their own. Having the best therapists doesn't mean anyone will use the techniques suggested in their daily lives.
I have degrees in math and physics. Those degrees gave me close to zero value in the market. Spending X years in school, then having to prove to an employer that you can do barely more than squat is a familiar experience in a lot of fields.
There are tests you can take in those subjects, such as the Graduate Record Exam. Those tests work to some extent because the subject matter is relatively mature, and consistent from one college to another. And yet there are entire fields of math and physics that I've never been exposed to. Their main purpose is to see if you're conversant in a body of knowledge that would prepare you for typical graduate study, not for a job.
Software engineering is a comparatively young field, with less standardization. There are even debates on HN as to whether software engineering is a real thing. There are places where every programmer has the title "engineer" regardless of their background.
I'm only employable because most people hate math and physics so much that they're relieved if anybody offers to do those things for them. That, and I'm pretty good at programming and electronics.
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Cynically, because they're part of the problem.
Personally I don't think the "obviously bad thing" is the current state of testing. I'd instead say that the problem is the intermingling of education and credentials.
Society doesn't care about education, however all of the inspiration is geared around it. So you wind up with the case that students either become disillusioned with the system after realizing it's ripe with hypocrisy, or otherwise structured in a way that creates resentment in the system.
As an anecdote, a friend I went to high school with dropped out when he was disallowed to participate in the school band, because it was his only source of motivation to show up every day. I don't think that was the intended goal, but when faced with the reality of the situation, the system is unbending.
I think as a result, the ones you see succeeding in college tend to be more driven by either ambition or obligation rather than any actual desire to learn. So in that respect, I think colleges are self selecting for students that are more willing to think cheating is a good idea. And in many respects they may not be wrong.
> Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
No...the systems haven't evolved independently. It's no more surprising to me than learning that felines could get covid.
For what it's worth, I'm a community college dropout. The education and mental health systems were absolutely structured in a way where my severe adhd (and its best friends anxiety and depression) went undiagnosed and untreated through my senior year of high school. I loved learning, but there wasn't any way to get an education that could present the coursework in a way that could keep me engaged. And of course my inability to do homework was continually met with being told it was some personal failure on my part and I should just apply myself.
So back to
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
_They're the ones that've made me think we'd be better of scrapping the system and starting over._
I taught high school math for 2 years. Which really isn't really enough to diagnose (much less solve) the system's problems. But it did give me a sense of how intractable the problem is.
I find it enormously frustrating when people (not you) complain about "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test is good pedagogy! First, determine what you want to students to know/do. Then choose how you're going to assess their knowledge/ability. Then design instruction that prepares them for the assessment. This is called backwards design.
I assumed you would say that the programmers should start working for the school system but your final description.of problems is not difficult to solve.
The teachers are the problem.
After all I was also sitting in school for 13 years
> In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
I would actually focus on the question of "Why do I need to quantify everybody's knowledge at a high resolution?"
When I was TAing, I held the position - never accepted I should say - that we should make more courses pass/fail; and instead of investing effort in the numeric grading keys, try to give more meaningful feedback on assignments.
Some alternative suggestions I brought up:
* I suggested that the final grade be a combination of the assessment a roll of 1D6 points - to hammer it in that the grading is to a great extent artificial. Somehow this was even less popular of a suggestion...
* I once proposed we offer people a perfect passing grade if they just never show up to class nor submit anything, and only people who want to learn would risk an imperfect grade. I really liked that proposal, because it put the two motivations - learning and making the grade - which are often conflated, at direct odds with each other.
Of course none of this was taken seriously - even though I was serious. Kind of.
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Oh please. Teachers advocate for themselves. Academics are currently waging a war against standardized testing for ideological reasons. Instead of a polemic against people giving their opinions please just tell us what you think.
For my money, the problem with education is that we decided it's not about knowlege but rather increasing the socioeconomic position of participants. From this it follows that everyone needs a 4 year degree. Education will only function when it's a small number of weirdos who want to be there.
Solve the problem by attacking credentialism, reforming student loans, and bolstering alternative post-secondary education (trade schools, bootcamps).
>In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
This sounds like an entirely different question. When you have a method for testing, you have at least two different measures of effectiveness:
- how well the test measures knowledge when it is taken honestly
- how likely is the test to be taken honestly vs. subverted
I thought this thread was about the second question, but you seem to be focused on the first. But these problems require different kinds of solutions, and crucially, it is much easier (but still not easy) to verify success or failure in addressing the second question (cheating) than the first (predictivity).
This is true for so many other aspects of life as well. Things are the way they are for a reason. Not understanding the deep and complex factors that got the system to where it is dooms you to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is why I go for depth on what I complain and ideate on rather than breadth. Dive deep on something you care about instead of having an opinion about everything. Humans have done well with specialization. If you enjoy breadth, go for it. I just don't see it as very effective.
I suppose that complaining without proposing solutions is akin to protesting. You may not necessarily know what you want specifically, but you don't want the current system.
To me measuring knowledge is a minor reason of having tests. The main reason is to force students to study. If you have no test on knowledge most people will just gloss over the detail and not learn.
This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options.
1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student.
2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers.
Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.
> These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
It's kind of hard to believe this needs to be said, because it is so obviously correct.
The petit-bourgeoisie elegies here are ridiculous.
You take the higher moral ground by establishing that you have "studied pedagogy and know all about it" and then you proceed with providing cliché points on how education has failed.
How can you apply critisism to a system you have been indoctrinated by? How fruitful is it gonna be?
i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else.
the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems.
teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach.
the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned.
these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
> Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).
Well obviously we need to fix the system of the system!
It is perhaps unreasonable for the purveyor of a critical service to demand that they be the only one who is allowed to understand or validate the quality of the service on offer, and to insist that the customer is too naive to be permitted a viewpoint.
Finland is a great example of a world class school system that doesn’t measure “knowledge”. So perhaps trying to measure “knowledge” is the real problem?
I don't think the problem is that complicated - you just can't measure knowledge with a process (or a machine). Only a human can approximate another human's level of understanding.
Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream. All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid mechanical box.
Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you remove the need to print out diplomas, everything does become simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is the hardest problem.
Again, it’s so easy to criticize, point out the “problem” and then offer no solution.
The “knowledge factory” exists for a reason. The way our society is constructed, we need structured specialization (pick a course), verification (you’re OK) and rating (you’re the top 5%) — because our entire society expects these things to work and be available.
It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem.
People need to be able to improve, be excluded when incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing that will always be true about an educational system is that it will mirror society: and if it doesn’t currently it will in a few decades.
You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational system without more or less advocating a revolution in society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and never continue to proposed solutions.
A minor critique and support for what you are saying.
The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005.
Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and know what they don’t know. Academic leadership often doesn’t have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in 2 weeks.
Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation.
Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.
It’s pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy is used every 3 words when… How adults learn (andragogy) including young adults is quite different than children.
When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it’s tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might not really know the difference.
If experts really wanted to get into digital learning taxonomies based on old ones that don’t seem to bridge the divide, maybe that would be a start.
Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students ( how many different things do students have to log into), perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are pretty complex but can take your money smoothly.
I think part of this is because too many academics are poor listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries.
In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in society.
Another observation is that most universities only teach how to teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it’s why the word pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do for K-12?
In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more ways to engage with the material. It’s a big problem.
Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It’s decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting into those roles and help change.
You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that’s what politicians want.
Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk of education. There’s a need for our leaders, experts and institutions to recognize and do something about this, but bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at all costs.
One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions, or put the same effort into building new institutions for the future.
Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats. Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks.
It’s interesting to see how much more society has opened up to taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if they can’t create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3 years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a course.
If it’s relevant, I’ve built platforms to deliver online K-12, post-secondary education and industry training certification for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering education like it’s designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs.
Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to build the skills and competencies they need in people because education isn’t turning out people that are needed. The advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn’t be discounted.
> Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.
It's always amusing to see lectures on correct usage from people who don't know the difference between etymology and meaning. (And also who don't know the etymology, either, since etymologically, pedagogy isn't “how children learn” but more like “the act of leading children”.)
In English, especially American English, “Andragogy” is mostly used in relation to a particular theory/approach to adult education originating with Martin Knowles, who leveraged the same conflation of etymology and meaning—even when it originated, pedagogy was well established with its modern and more general meaning despite the narrower sense of its Greek roots—to promote it; education for different audiences by age or other circumstance is not generally distinguished by different greek-root terms in English, but by English terms [“early childhood education”, “adult education”, “continuing professional education”, etc.)
> Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.
The original root of "pedagogy" relates to children, but I still have a lot more time for someone who uses that industry-standard term than I do for anyone preaching 'andragogy'. It's a niche, culturally-bound and assumption-based theory with little research to actually support any of its claims.
Despite the grandiose name, 'andragogy' is just another 'learning styles' or 'growth mindset' - it's pop psychology designed to sell training courses.
I TA'd for a Prolog course at my university (Imperial College London) during the four years of my PhD there. As part of that work I helped correct students' papers. It was pretty clear to me that the students were sharing their code and only changing variable names etc. to make it look different.
It didn't work, because you could see the same, let's say, idiosyncracies, in their code. For example, there might be three or four different ways to solve a coding exercise and about 60-75% of the papers would solve it using the same way, which was not necessarily the best, or even the most obvious, way (what is the most obvious way to solve a Prolog exercise might not be common sense, but that's why you are given a lecture, first, and then the exercise).
What's most interesting is that I saw the same patterns repeated over the three years I TA'd for one of the Prolog courses. I guess they shared the answers between years, or somebody had put them online (I searched but couldn't find them). Or they just copied solutions to similar exercises they found online.
I didn't report the cheating because I felt there was no benefit in doing so. In particular with Prolog, because it's not a language commonly used in the industry, and it's taught at Imperial mainly for historical reasons (there are many of us logicists studying, or teaching, there) I reckoned that most students found it a useless chore and did not understand why they needed to learn it, and why they needed to "waste" time solving those coding problems. So they copied from each other in order to get the job done quickly and then have more time to spend on the things they felt were more useful to them (like learning Python or "ML" I suppose).
I personally thought, and still think, that learning to program in Prolog is useful, just to disentangle a programmer's mind from the particularities of the coding paradigms, and the programming languages, she's most familiar with. At CS schools today, programming is introduced with Python and I guess it's easy to get into a mindframe that all programming languages must necessarily work like Python. Studying languages from different paradigms, like Prolog or Haskell, can shake you off that mentality (it sure did me, back when I did my CS degree).
The problems is that you can't really force this appreciation of the need to learn different things on students, who are often in a terrible hurry and under terrible pressure to do good on their course, so they can get on with life. The Prolog course I TA'd was mandatory and so it must have really felt like someone was trying to force the knowledge down the studnets' throats.
I don't think that's a good idea. You can't teach people that way. They'll just see your obvious effort to force them to learn what you want, and they'll simply take the obvious route around it. And that ends up teaching them a lesson that you really weren't expecting to teach: the world is full of idiots who think they can teach you things, but you know better than they do and you'll show them who's boss.
That's what students do with tests, also. They can see they're a useless waste of time and they can see the obvious way around them is to cheat, and that it's to their benefit to cheat. And so they cheat. I don't have solutions to this. The students shouldn't have to fight the school, and the school shouldn't have to fight the students. The school is there for the students' benefit after all.
> probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much
This is the story of hacker news. And of most other online forums. And of most meetings. Let’s bikeshed. Hi, I’m on the Internet and I read the whole post title. Let me share my thoughts.
People are stupid, lazy, and uninformed in the general case. People writing in an 8 line comment fields on mobile aren’t going to be the exception.
There is no need to be frustrated. Unless you enjoy that feeling. Then by all means embrace it.
Try this? Dip into the comments with right expectation. These are off the cuff uniformed thoughts of the masses. Maybe they make you laugh or cry or maybe something inspires you. Maybe there’s a gem buried here somewhere.
Don’t expect HN commenters to know anything deep. If you are in the mood for a deeper thought, go to the library.
The other problem with the "we need to fix the system" arguments is that they often ignore the much greater problems in our society.
Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.
We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.
People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught.
Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.
This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else.
Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing?
If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
I said no such thing. I never even claimed to be a teacher (which I am not).
What I said was that we should listen to people who are active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I said quite the opposite.
I really don’t understand why your comment is so confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably shouldn’t do it by having an open discussion involving only programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for that matter).
Is this what you really got from that comment? The implicit point is that the better you want to assess knowledge the less scalable it is, eg. giving oral/one-to-one interview style assessments to university students is not feasible even if it is a better knowledge assessment.
Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all these and say the system is broken
> This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else.
No, it's not. Not at all.
But your comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we listen to experts? We all should have a say!". And that's the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should work..
This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual.
I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating
Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).
The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they're teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc
imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle
Yes - it's similar to the situation in high school where there are kids who want to learn and kids who disrupt the class because they're lazy/not motivated/have issues/want attention.
Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion.
But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.
Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence.
It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge.
Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most profs won't.
The underlying issue is that there's been far too little research into the social consequences of automating all kinds of interactions.
The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns were automated and enhanced.
Culture as a whole has no defences against this because hardly anyone has realised that it's a problem inherent within the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and who knows why?
> But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.
And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews
I really appreciate this comment, especially the bit about how automation amplifies culture - that's something I've felt for a long time but you've stated it eloquently.
Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads.
Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues.
I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.
Another thing (that the story goes into in depth) is that cheating creates a whole lot of extra work and stress for professors who would rather just be teaching material and not exerting enormous effort into policing other people's behavior and enforcing rules. (And that's really hard to do if you're afraid of making a mistake somewhere and punishing someone too harshly, or for something they didn't do.)
The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.
>imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at.
This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make the best effort to understand the material as opposed to leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade.
On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.
Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
> This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class.
I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much.
Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question.
It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).
I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"
Not at university, but at a company I worked for: the company had legal requirements to train its employees and contractors in various aspects of integrity. They'd made an app that gamified this, and at the end of every month, we should have out score above 70% in that app.
A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.
I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.
It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.
I hope you told the professor what you discovered. Allowing cheating is complicity in the cheating without the benefits. But I remember the intense social pressure - glad I’m not a kid any more.
I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic.
This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention
The Polish university I went to never even heard of grading on a curve, and yet cheating was rampant. I think it's just human nature - as long as cheating is not heavily penalised, many people will choose to do it.
During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you another attempt at later time. Also, during the written exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at all - it just didn't pay off.
Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.
This happened to me in an ML class. Somehow people went from not knowing what eigenvalues were to solving all the problems in Bishop's book correctly and exactly the way the TA wanted them. A bunch of them would go to his office hours and have him do a problem, then they would share his answers.
I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.
On the other hand you studied way harder than you normal would have, which if your goal is to learn the material, is in fact a good thing.
But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to employment and life success. People cheat because they don’t want to learn but they do want a good job. I don’t know how you separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is probably to snitch.
This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.
Curve grading is such a messed up thing. It leads to professors assuming you should get all A's in all of your classes basically, cuz of this nonsense from US unis.
I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up).
Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.
I think that curves discourage cooperation and encourage zero-sum thinking. Curves are only really necessary when the professor is out of touch with the class and/or prerequisites.
I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester
Curve grading does have a place. But that is standardized tests or placing entire cohorts to buckets. So we are talking of hundreds if not thousands of students. For individual schools or classes inside thereof it is wrong method. Either the students know enough of the course material to pass or they do not.
If you want to compare grades across semesters you have to either keep the difficulty of the tests constant or adjust the grades to compensate for how difficult the tests were relative to previous semesters.
BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if there is not a rational argument for X.
Of course there’s a rational argument to using the distribution of scores to set the grades: If everyone in the class gets half the questions wrong on the final exam, you shouldn’t just fail the whole class! The test was probably just harder than expected
But in that same example, if many of the students get close to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the class will suffer
A lot of my classes the average grade on a test could be as low as 30% with a P100 of 50%. The material was extraordinarily difficult. I’m glad it was because it stretched me in equally extraordinary ways to do my best. But I don’t see how they would have assigned grades without a curve. In most cases I agree with you, but in those classes I wouldn’t have changed to tests to dumb them down but I also wouldn’t have accepted score based grades. The curve felt fairly rational in the situation and I think the distribution of performance reflected a grade curve well enough. The GPA though for the department was depressed relative to others but it was also widely regarded and recognized internationally as extremely difficult.
There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve
It's an imperfect solution for a legitimate problem.
The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam.
If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and engaged students who are showing good understanding of the material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect actual mastery of the material.
There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.
Well, people shouldn't cheat for a whole lot of reasons. But the main take away from this is, in my opinion, that people should not be "graded on a curve".
You somewhat seem to miss the wood for all the trees. The problem is the curve - grading on a curve is inherently unfair and irrelevant. Why should it affect your grade if others in the class cheat/struggle/..?
Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.
Maybe not a literal curve, but tons of instructors will compensate if an exam ends up being too hard (or too easy). Except the main way they tell whether the test difficulty was off is by looking at the grade distribution which obviously ends up skewed if some people cheat
You should read up on Nash equilibriums. In general, the equilibrium only holds with information sharing. In the real world, winning due to a lack of information sharing is called things like "good business." Academia, and cheating in general, is rotted to the core because of ranked grading and curves. They fundamentally incentivize cheating, because of the game theoretical gain therein.
Ah cheating ! I did a year abroad in California when I was studying computer science and I remember there was a huge difference between cheating there and cheating in my French school.
In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises. As the exercises were harder than expected for a class and projects were long and difficult, students were encouraged to talk, discuss and exchange ideas. Ideas sure, code meh.
Then, in the US, exercises were stupid checkboxes-style questions and graded on a curve. So of course everyone "cheated".. I must confess that I did it too. It was unworthy of my time and attention, as it was just about taking the course material and regurgitate it with different words. Of course, I can't imagine anyone learning anything from this way of working.
Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away.
> Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away.
and yet
> Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises.
So both courses have cheating, one possibly has less cheating, and that one has a more effective detection procedure, but cheating happens on both all the same. The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.
Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one. Maybe it's simply that a course that appears more difficult to cheat on or is more difficult to cheat on attracts less cheating.
> The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.
I was a TA in France, and did a bit of TA-ing unofficially in the US. So, my view is based on both experience, TA and Student.
While there was some cheating happening on both sides, it was practically non-existent in France after a few weeks of school. The abilities required to cheat and get away with it were extremely hard to master, and usually would carry much more risks than just complete the exercise. Successful cheating were, sometimes, rewarded if the problem solved was worthy enough. You could even get clearance from the professor in advance (not for copying code from StackOverflow, of course, but rather for using forbidden functions or libraries).
Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6. Individual students putting a group at risk deliberately, would get caught extremely easily and carry a far worse sentence than just a bad grade: they would be excluded from other students groups and left to do their projects alone or with dropouts students. Finding back you way after this is very very difficult.
> Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one.
Actually, that's not a hypothetical scenario: School 42, an offshoot of the school GP described with the same cursus, has antennas in both Paris and California.
I wonder if the cheating rates differ between the two.
I went to UW Seattle ~15 years ago, and some of the CS classes there were a fucking joke
I got a 2.7 in my CS classes because I had perfect scores on the tests and homework, but the teacher decided to make a huge percentage of your grade consist of quizzes about random factoids from the book that had literally nothing to do with computer science. (Literally: "What color was the elephant on page 12?") The book cost like $200, so I decided to just study from other books and the lectures and eat the loss of GPA
Man, I wish I could remember that professor's name so I could send him some hate mail..
I recently took a CS class at Stanford with an interesting policy on cheating. While cheating almost certainly happened during the course, at the end of the quarter the course staff made a public post allowing any student who cheated to make a private message to the staff admitting they've done so.
If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face consequences like expulsion or being on official academic probation.
However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code through a piece of software to detect similarities between each other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether it seemed like cheating.
I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance, or perhaps an overly permissive one.
The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.
That sounds great and all but I honestly have doubts about this software that detects similarities… there’s only so many ways to solve the bland questions that professors lift from books; kind of ironic. I’m assuming it’s basicallly doing AST analysis and it’s no smarter than eliminating things like variables being renamed.
They are basically stating that this “software” is 100% accurate. Furthermore it’s then left to whims of some TAs?
No algorithm can detect cheating unless the number of permutations are very very large (I.e being struck by lightening). Maybe one way to offset would be to use data as the student is entering the solution but that was never the case for us; just upload the source code to their custom made Windows app.
Speaking from experience using similar software on students assignments, it is often blatantly obvious when cheating is occurring.
To start with, at an undergrad level, most students had fairly distinct coding styles - usually with quirks of not "proper" coding. Some cheaters had the exact same quirks in multiple students assignments.
Also, some cheaters had the exact same mistakes in their code, on top of the same code style.
Yes the software picks up people that write correct solutions with perfect syntax, but those are the ones that you just toss out because there isn't any proof there.
The people that get caught cheating generally don't know what correct solutions and good code look like, so they don't understand how obvious it is when they copy paste their friends mediocre code.
I implemented the widely used MOSS algorithm (mentioned by a sibling) for my CS department in my senior year. That algorithm doesn't do AST analysis, it just looks at the plain text in a way that is resistant to most small refactorings. MOSS compares sets of k-grams (strings of k characters) between every pair of projects that are under test and produces the number of shared k-grams for each pair of projects. On any given assignment in a given semester, there's a baseline amount of of similarity that is "normal". You then test for outliers, and that gives you the projects that need closer scrutiny.
On the test data we were given (anonymized assignments from prior semesters together with known public git repos), we never had a false positive. On the flip side, small refactorings like variable renames or method re-ordering still turned up above the "suspicious" threshold because there would be enough remaining matching k-grams to make that pair of projects an outlier.
Our school explicitly did not use the algorithm's numbers as evidence of cheating and did not involve the TAs--the numbers were used only to point the professor in the right direction. We excluded all k-grams that featured in the professor's materials (slides, examples, boilerplate code). It also helped that they only used it on the more complex assignments that should have had unique source code (our test data was a client and server for an Android app).
My sense was that this was a pretty good system. Cheaters stood out in the outliers test by several orders of magnitude, so false positives are extremely unlikely. At the same time, the k-gram approach means that if you actually manage to mangle your project enough that it's not detected as copied, you had to perform refactorings in the process that clearly show you know how the program works--anything less still leaves you above the safe zone of shared k-grams.
From doing some cursory research, it appears the software in question is called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) and is currently being provided as a service [0].
Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."
I used something similar when I was a TA 20 years ago and while your assumption seems reasonable, there are actually a lot of different ways to solve even quite simple tasks and most cheating is very obvious on manual inspection.
I noticed a swap in your prose (still comprehensible), but just realized that cheating and teaching are semi-spoonerisms (swapping the sound order of a single word)... how appropos!
I have the same policy at my uni in Poland.
Admit to cheating without being called out? Depending on the professor mood, they either allowed you to retake exam (though the best grade you'd get was the lowest passing one), or you just fail the course and try again next year.
Both they had less paperwork, and well, they wouldn't report that person.
The results of checking against existing and other test takers solutions must be taken with a strong human judgment. Programming problems such as would be asked in tests are essentially like mathematical formulas/algorithms, and there isn't much variation in how a given formula or algorithm can be implemented.
I don't think these techniques are often applied to problems in tests - there are other, simpler ways of catching cheaters there.
They are much more likely to be applied to homework assignments, where the opportunity for copying is large, but the chance of two students producing the exact same >500-1000 line program is slim to none. Perhaps once in a while a critical function will be copied and no one will realize or similarities in a trivial function will be unnecessarily flagged, but this will be relatively rare and quickly discovered in manual review.
There is a lot of syntactic variation possible, both for formula and algorithms. Even for something as simple as quicksort there is enough natural variation for a class of 30 maybe even 100 (if no references can be used).
Anything more complex and even with references it should be unique.
It's not _just_ trying to be lenient and offer a second chance - it's a way to catch more cheaters. "Turn yourself in and we'll go easy on you... because we might not catch you."
>I knew that my students wanted a second chance, I wasn’t sure how many of them would take it. Part of completing the academic integrity assignment was a tacit admission of cheating, and some students seemed set on not admitting to anything. So, I was thrilled when I received the first completed academic integrity assignment.
>What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of text verbatim copied.
How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already? How can that be the first thing you go for? This is really sad. I seriously don’t understand the thinking here.
> How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already?
My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material.
Given that assumption, it's easy for me to understand why people would try to minimize the amount of work they have to do for something they didn't want in the first place.
> My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material.
I know most people here refer to American system and universities but my experience in Poland is, degrees, especially related to computer science, mostly teach you useless, outdated stuff, that you will never need to know. Most people here approach CS degree as something that you simply have to do to get a decent job in IT(though it's slowly changing toward not doing a degree at all), or simply because your family expects you to. Most universities here pump out diplomas to get paid by government and industry, so they can pump out more diplomas. Honestly I haven't met a single employer or even coworker that ever cared if I had CS degree. Most of stuff I learned there is 'nice to know it exists' but nothing I've ever used in real life work, most professors clearly have never even worked in the industry. Best thing that came out of my BEng in CS are friends and realization that noone cares about me so I needed to solve issues and learn on my own.
100%. People I know here at a T-20 Southern California school just cheated their way through classes, just grinded leetcode through university and have high paying FAANG jobs. It's just a matter of what you want from an university education and why you want a degree tbh.
I could imagine someone seeing this assignment as a formal requirement. And googling "integrity assignment", just like one might google how to fill out some tax related forms. Or perhaps even how people google "birthday wishes".
As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Perhaps that's why I didn't care?
Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be.
There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability to teach adult students — so I don't see why bother.
The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course?
Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).
I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.
I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them.
I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful.
I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.
A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism.
I agree with your opinion on curves (which aren't even a thing where I'm from), but cheating matters even in the absence of curves.
If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions, grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.
> I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.
I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's inherently relative to what the typical student at that institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it strongly implies that more material could have been covered.
if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.
ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.
Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they would be useless, there’s always that one kid) so unless everyone except you is cheating you’re usually fine.
There are two cases, usually, where curves make sense.
* When the professor doesn’t actually know how hard the exam is because it’s a new test. And since people save tests that’s most classes.
* When the professor is actually trying to find that one kid. This is super common in theoretical maths. The exams are incredibly hard with the expectation that you won’t finish it and graded on a curve or some other measure like “the test is out 100 points but there are 200 possible.” But when someone gets a perfect score you direct them to the phd program.
> Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters
Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.
How do you know if grades matter for your future? In my first uni year, I had no idea I'd get a job before my studies were over.
If there's an actual correspondence (eg you get next year scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above X), that's an incentive to cheat, so there is one issue.
And while curves do suck, it also sucks to be compared with someone having photographic memory in most exams where that is a very useful skill (even though the exam is not sttempting to favout photographic memory). Or some lazy bag who is more talented at something so it took you 10x more effort to get the same understanding. Basically, you are stacked against so much, that cheating is just a small part of all of that.
In short, it sucks being compared to people using everything they can to their advantage. But then again, that's what happens past university too, so it's just real life.
> As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more aggressively ever since.
In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2 or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the prior semester.
Oh, it sure does matter. Like it matters to most every student (teenage or college) how they are perceived by their most popular peers. I.e. it's a human trait to care about things that should not really bother us.
You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.
Yea but the pointscoring is literally all that matters, if you change the incentives you’ll see the behavior change with it.
If you take away the aspect of college as “a place to get a credential” you’ll see the cheating stop. Instead for those credentials just hold exams like the AP, ACT, SAT, RHCSE, or the 7 Actuarial exams. No college required. Whatever you do to pass them is fine.
Then make college totally ungraded except as a mechanism for student feedback. Have tracks for people that just want the credentials (just like the APs) that terminate at the exams. All other courses are just for people who are genuinely interested and confer no status or praise.
Now the incentives are aligned. Outside of the testing areas there is literally zero reason for anyone to cheat, and non-credential classes have to actually be interring, engaging, and useful to students for anyone to take them.
If you are doing that, why do you care about others not doing it?
I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating.
How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college?
I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well).
Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.
So I think the teacher missed the main point of his own essay:
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn’t be there for the cheating. Then they rejoined afterward."
So, in order to be competitive in a class where (whether explicitly curved or not) the difficulty will be adjusted up or down until the "right" portion of students are passing, even a student who wanted to not cheat needed to be in the chat. He made a course in which it required extraordinary efforts to find a way to be able to both pass and not cheat, and then acted surprised that so many students cheated.
Any teacher who can fire up R to process the chat group logs, could have figured out a better system for quizzes and tests, so that it wasn't this hard to be competitive without cheating. Also, if he hasn't ever taken a course on game theory, he should; if he has, he shouldn't have passed.
Not only was the course not "too hard", the author give plenty of indications that the course is actually pretty easy. The quizzes everyone was cheating on were open-book. At one point, a student in the group chat recommended that people look things up in the course textbook:
"The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers. I mean, ya. It’s in the textbook."
This does not sound like a difficult course to me. I have taken courses where it's rather trivial to ace the online quizzes by looking things up in the textbook (I am taking one right now, in fact). Students who can't even do this and resort to sharing the answers in a group chat must have become incredibly jaded about their education. I fully agree with the author's decision to both sanction them for cheating and give them a second chance to engage with the course material. It was very satisfying to see that all of the effort paid off in the end.
Which is one of the most interesting takeaways for me. What this guy was dealing with was a cultural problem - a toxic culture had developed in the temporary group/space.
His goal is clearly stated: for people to honestly connect with the course material. That's hard if a group like this is poisoned with cynicism. My thought here is how these types of messaging groups spaces have become an incredibly important aspect of the educational experience and beyond. I think about all the 'toxic' cultures in places I have been in and how they usually revolve around people trading information and socializing.
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic...I totally agreed with this point"
As much as the OP claims they take cheating seriously and as an opportunity to engage with students and have them learn amongst other noble undertakings.
I think they just really enjoy catching people cheat and see how far it goes. Sort of masochistic tbh
I’d like to add, that supposed “superstar” student who read the chat to learn the other class info and left to not read the cheating… “sent no texts”.
As someone who recently graduated, this student is a freeloader. Comparable to companies who heavily use OSS but never contribute. I expect them to be a terrible coworker.
I had to stop in the middle of the article due to all the annoying animations.
But something that stood out to me is this:
> For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule.
and then
> I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating.
So basically, this professor know about "low-impact cheating" (cheating in quizzes, where "[t]he quizzes were low stakes"), but instead of saying anything just kept pushing forward.
I wonder if anyone even told those students up front in clear terms that sharing answers on the quizzes was not allowed. In school we're often told to co-operate in assignment. Where is the line between an assignment and a quiz?
Just letting the whole group slide gradually into cheating territory is a lose-lose strategy.
Give me a break. The professor went above and beyond to be understanding. The mental gymnastics from many on this thread seeking to blame anyone but the students lack of integrity is pathetic. It's from the Boris Johnson school of 'I didn't know it was a party'.
This is a college course, right? Do you really not understand what it means to cheat by the time you get to college? A quiz especially--you should not be sharing the answers to questions with other students. It's just about the most basic understanding of cheating you can imagine.
You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless the teacher/professor says you can do so.
And finally, read your school's handbook for a proper definition of cheating.
The professor sets up the expectation they are going to come down hard on everyone but ends up putting in an obscene amount of work to give almost everyone a chance to succeed.
After the halfway point they tilt strongly from justice to mercy and ethics education.
He was curious how far rhis would go, and enjoying this undercover cop thing a little too much.
A course should tell you what works and what doesn't early on, just like a good computer game. If people go down the wrong path early on, it means early on something failed.
Readit News
As someone who studied pedagogy for years and quit due to an immense frustration with exactly this — how broken the system is — I would encourage you to entertain the thought that maybe, you as a person who is almost in all cases not a teacher, nor someone with any experience apart from once having been a student, do not have a good understanding of how exactly this system should be fixed, and that it’s not broken for fun but because there are some very difficult unresolved issues.
People love to rant about how bad tests are. “We just study for the tests” and so on. And yet this complaint seems to be international. Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
In the case of testing it’s because you choose to focus on the obviously bad thing (current state of testing) rather than the very complex and difficult question behind it: HOW do you measure knowledge? And when you decide how, how do you scale it?
These are very hard questions, and it’s frustrating to read the phrase “we need to fix the system” because yes, obviously we do, but agreeing that things are bad isn’t the hard part, and probably input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.
So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
Cynically, this will never happen because reforms to battle educational issues in any democratic society usually takes more than 5 election cycles to show obvious results (and when the bad results start stacking up current leaders will take the flak regardless).
I have experienced good tests and bad tests. I studied in France, tests were open book with no multiple choice questions, only problems to solve. This approach scales badly and is a lot of work for the professor grading but it measures knowledge.
The problems were long, had few questions besides describing the problem and maybe a few questions to guide the student along the path to solving it. We had either 3 or 4 hours to solve those problems.
Those tests worked very well. I'd come out from one of those tests having often learned something new.
I was an exchange student in the US, tests involved multiple choice questions, they were closed books with questions around rote memory. While I did feel that some of the education in the US was valuable and interesting, I hated those tests, they didn't correlate as much with comprehension of the subject matter and more with learning facts that are more or less tangentially related to the subject matter. I still remember in a computer graphics tests being shocked by being asked when Opengl was first released, which companies were involved and other completely useless knowledge.
What's interesting to me is that there's much less opportunities to cheat with the former tests while the later tests are pretty much made for cheating. So, imho cheating is a symptom of bad tests.
To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its copies did not exist.
As a US citizen, many tests were open book essay style, especially once we got to college.
In public school however, lots of "standardized" multiple choice tests that were used to grade the school. Some of those tests also include an essay portion.
Teachers in the US aren't paid to do grading, they typically do it at home in their own time, thus very few essay style tests.
I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work and how I can solve problems and how, beginning with one ideea I can extend it or come up with an entirely different idea.
And I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but for me, programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them. Which can be fine, lower level work is ok and highly needed. But wouldn't make me as good as someone who knows his stuff from a to z.
I hate it when I hear someone considering himself a programmer after he modified a WordPress theme or did a 3 weeks boot camp.
Why should this field be hold to much lower standards than medicine, physics, math, chemistry?
I never heard someone bragging that he is a doctor after watching YouTube videos, which happens often with writing and architecting software.
> programming without having a solid understanding of CS background and how computers work it would make me just a code monkey, able just to do what I saw in tutorials and copy pasting SO answers without understanding them
Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.
Even in medicine, the first triage will probably be done by a nurse, then a doctor, finally a specialist.
You don't need a CS PhD for most of the work done with computers and it would be unrealistic and uneconomical to require such a high standard everywhere.
People make a good living customizing WordPress sites and the buyers get good value from it.
> I studied because I wanted to genuinely understand how things work
I don’t think you do.
Genuine curiosity forged in one’s own mind. It is not something that can be bounded, repackaged as a curriculum, and sold in university. It’s like ether, it’s everywhere and can be captured by anyone, through multiple means.
University degrees for any professions are useless. Even in medicine! There are shit doctors and good doctors. Most people here would’ve run through a couple of them before picking one. I’ve been with my current doctor for 10 years now, because they are really good, empathic, and teach me rather than just pushing pills.
Software in my humble opinion works the same way. I care more about what someone does with the tools they have, rather than them being made of wood or metal or gold
I doubt it, but I downvoted you for saying that. No comment anywhere has ever been improved by adding "I know I will get downvoted for saying this, but". Please don't do it.
That led to my grades ending up exactly average, but also at one point I challenged myself and got the highest marks in the most difficult course in my degree. Everyone, specially those who were normally top of the class, were like "WTF did you do??" lol
Incompetent doctor? People die. Incompetent chemist? People die, or at least there's substantial material damage.
When it comes to mathematicians and physicists they only ever have any real impact when they roll up their sleeves, open matlab or R and turn their theoretical work into something practical. Does that make them programmers? Probably I guess.
Anyway as for us programmers there are very few jobs where a poorly written program will cause anyone any harm especially since it can be reviewed, tested, and corrected before being used for real, unlike a doctor who must use their skills on the fly and get it right first time, every time. So the bar for entry is obviously much lower and lowering standards doesn't do much to increase harm.
Yet real doctors actually believe the bullshit they get from medical reps when it comes to prescribing actual drugs that goes in patients bodies. I will let you ponder how successful that strategy is.
The truth is, is that programming languages themselves have evolved far enough that knowing exactly what's running underneath the hood isn't needed anymore, outside of niche specialist cases. Most people don't even need to worry about seeing a single 'index out of range' issue, or worry about CPU cycles. And it's only going to become easier and easier.
I'd compare it to bricklaying. Yes, you need to use the correct formula for the cement you use, but figuring out that formula has already happened. For niche cases that require special cement, you go to the cement specialists that know the ins and outs of it.
The issue is that modifying a Wordpress theme is just as much of a job as optimizing a low level 3D rendering pipeline or writing facial recognition software. One of these is not like the others and the issue is that universities fail to realise this and just try to teach everything.
In my mind we would need to abolish the idea of a general programmer and move towards specialization.
It doesn't, a good programmer is self evident to good peers.
And schooling isn't the only way to get there. I know plenty of academically educated CS grads that aren't a great programmer not because they didn't do well in school (I have no way of knowing but I assume they did well), but because they lacked curiosity and interest into programming.
While there are times where a piece of code failure or poorly worded instructions can cause injury to others, those are exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking- the cost of failure for writing and software is lower than it is medicine, and it makes sense not to gatekeep these industries behind theory, and rather just let results speak for themselves.
A person who writes for a regional trade magazine, a failed novelist, and Shakespeare all considered themselves writers.
Measuring knowledge at scale is futile, harmful, and pointless. The fact that a lot of society has been arranged around the fiction that this is a feasible endeavor does not mean it has borne out in practice, and prioritizing assessment in this way has been gradually hollowing out most forms of pedagogy of their value while building an ever-expanding series of increasingly meaningless hoops for people to jump through to get what they actually need. We have deemed it necessary to create assessments to prop up the idea that education can be easily measured and should gate meaningful life outcomes for most people. Most if not all "cheating" behavior is either just a rational, strategic response to this situation, or a disconnect between how people actually solve problems (e.g. often collaborative and laser-focused on the part of the problem that drives the outcome, in this case the assessment) and some weird cultist notion of what it means for an individual to do it "correctly".
Effective pedagogy will never scale unless we get some really AGI-like technologies (I loved The Diamond Age as a kid, but A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is from the perspective of extant tech a total pie-in-the-sky fantasy, illustrative of how meaningful teaching requires individualized approaches), and we see time and time again that teacher-to-student ratios as well as particularly good specific teachers are overwhelmingly the drivers of even the stupid metrics we are optimizing for
In short, this whole system is broken because its fundamental premise is flawed
When I was in school, many moons ago (in France) there were no quizzes. Zero. "Tests" were either dissertations (for topics such as literature, history, etc.) or problems. Everything was done in class, in longhand.
There were no good or bad answers, even in math class, because what was evaluated was the ability to describe the problem, the approach, and the solution, and you got points for that even if the ultimate result was wrong.
"Cheating" was very difficult; copying what another student was writing was hard and not very effective, because unless you could reproduce their whole argument, just taking a sentence or two would not make sense.
This system didn't "scale" very well; in fact it didn't scale at all.
If you build a system that let one person "teach" classes of hundred of students and generate quizzes that can be instantly rated by a machine, then some (most?) students are going to try to game that system.
This is inevitable, and I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
In high school we often were given two (or more) sets of problems so we can't copy off each other because people sitting one sit away from each other have different sets.
I remember at least one test where I wrote down problems from both sets (they were verbally dictated by the teacher at the beginning of the test). Then I just solved both and passed the solution to his problems to the classmate sitting behind me (I was asked for this ahead of time by him).
In Poland cheating is frowned upon by teachers and they tried to catch the cheaters but there were no formal systems in place to report or excessively punished cheating (like in USA).
In the real world the solutions to your problems can’t be found online, or if they can it’s valid to search them there (and lawyers will charge you a lot to do that). Collectively searching and distributing a solution is something young people are quite adept at (e.g. gaming wikis).
This is what makes the problem intractable. Measuring knowledge takes time, lots of time, by a skilled person. That does not scale.
Since we need (want) scale we necessarily have to use (ever weaker) proxies for measurement. And if there's one thing we do know, you get exactly what you measure for.
Hence, the system is not broken - it's working exactly as intended. It's not "fixable" because there's nothing to fix (at this scale.)
Real learning happens either because a) the student is soaking up everything they possibly can using every resource offered or B) they've left college and are fortunate enough to be in a workplace where there are more knows than know-nots, and they take every opportunity to soak it in like a sponge.
College does not prepare people for the working world (and never will). It is operating exactly as it is designed to do.
If a test is already graded on partial credit, which in the field of engineering at least most are, then it's no harder to grade than an equivalent test that has less but longer questions.
This obviously doesn't translate for multiple choice tests where there is no partial credit but at least in engineering those don't really exist outside of first year and maybe one or two second year classes. And honestly, every intuition tells me that those classes that I remembered doing no-partial-credit multiple choice should not be doing so in the first place.
Maths classes like algebra, precalc, calculus, statistics, and linear algebra should by no means be using no-partial-credit exams. That defeats the entire purpose of the classes as those classes are to teach techniques rather than any particular raw knowledge.
Same for the introductory hard sciences like chemistry and physics.
And for the ability to handle those more "bespoke" exams, we really need to be asking the question of why certain students are taking certain classes. Many programs have you take a class knowing that only maybe 30% of that will be relevant to your degree.
Instead of funneling all the students through a standard "maths education" class, maybe courses would be better suited by offering an "X degree's maths 1-3" or even simply breaking up maths classes into smaller semesters where you are scheduled to go to teacher X for this specific field up to week A, then teacher Y for this other unrelated maths field up to week B, and teacher Z until the end of the semester. In-major classes need not do this but general pre-req classes could benefit by being shorted and split up through the semester into succinct fields of knowledge so that maths or physics departments aren't being unnecessarily burdened by students who will never once apply the knowledge possibly learned in that class.
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The solution to testing students in a way that they can't cheat is to simply design tests that require students to apply their knowledge as if in the real world. No artificial handicaps and at most checks should be made for obviously plagiarized solutions. If that's not a viable testing mechanism, it's probably worth asking why and considering reworking the course or program.
The solution to students not wanting to absorb knowledge is to stop forcing students to learn topics & techniques they'll never use because maybe some X<25% of them will. Instead split up courses into smaller chunks that can be picked and chosen when building degree tracks.
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Edit: I forgot to include it but this is largely based on my experiences not necessarily just on my own as a student but as a tutor for countless peers and juniors during my time at university, and as a student academics officer directly responsible for monitoring and supporting the academic success of ~300 students for an organisation I was part of. This largely mirrors discussions I've had with teaching staff and it always seems to boil down to "the administration isn't willing to support this" or some other reason based on misplaced incentives at an administrative and operational level (such as researchers being forced to teach courses and refusing to do anything above or often even just at the bare minimum for the courses they are teaching).
I have some thoughts about the education system, and despite not being a teacher or academic I like to believe that my opinions have some value because I'm an expert programmer that has worked in the field for over 50 years. I attended three different major universities and have degrees in Math, EE, and CS. I still code almost every day (my Emacs configuration is never finished!), and I have in the past taught or been a teaching assistant for both undergrad and graduate courses for four semesters. Cheating has always been a concern, but now things are different.
The original article highlights the scale of exam cheating during the pandemic, but for us, the readers of HN, there is another problem with university learning that happens because of the internet. I've seen this affect virtually all of my younger friends pursuing degrees in CS. Programming assignments in school are unrealistically difficult, and it causes everyone to cheat.
Here's a typical real-life example: after covering doubly linked lists in the undergrad data-structure's class the programming assignment is to write a GUI based text editor in Java using doubly linked lists. This isn't especially hard for a professional programmer, but this is the first programming assignment of the course. Students had to wrestle with Eclipse, learning the AWT/Swing interfaces, event loop programming, and how to translate low level pointer based data structures into non-idiomatic Java based imitations of linked lists that kind of simulated using pointers. Most of the students really couldn't do this on their own, but they didn't have to because they can find the solutions to this very problem right on the internet.
Why would professors give such a program to beginning programmers to write? Because every student turns in a solution, and this causes the professors to lose touch with how difficult their assignments are. Over and over again difficult assignments are given, but the students are seemingly keeping up. The bomb lab assignment is a great assignment for CS students[1], but I've seen it given out with far too few attempts allowed to solve it. Again professors feel like a small number of attempts is all the students should need, they keep turning in the answers. The reason they can is that the complete solution is available on dozens of public Github repos and web sites.
The consequence of such hard and challenging programming assignments is a kind of inflation of the difficulty. The high difficulty causes students to cheat more, since their fellow students are cheating by downloading, cutting and pasting, or simply sharing their programs. There are commercial web-sites like chegg.com that sell the solutions to virtually every homework problem found in CS textbooks. Why should an undergrad spend so much time working on their own homework solutions while other students work openly in big teams at table in the university library?
This kind of cheating is pervasive at the undergrad level. How do we prevent our students to being pushed into cheating to keep up? Graduate school is different, the classes are smaller and more interactive. In my grad school classes I've often had to go to the board to demonstrate my code or proof to the class. Professor Dijkstra used to give individual oral exams to his students. So small interactive classes would help.
I've also seen assembly language programming classes given that require all work to be done on lab computers. The lab computers weren't on the internet and students had to sign in with the lab proctor to use the machines for their assignments. This at least helped some with the problem.
If I was teaching a programming class now, I would require everyone to maintain a git repo that could be checked for realistic commits of the programs as they are written. This might discourage the simple copying of a solution from GitHub the day before the assignment was due.
[1] The text for the bomb-lab assignment (highly recommended by the way): Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, 3rd edition,Bryant and O’Hallaron, Prentice-Hall, 2016 (ISBN: 0-13-409266- X), a google search will return many bomb-lab assignments and solutions from colleges all over the world.
Finland topped Pisa rankings many years, because we 1) listen teachers and have good academic pedagogical research, and 2) teachers are highly educated and reasonably well paid, meaning that the job is attractive to competent people.
Then politicians started to think big and read all the hype papers from think tanks about digitization and how the young are digital natives. Let's give them computers and they learn by themselves and ... we started slipping. Still OK, but slipping. It turns out that computers are not magic. Having all the information accessible is not a pedagogical solution.
ps. Chinese studied Finnish school system and imported some of the best policies in Shanghai and it worked. Some lessons work across widely different cultures.
This, combined with the possiblity for good teachers to gain respect in their communities, is what makes Finnish schools more effective learning environment than Norwegian schools, I think. Not salaries, some specific methodology, etc.
Because it conflates two things with conflicting incentives. This could and should resolve nicely.
1. Spreading knowledge 2. Certifying competence
To get e.g. a RHCE you may or may not attend the course. You may get the materials elsewhere and study from them, you might get tutoring from someone else who attended the course, you may have enough experience from your day job. This is knowledge acquisition.
Then you attend the certification exam and either succeeded or fail.
If you fail, you get back to knowdge acquisition. Decide to pay for the course this time. Get tutoring. Read the materials again. Maybe retry right away because you were just stressed and disoriented. Then you succeed.
Compare this with college. Fail a couple of examinations? Too bad, you are booted. Want to try again? Repeat up to two years! This is absolutely insane! No surprise people are cheating their way through!
Decouple knowledge acquisition from competence certification. Managed to reach end of the math track but failed physics? No problem! Certify math competence and let them study physics some more! Got enough certifications to warrant a title? Cool, give them the title!
Make it possible for people to step away for a couple of years and then come back to earn some more certifications and even the title when they actually need and want to learn those skills.
Make it possible to study 1/3 of your time for 15 years. Maybe people would stay in the learning mode longer. Unlike many doctors who are hopelessly behind the times. Make it possible to study with kids or sick parents to take care of. Make it a part of the adult culture.
Not something people had to suffer through in their youth to earn their place in the world.
The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
At the end of the day the final grades from school / college grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more important than the actual learning and so much time and stress is spent on them.
In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers", separate from colleges, where you could go and get a certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private companies that want to hire the best people actually have a good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as possible.
To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the college would act as a generative part and "exam center" would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D
Everyone has to pass the two certifying exams for their discipline, but there are multiple paths for assuming somebody has acquired the knowledge for the exam, ranging from years of industry work to passing standardized tests to having a college engineering degree.
It seems to me that a lot of problems in the real-world can be tracked down to unnecessary dependencies (in this case, having to attend college in order to get certified).
I don't agree that the system is broken (broken to me is something that is completely unusable, and we must stop using immediately). The progress we've made as a global civilization is to be credited to the way human knowledge is captured, distributed and taught by us as a species. And certainly formal schooling is a big part of that. And so, I'd rather view the situation as us being on a path of continuous improvement - where everything, including education can be improved.
Whether this means it’s “broken” or not is of course completely subjective because it depends on what you think the educational system should be doing in the first place.
No, we should listen to the people when deciding what the purpose of school should be, THEN refer to the experts on those purposes. Is it teaching random factoids? Making people "cultured"? Separating out people who follow instructions and learn well from those who don't? Introducing habits useful in a workplace? Good habits of thought? Teaching the knowledge required to vote sensibly? To provide some foundational knowledge for later vocational training? To navigate and function in the modern world? Is it just day care for kids?
First decide on the purpose(s) (and their weightings if many) and only then can we have a plan. I think there hasn't been anywhere near enough thought given by most people about what the purpose(s) of schooling is(are).
Well, yes, but at some point we look at the system, see human beings spend over a decade of very precious years doing just that, and not really getting over a decade's worth of benefits.
If we just want to incrementally improve things then definitely we should let specialists have the most weight. But listening to educators will absolutely never lead to major reforms or (god forbid!) reducing the years spent in the system.
I think there are a few constructive things that can be done. One is allowing curious students to design their own academic career (with guidance and supervision). I think students usually cheat because they think the course work is irrelevant to their future lives. Sure people need to be exposed to new things, but a semester on something you know you will never care about is torture. I have a computer science degree, but I remember being forced to take geology. To this day I can't think of a bigger waste of time, I remember nothing from it, and even if I did I would never use it.
Vocational schools and apprenticeship should also really come back. I know parents want their kids to be part of the affluent elite, but in a good society being a car mechanic should be a good life. There's no point saddling people with student debt if their degree gets them a job at starbucks.
I also think that things like essays are a lot better than quizzes. Sans plagiarism, it's hard to fake knowledge if you have to write it out.
Of course everyone can have an opinion! But are these truly likely to contribute to solving the problem? Of course not. Some people are more likely to have the experience and skills to comprehend and advocate for better solutions.
Yes, I tend to support democratic forms of government over others. However, I'm under no illusion that democracy's broad, sweeping claims about what government are "best" are really defensible when applied to the general problem of collective problem solving under real-world constraints.
Having one person, one vote seems intuitive and valuable for certain decisions. In particular, it seems useful and practical for selecting certain representatives. But I (and many others) don't think it is a great way of making policy decisions in general. Just as one example: committees of experts can make sense in some contexts.
But in general, we can do better than what most of us have seen so far. We have to do better than that. Look at how well government(s) at all levels are serving their constituents. I think it is self-evident that all can stand tremendous improvement.
So, for any particular context, think about how to design mechanisms that are likely to work well. In so doing, one must account for many factors, including: human biases, cognitive limitations, cultural differences, imperfect communication, economic costs, time constraints, factions, self-interest, lack of experience, and so on.
Keeping these in mind, how exactly would you select, organize, and structure an ongoing set of interactions between, say 1,000 people such that one can maximize the quality of their resulting collective recommendations?
One option is to choose 1,000 people at random and weight their opinions evenly. But this is underspecified. How do you compress those recommendations into a form that others are likely to read? How do you discover collective preferences? There are dozens of key questions even if you generally adhere to the idea of "equally weighting each person's opinion".
But there are manifold other options where each individual's starting opinion is not the driving factor.
I encourage everyone here to study political economy, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Disregard your preconceived framings of how people make decisions. Look at how others have done it. Look at what theorists suggest might be alternatives. It is an amazing journey. I've been thinking about it for almost twenty years, and it is just as fascinating, if not more, as when I first got exposed to these ideas in policy school.
When I first heard that students often cheat in higher education not too long ago, I was shocked. When I studied during the 90s at two good German universities, I had not ever heard of anyone who cheated in any course. A cheating student would have been a huge scandal. To be fair, I studied philosophy and general linguistics. I guess people in more practical disciplines cheated even then, e.g. economics -- more specifically, "BWL" in Germany -- always had a bad reputation. However, even in these disciplines cheating was rare. Its incomprehensible to me why lecturers and universities nowadays appear to be so lenient about it.
Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses.
Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar.
I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested.
Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered.
Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.
I think the reason for feeling of competence that prompts so many people to share their opinions on the matter is that nearly all of us went through this broken system at some point in our lives and our future lives literally depended not so much of what was taught but what was written down as the result of the teaching.
Yes, because they've proved they know things by passing through the system and getting good grades. Oh wait...
Sorry for the joke, but seriously, you can't expect us civilians to shut up. Leaving education to educators is as pernicious as leaving law just to lawyers, or journalism just to journalists. In all cases, the outcomes are everyone's business, and because there are real conflicts of interest here (and not just disagreement on facts) it can't just be delegated to experts. Even calling for it will make people rightly suspicious of your agenda.
Unlike with law or journalism though, pretty much everyone has A LOT of experience with the educational system in practice, by being on the receiving end of it for 12+ years. There's a challenge with sharing our experiences in a fruitful way and not just shouting over each other, sure, but suck it up: we have opinions about what education should be and can be, and we won't shut up and leave it to you.
When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration.
Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.
I've never met a teacher who didn't do those things; I have met many who wouldn't phrase it like that. Just because they're not using the same terminology as you doesn't mean it isn't happening.
It's very easy to look at a system from the outside and think that they're missing the obvious [1]; things become more complex the more you understand them.
[1] https://xkcd.com/793/
Or the way we fixed productivity in ways that has led to no measurable increase in productivity despite nearly everyone having the most powerful device ever invented in the palm of their hands.
Or the way we fixed housing through regulatory arbitrage, once again, converting housing for residents into short term rentals for vacationers, making housing for residents more expensive globally and making their communities worse.
Or the way we fixed cable by going from bundled cable packages where we have to pay $70-$100 to get all our channels, to unbundled walled gardens where we have to pay $70-$100 to get a fraction of content plus we also have to pay internet fees in addition.
Or the way we fixed messaging and phone calls by taking something like a $1/yr WhatsApp membership that offered safe encrypted chat and converting it into a data harvesting machine.
Or the way we fixed stock investing by gamifying investing, bringing in a lot of people into active trading who have no business being in active trading and should just park their money in Fidelity, and then promising “free” trades by allowing big banks to trade against, leading to a massive wealth transfer from naive individuals to sophisticated banks at the best of times.
Or how we destroyed inflation through BTC.
Or saved art through NFTs.
The list just goes on.
The teachers I've known don't really care about measuring knowledge. They're looking for a reasonable way to motivate engagement with the class, that's not too disruptive of the overall flow of the course. One professor told me, "A student who has made an effort to work through the homework problems a couple times should be able to easily get a B on the exam.
Testing also acknowledges that you're competing for your students' attention, and if you give no assessments, your students will rationally focus all of their effort on the courses that do. Preparation for the test becomes a reasonable measure, not of your knowledge, but of how much effort you need to apply to a course. Since students have been taking exams for years, each student knows how to calibrate their own level of effort.
As a student, after some trial and error, I developed a pretty good routine for getting A's in the two kinds of classes I was taking: Those that were dominated by solving problems and proofs, such as math and physics, and those that were based primarily on written assignments, such as art history.
Allow tests to be continuously regraded as the things students get wrong are corrected.
Automation would go a long way towards making that more feasible (i.e. easier for a multiple choice test than a written one).
But the emphasis on being right initially as the only thing that matters is unhealthy, and certainly in part what leads to the majority of people doubling down on confirmation bias rather than admitting being wrong and learning/incorporating the knowledge for the future.
Yes, there are practical issues with improving the system. But I've had a few select teachers that had that policy in some form years ago, and it was often the best teachers that did. We'd benefit from a widespread adoption of similar and it might lower the inventive for trying to cheat to be right the first time, as to the kids being brought up in these systems and reflecting these systems, that's the only thing that matters.
This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
You DON'T measure knowledge.
You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.
And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.
Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
CONTROVERSIAL
On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.
The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators.
>Teachers are not doctors
Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it.
> schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job?
> teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead
Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade.
Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there.
As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.
> You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
> Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.
>You DON'T measure knowledge.
>You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
>Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
It's very easy to make satisfying and engaging teaching. It's a lot harder to make that valuable.
If we focus on student satisfaction rather than understanding, we're failing them.
If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
The only people that ought to be involved are the teachers (and other school employees) the students (and their parents) of that school.
The fact the it might take ‘5 election cycles’ to see a reform through, is a disservice to the students, and often frustrating for the teachers as well.
If government does it, that literally opens the door for everyone else to be involved, muddying otherwise clear waters.
If it's learning for the joy of learning you don't need a test. If it's to get a piece of paper you need for a job, then schools are just shitty interviews mostly uncorrelated to real world tasks.
I think we should move to learning for the sake of learning (free, open door lessons or pick your own on the internet at your own time - no frontal lessons but still provide a space for students to socialise) and give the chance to students to work on projects that can prove they know something. Workplaces can look at these projects and find someone who fit with them.
You built a robot? I can reasonably expect you to know something about electrical engineering and math.
Because knowledge is currency. It opens doors to privilege and status in society. It also ensures incompetent people are not put into positions where they can do harm.
How are you telling whether you are successful at that? Even if you do not care about the personal individual achievement level (or whatever) of the students, you still need to be able to measure to understand where you are successfully teaching, and not, so that you can change/improve/etc teaching.
As the comment you replied to said, you can't just wish these problems away, and they are not easy things.
The overall thing is not a problem, they are systems. They can't be "solved" through simplistic answers
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Some things to understand about teaching. You must always teach at the middle kid in terms of ability and intelligence. By default this already means that some kids will be lost and some kids will be bored. This is made worse by conflating age with competence. Additionally, teachers have no understanding of what the kids are going through at home. Say you have a kid that never does homework? Is that the teacher's fault? Is it because the kid is lazy and just plays fortnight at home? Or is it because the parent's only job is night shift and the kids is a de facto parent watching two other kids? Or is it because the parent has a substance abuse problem and the kid hides out at playgrounds until late at night after everyone is passed out and it is safe to come "home"? Statistically, kids with problems at home also tend to be lower on competence scales. The real problem here is social help for the parents but we don't have the political will for this. Do you have any idea how often a teacher has had a student's parent come to a conference to discuss concerns about the kid falling behind just to be told that "It is YOUR job to teach my kid, not mine!" Tell me how testing teachers fixes that? And these are the same teachers that must buy paper/pens/supplies with the other salary because we ration school supplies.
We have some similar problems at the collegiate level. I worked full time while carrying 12+ credits paying my own way through college. I had to cut corners and ration my time. This meant lower grades for some classes but luckily I have the aptitude to get away with it. We also are sending kids to college that shouldn't be there. They don't have a real desire for a professional career outside of something like Social Media Manager. Of course they are going to cheat and use all the tools they have at their disposal having grown up digital. They aren't interested in the subject matter they just want to check the boxes and get through it. There is an issue here that needs solved at the institution level that kids will always be better at tech than the teachers but that is silly to lay at the feet of the teachers. In the end they are trying to lay a foundation of knowledge but the students have to care. Most college classes don't take attendance, is that the teacher's fault too?
Having the best software engineers doesn't mean anyone will use the product. Having the best doctors doesn't mean patients will do what they are told. Having the best trainers doesn't mean people will workout on their own. Having the best therapists doesn't mean anyone will use the techniques suggested in their daily lives.
In other industries, passing an accreditation exam gives you value in the market. In software engineering, certificates are seen as useless.
This can explain the cynical attitude programmers have against testing.
There are tests you can take in those subjects, such as the Graduate Record Exam. Those tests work to some extent because the subject matter is relatively mature, and consistent from one college to another. And yet there are entire fields of math and physics that I've never been exposed to. Their main purpose is to see if you're conversant in a body of knowledge that would prepare you for typical graduate study, not for a job.
Software engineering is a comparatively young field, with less standardization. There are even debates on HN as to whether software engineering is a real thing. There are places where every programmer has the title "engineer" regardless of their background.
I'm only employable because most people hate math and physics so much that they're relieved if anybody offers to do those things for them. That, and I'm pretty good at programming and electronics.
Cynically, because they're part of the problem.
Personally I don't think the "obviously bad thing" is the current state of testing. I'd instead say that the problem is the intermingling of education and credentials.
Society doesn't care about education, however all of the inspiration is geared around it. So you wind up with the case that students either become disillusioned with the system after realizing it's ripe with hypocrisy, or otherwise structured in a way that creates resentment in the system.
As an anecdote, a friend I went to high school with dropped out when he was disallowed to participate in the school band, because it was his only source of motivation to show up every day. I don't think that was the intended goal, but when faced with the reality of the situation, the system is unbending.
I think as a result, the ones you see succeeding in college tend to be more driven by either ambition or obligation rather than any actual desire to learn. So in that respect, I think colleges are self selecting for students that are more willing to think cheating is a good idea. And in many respects they may not be wrong.
> Curious, isn’t it, how all these systems seem to fail in the same way?
No...the systems haven't evolved independently. It's no more surprising to me than learning that felines could get covid.
For what it's worth, I'm a community college dropout. The education and mental health systems were absolutely structured in a way where my severe adhd (and its best friends anxiety and depression) went undiagnosed and untreated through my senior year of high school. I loved learning, but there wasn't any way to get an education that could present the coursework in a way that could keep me engaged. And of course my inability to do homework was continually met with being told it was some personal failure on my part and I should just apply myself.
So back to
> So what’s the solution then? Well, maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
_They're the ones that've made me think we'd be better of scrapping the system and starting over._
I find it enormously frustrating when people (not you) complain about "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test is good pedagogy! First, determine what you want to students to know/do. Then choose how you're going to assess their knowledge/ability. Then design instruction that prepares them for the assessment. This is called backwards design.
The teachers are the problem.
After all I was also sitting in school for 13 years
I would actually focus on the question of "Why do I need to quantify everybody's knowledge at a high resolution?"
When I was TAing, I held the position - never accepted I should say - that we should make more courses pass/fail; and instead of investing effort in the numeric grading keys, try to give more meaningful feedback on assignments.
Some alternative suggestions I brought up:
* I suggested that the final grade be a combination of the assessment a roll of 1D6 points - to hammer it in that the grading is to a great extent artificial. Somehow this was even less popular of a suggestion...
* I once proposed we offer people a perfect passing grade if they just never show up to class nor submit anything, and only people who want to learn would risk an imperfect grade. I really liked that proposal, because it put the two motivations - learning and making the grade - which are often conflated, at direct odds with each other.
Of course none of this was taken seriously - even though I was serious. Kind of.
Oh please. Teachers advocate for themselves. Academics are currently waging a war against standardized testing for ideological reasons. Instead of a polemic against people giving their opinions please just tell us what you think.
For my money, the problem with education is that we decided it's not about knowlege but rather increasing the socioeconomic position of participants. From this it follows that everyone needs a 4 year degree. Education will only function when it's a small number of weirdos who want to be there.
Solve the problem by attacking credentialism, reforming student loans, and bolstering alternative post-secondary education (trade schools, bootcamps).
This sounds like an entirely different question. When you have a method for testing, you have at least two different measures of effectiveness:
- how well the test measures knowledge when it is taken honestly
- how likely is the test to be taken honestly vs. subverted
I thought this thread was about the second question, but you seem to be focused on the first. But these problems require different kinds of solutions, and crucially, it is much easier (but still not easy) to verify success or failure in addressing the second question (cheating) than the first (predictivity).
I suppose that complaining without proposing solutions is akin to protesting. You may not necessarily know what you want specifically, but you don't want the current system.
To me measuring knowledge is a minor reason of having tests. The main reason is to force students to study. If you have no test on knowledge most people will just gloss over the detail and not learn.
This question has no meaning unless you specify what the goal of the measurement is. There are two main options.
1. Measurement as part of education process — for the sake of both teacher and the student.
2. Measurement as part of external qualifications — for the people who would later use the credentials achieved in measurement to accept you to higher education and to extend job offers.
Most of the problems with different measurement strategies happens because people conflate the two.
It's kind of hard to believe this needs to be said, because it is so obviously correct.
i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else.
the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems.
teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach.
the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned.
these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
Well obviously we need to fix the system of the system!
Trying to create a knowledge factory seems to me a pipe dream. All cheating comes from trying to force learning into a rigid mechanical box.
Solution? My opinion - remove colleges, bring back guilds.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the moment you remove the need to print out diplomas, everything does become simpler. The "measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is the hardest problem.
The “knowledge factory” exists for a reason. The way our society is constructed, we need structured specialization (pick a course), verification (you’re OK) and rating (you’re the top 5%) — because our entire society expects these things to work and be available.
It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem.
People need to be able to improve, be excluded when incompetent and rewarded when excellent, because that is how our society works in all other aspects, and the one thing that will always be true about an educational system is that it will mirror society: and if it doesn’t currently it will in a few decades.
You cannot suggest fundamental changes to an educational system without more or less advocating a revolution in society. No wonder most complaints stop at the problem and never continue to proposed solutions.
How do you prevent them from becoming corrupt gatekeepers that maximize their own profits while ignoring learning as much as possible?
"measuring understanding mechanically at scale" is exactly the tool to prevent that.
The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005.
Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and know what they don’t know. Academic leadership often doesn’t have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in 2 weeks.
Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation.
Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.
It’s pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy is used every 3 words when… How adults learn (andragogy) including young adults is quite different than children.
When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it’s tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might not really know the difference.
If experts really wanted to get into digital learning taxonomies based on old ones that don’t seem to bridge the divide, maybe that would be a start.
Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students ( how many different things do students have to log into), perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are pretty complex but can take your money smoothly.
I think part of this is because too many academics are poor listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries.
In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in society.
Another observation is that most universities only teach how to teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it’s why the word pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do for K-12?
In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more ways to engage with the material. It’s a big problem.
Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It’s decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting into those roles and help change.
You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that’s what politicians want.
Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk of education. There’s a need for our leaders, experts and institutions to recognize and do something about this, but bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at all costs.
One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions, or put the same effort into building new institutions for the future.
Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats. Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks.
It’s interesting to see how much more society has opened up to taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if they can’t create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3 years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a course.
If it’s relevant, I’ve built platforms to deliver online K-12, post-secondary education and industry training certification for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering education like it’s designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs.
Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to build the skills and competencies they need in people because education isn’t turning out people that are needed. The advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn’t be discounted.
Edit: Grammar, clarifications.
It's always amusing to see lectures on correct usage from people who don't know the difference between etymology and meaning. (And also who don't know the etymology, either, since etymologically, pedagogy isn't “how children learn” but more like “the act of leading children”.)
In English, especially American English, “Andragogy” is mostly used in relation to a particular theory/approach to adult education originating with Martin Knowles, who leveraged the same conflation of etymology and meaning—even when it originated, pedagogy was well established with its modern and more general meaning despite the narrower sense of its Greek roots—to promote it; education for different audiences by age or other circumstance is not generally distinguished by different greek-root terms in English, but by English terms [“early childhood education”, “adult education”, “continuing professional education”, etc.)
The original root of "pedagogy" relates to children, but I still have a lot more time for someone who uses that industry-standard term than I do for anyone preaching 'andragogy'. It's a niche, culturally-bound and assumption-based theory with little research to actually support any of its claims.
Despite the grandiose name, 'andragogy' is just another 'learning styles' or 'growth mindset' - it's pop psychology designed to sell training courses.
Should we also always listen to the car mechanics, used car salesmen, and cops because after all they are the experts?
It didn't work, because you could see the same, let's say, idiosyncracies, in their code. For example, there might be three or four different ways to solve a coding exercise and about 60-75% of the papers would solve it using the same way, which was not necessarily the best, or even the most obvious, way (what is the most obvious way to solve a Prolog exercise might not be common sense, but that's why you are given a lecture, first, and then the exercise).
What's most interesting is that I saw the same patterns repeated over the three years I TA'd for one of the Prolog courses. I guess they shared the answers between years, or somebody had put them online (I searched but couldn't find them). Or they just copied solutions to similar exercises they found online.
I didn't report the cheating because I felt there was no benefit in doing so. In particular with Prolog, because it's not a language commonly used in the industry, and it's taught at Imperial mainly for historical reasons (there are many of us logicists studying, or teaching, there) I reckoned that most students found it a useless chore and did not understand why they needed to learn it, and why they needed to "waste" time solving those coding problems. So they copied from each other in order to get the job done quickly and then have more time to spend on the things they felt were more useful to them (like learning Python or "ML" I suppose).
I personally thought, and still think, that learning to program in Prolog is useful, just to disentangle a programmer's mind from the particularities of the coding paradigms, and the programming languages, she's most familiar with. At CS schools today, programming is introduced with Python and I guess it's easy to get into a mindframe that all programming languages must necessarily work like Python. Studying languages from different paradigms, like Prolog or Haskell, can shake you off that mentality (it sure did me, back when I did my CS degree).
The problems is that you can't really force this appreciation of the need to learn different things on students, who are often in a terrible hurry and under terrible pressure to do good on their course, so they can get on with life. The Prolog course I TA'd was mandatory and so it must have really felt like someone was trying to force the knowledge down the studnets' throats.
I don't think that's a good idea. You can't teach people that way. They'll just see your obvious effort to force them to learn what you want, and they'll simply take the obvious route around it. And that ends up teaching them a lesson that you really weren't expecting to teach: the world is full of idiots who think they can teach you things, but you know better than they do and you'll show them who's boss.
That's what students do with tests, also. They can see they're a useless waste of time and they can see the obvious way around them is to cheat, and that it's to their benefit to cheat. And so they cheat. I don't have solutions to this. The students shouldn't have to fight the school, and the school shouldn't have to fight the students. The school is there for the students' benefit after all.
This is the story of hacker news. And of most other online forums. And of most meetings. Let’s bikeshed. Hi, I’m on the Internet and I read the whole post title. Let me share my thoughts.
People are stupid, lazy, and uninformed in the general case. People writing in an 8 line comment fields on mobile aren’t going to be the exception.
There is no need to be frustrated. Unless you enjoy that feeling. Then by all means embrace it.
Try this? Dip into the comments with right expectation. These are off the cuff uniformed thoughts of the masses. Maybe they make you laugh or cry or maybe something inspires you. Maybe there’s a gem buried here somewhere.
Don’t expect HN commenters to know anything deep. If you are in the mood for a deeper thought, go to the library.
Dead Comment
Our schools, in the aggregate, aren't that bad. We have a broad spectrum and inequality is severe, but even in the worst-off areas, it's not the schools so much as broader social conditions that are producing lousy academic performance. If kids are getting evicted, they're not going to be able to turn homework in on time. If they're doing nothing all summer, they're going to backslide. I also question the social value of "fun" projects like dioramas in grade school: the result seems to be that middle-class kids' parents do all the work, producing adult-quality work, while the less well-off students turn in projects that looks like they were made by kids.
We have ridiculous rates of cheating because we're in a society run by people who cheated and everyone knows it. Corporates cheat; you can't become (or stay) an executive if you don't lie and backstab your way to the top. The fish is rotting from the head, and young people are extremely alienated. This doesn't justify their actions, at an individual level, but it does explain the upsettingly high rate of dishonesty we're seeing.
People also underestimate the power of peer framing and moral drift. Generally, people don't wake up one day and decide that they want to cheat their way through college like some future insurance executive. It happens over time. They start with minor offenses like lifting a sentence without attribution, or looking up one answer on a phone... but, over time, they're plagiarizing whole papers and have stopped doing the actual work... and this is when they usually get caught.
Dishonesty also goes both ways. Grading might be broken, but a world without it would be worse--removing the SAT enhances the preexisting advantages of the rich. Once people become teenagers and realize that advancement in society isn't only based on merit but also requires playing social/nonacademic games (in high school, to be popular and appear "well-rounded" to admissions committes; in college, to get laid but also to get introduced to the best companies; in the work world, to ingratiate oneself to the right people and thus climb the ranks over more deserving but less likeable peers) at which everyone cheats, because everyone has to do so... because global corporate capitalism is itself a cheating system in which most of us are predestined to lose... it becomes harder to make a moral argument to them that cheating is categorically unacceptable.
Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing?
If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
What I said was that we should listen to people who are active in the field for proposed solutions to problems we face. I also never said I was active in the field, in fact I said quite the opposite.
I really don’t understand why your comment is so confrontational. I never claimed to have the answers to all problems in all educational systems across the globe, I only suggested that if you want to resolve them you probably shouldn’t do it by having an open discussion involving only programmers (or any other non-pedagogical group of people for that matter).
Therefore, saying "fix the system" isn't helpful, everyone knows some fixing needs to be done but not how or even if they do, don't have the power to. Look at problems like poverty, housing supply, climate change, I can look at all these and say the system is broken
No, it's not. Not at all.
But your comment is saying "How dare you suggest that we listen to experts? We all should have a say!". And that's the problem the gp post is pointing out. Do you argue like that with your doctor before surgery? With your lawyer before they defend you in court? With a chef before they cook a meal you ordered in a restaurant? No? Then why is education any different and suddenly everybody claims to know how it should work..
I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating
Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).
The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they're teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc
imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle
Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion.
But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.
Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence.
It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge.
Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most profs won't.
The underlying issue is that there's been far too little research into the social consequences of automating all kinds of interactions.
The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns were automated and enhanced.
Culture as a whole has no defences against this because hardly anyone has realised that it's a problem inherent within the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and who knows why?
And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews
Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues.
I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.
So they're ideally qualified for a career in politics.
The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.
An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.
On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.
Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.
I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much.
Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question.
It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).
I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"
A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.
Dead Comment
I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.
This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention
During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you another attempt at later time. Also, during the written exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at all - it just didn't pay off.
Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.
I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.
But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to employment and life success. People cheat because they don’t want to learn but they do want a good job. I don’t know how you separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is probably to snitch.
This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.
I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up).
Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.
I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester
BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if there is not a rational argument for X.
But in that same example, if many of the students get close to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the class will suffer
The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam.
If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and engaged students who are showing good understanding of the material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect actual mastery of the material.
There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.
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Well, people shouldn't cheat for a whole lot of reasons. But the main take away from this is, in my opinion, that people should not be "graded on a curve".
Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.
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In the later, we were given harder exercises and asked to deliver a working program with some constraints. This program is then tested and graded by a CI and examined by TAs. Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises. As the exercises were harder than expected for a class and projects were long and difficult, students were encouraged to talk, discuss and exchange ideas. Ideas sure, code meh.
Then, in the US, exercises were stupid checkboxes-style questions and graded on a curve. So of course everyone "cheated".. I must confess that I did it too. It was unworthy of my time and attention, as it was just about taking the course material and regurgitate it with different words. Of course, I can't imagine anyone learning anything from this way of working.
Stupid assignments encourage students to cheat. Make them interesting and this problem will go away.
and yet
> Usually TAs would get a cheating report for reused bits of code and things that would solve an exercise with techniques far away from students knowledge or forbidden functions. TAs would ask you questions about your code and trigger cheating review if you could not explain why you wrote it this way. It was usually effective for detecting people that didn't wrote their own exercises.
So both courses have cheating, one possibly has less cheating, and that one has a more effective detection procedure, but cheating happens on both all the same. The problem does not go away with a better course but is - based on your anecdote and not from the presumably better view of the TAs - lessened somewhat.
Perhaps the same course could be run in California and would still attract the same level of cheating as the checkbox style one. Maybe it's simply that a course that appears more difficult to cheat on or is more difficult to cheat on attracts less cheating.
I was a TA in France, and did a bit of TA-ing unofficially in the US. So, my view is based on both experience, TA and Student.
While there was some cheating happening on both sides, it was practically non-existent in France after a few weeks of school. The abilities required to cheat and get away with it were extremely hard to master, and usually would carry much more risks than just complete the exercise. Successful cheating were, sometimes, rewarded if the problem solved was worthy enough. You could even get clearance from the professor in advance (not for copying code from StackOverflow, of course, but rather for using forbidden functions or libraries).
Finally, most important projects were done in groups of 2 to 5-6. Individual students putting a group at risk deliberately, would get caught extremely easily and carry a far worse sentence than just a bad grade: they would be excluded from other students groups and left to do their projects alone or with dropouts students. Finding back you way after this is very very difficult.
Actually, that's not a hypothetical scenario: School 42, an offshoot of the school GP described with the same cursus, has antennas in both Paris and California.
I wonder if the cheating rates differ between the two.
What you describe in France is exactly how my classes in the US were (at UW Seattle) ~15 years ago.
I got a 2.7 in my CS classes because I had perfect scores on the tests and homework, but the teacher decided to make a huge percentage of your grade consist of quizzes about random factoids from the book that had literally nothing to do with computer science. (Literally: "What color was the elephant on page 12?") The book cost like $200, so I decided to just study from other books and the lectures and eat the loss of GPA
Man, I wish I could remember that professor's name so I could send him some hate mail..
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If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face consequences like expulsion or being on official academic probation.
However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code through a piece of software to detect similarities between each other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether it seemed like cheating.
I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance, or perhaps an overly permissive one.
The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.
They are basically stating that this “software” is 100% accurate. Furthermore it’s then left to whims of some TAs?
No algorithm can detect cheating unless the number of permutations are very very large (I.e being struck by lightening). Maybe one way to offset would be to use data as the student is entering the solution but that was never the case for us; just upload the source code to their custom made Windows app.
To start with, at an undergrad level, most students had fairly distinct coding styles - usually with quirks of not "proper" coding. Some cheaters had the exact same quirks in multiple students assignments.
Also, some cheaters had the exact same mistakes in their code, on top of the same code style.
Yes the software picks up people that write correct solutions with perfect syntax, but those are the ones that you just toss out because there isn't any proof there.
The people that get caught cheating generally don't know what correct solutions and good code look like, so they don't understand how obvious it is when they copy paste their friends mediocre code.
On the test data we were given (anonymized assignments from prior semesters together with known public git repos), we never had a false positive. On the flip side, small refactorings like variable renames or method re-ordering still turned up above the "suspicious" threshold because there would be enough remaining matching k-grams to make that pair of projects an outlier.
Our school explicitly did not use the algorithm's numbers as evidence of cheating and did not involve the TAs--the numbers were used only to point the professor in the right direction. We excluded all k-grams that featured in the professor's materials (slides, examples, boilerplate code). It also helped that they only used it on the more complex assignments that should have had unique source code (our test data was a client and server for an Android app).
My sense was that this was a pretty good system. Cheaters stood out in the outliers test by several orders of magnitude, so false positives are extremely unlikely. At the same time, the k-gram approach means that if you actually manage to mangle your project enough that it's not detected as copied, you had to perform refactorings in the process that clearly show you know how the program works--anything less still leaves you above the safe zone of shared k-grams.
Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."
Sources:
[0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss
[1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...
Both they had less paperwork, and well, they wouldn't report that person.
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This kind of mistyping reminds me of those example of people whose names fit their job but it's rare to find such an apropos example.
Sorry to derail your point but the juxtaposition of "ch" and "t" here is perfect.
They are much more likely to be applied to homework assignments, where the opportunity for copying is large, but the chance of two students producing the exact same >500-1000 line program is slim to none. Perhaps once in a while a critical function will be copied and no one will realize or similarities in a trivial function will be unnecessarily flagged, but this will be relatively rare and quickly discovered in manual review.
>What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of text verbatim copied.
How broken of a person do you have to be to reflexively cheat on a simple assignment intended to give you a second chance after you’ve been caught cheating already? How can that be the first thing you go for? This is really sad. I seriously don’t understand the thinking here.
My opinion is that most people only go to college these days because they perceive it as the only path to a good paying job, not because they are terribly interested in the material.
Given that assumption, it's easy for me to understand why people would try to minimize the amount of work they have to do for something they didn't want in the first place.
They are mostly just there for the "job ticket".
I know most people here refer to American system and universities but my experience in Poland is, degrees, especially related to computer science, mostly teach you useless, outdated stuff, that you will never need to know. Most people here approach CS degree as something that you simply have to do to get a decent job in IT(though it's slowly changing toward not doing a degree at all), or simply because your family expects you to. Most universities here pump out diplomas to get paid by government and industry, so they can pump out more diplomas. Honestly I haven't met a single employer or even coworker that ever cared if I had CS degree. Most of stuff I learned there is 'nice to know it exists' but nothing I've ever used in real life work, most professors clearly have never even worked in the industry. Best thing that came out of my BEng in CS are friends and realization that noone cares about me so I needed to solve issues and learn on my own.
In some lines of work finding the correct stuff to use for a task is way more important than ability to create it yourself from scratch.
Finding the plug that fits the given socket vs building the plug from scratch.
As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn't care about comparing against others.
Perhaps that's why I didn't care?
Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it's just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be.
There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that's a moral value that's beyond some random teacher's ability to teach adult students — so I don't see why bother.
The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course?
Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn't condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).
Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters, and the grades matter for your future.
I know in the program I attended I was up against a fair few who were taking cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework. It was frustrating to be on a curve with them.
I had a few professors who didn’t use curves. It was wonderful.
I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.
Open to counterarguments.
I feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on drugs did put in the work and the effort, after all.
Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.
There’s the key problem.
A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions, grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.
I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's inherently relative to what the typical student at that institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it strongly implies that more material could have been covered.
if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.
ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.
Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.
There are two cases, usually, where curves make sense.
* When the professor doesn’t actually know how hard the exam is because it’s a new test. And since people save tests that’s most classes.
* When the professor is actually trying to find that one kid. This is super common in theoretical maths. The exams are incredibly hard with the expectation that you won’t finish it and graded on a curve or some other measure like “the test is out 100 points but there are 200 possible.” But when someone gets a perfect score you direct them to the phd program.
Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.
It's beyond me why is this even allowed.
Are you grading results of your educational effort or are you organizing a beauty pageant?
Not grading on a curve should be part of academic integrity standards.
If there's an actual correspondence (eg you get next year scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above X), that's an incentive to cheat, so there is one issue.
And while curves do suck, it also sucks to be compared with someone having photographic memory in most exams where that is a very useful skill (even though the exam is not sttempting to favout photographic memory). Or some lazy bag who is more talented at something so it took you 10x more effort to get the same understanding. Basically, you are stacked against so much, that cheating is just a small part of all of that.
In short, it sucks being compared to people using everything they can to their advantage. But then again, that's what happens past university too, so it's just real life.
Years ago a few students in my class were complaining about cheaters. They were frustrated, and one even accused me of missing "obvious" cheaters. It was embarrassing for me, and brought down morale in the class. I have policed exams more aggressively ever since.
In another class, I caught a cheater during an exam (Calculus 2 or 3), and one of his classmates e-mailed thanking me, noting the student cheated his way through the prerequisite class the prior semester.
This stuff really matters.
What I am saying is that it shouldn't.
You voluntarily agree to abide by the academic integrity rules. If you don't want to do that, you can voluntarily go to a different institution with different rules and standards. The goal of the place is learning not pointscoring and cheating undermines that.
If you take away the aspect of college as “a place to get a credential” you’ll see the cheating stop. Instead for those credentials just hold exams like the AP, ACT, SAT, RHCSE, or the 7 Actuarial exams. No college required. Whatever you do to pass them is fine.
Then make college totally ungraded except as a mechanism for student feedback. Have tracks for people that just want the credentials (just like the APs) that terminate at the exams. All other courses are just for people who are genuinely interested and confer no status or praise.
Now the incentives are aligned. Outside of the testing areas there is literally zero reason for anyone to cheat, and non-credential classes have to actually be interring, engaging, and useful to students for anyone to take them.
I went there for learning, and I never felt that was undermined by others' cheating.
How does cheating undermine learning for non-cheaters in college?
I can see loss of motivation or external pressures (family or scholarship demanding a particular GPA) when you are curve graded, but that means that one cares not only about learning — which is ok, we all care about ranking to some extent, but as long as you recognize that it's a flawed system, you can either focus on that or focus on learning imho. And accepting that someone else cares about grading more than you do (which pushes many into cheating as well).
Edit: Oh, and loss of motivation for the teacher, as brought up by the author in the article.
I did not go to college to “learn”, and I’m not sure I know anyone who did.
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic. The essay detailed all of the useful info passed around in chats. I totally agreed with this point....Their strategy was to leave the chat before every quiz and midterm so that they couldn’t be there for the cheating. Then they rejoined afterward."
So, in order to be competitive in a class where (whether explicitly curved or not) the difficulty will be adjusted up or down until the "right" portion of students are passing, even a student who wanted to not cheat needed to be in the chat. He made a course in which it required extraordinary efforts to find a way to be able to both pass and not cheat, and then acted surprised that so many students cheated.
Any teacher who can fire up R to process the chat group logs, could have figured out a better system for quizzes and tests, so that it wasn't this hard to be competitive without cheating. Also, if he hasn't ever taken a course on game theory, he should; if he has, he shouldn't have passed.
"The best advice was a student telling everyone they could just go to the website for the textbook, then control-F in the textbook and search for words in the question to find the answers. I mean, ya. It’s in the textbook."
This does not sound like a difficult course to me. I have taken courses where it's rather trivial to ace the online quizzes by looking things up in the textbook (I am taking one right now, in fact). Students who can't even do this and resort to sharing the answers in a group chat must have become incredibly jaded about their education. I fully agree with the author's decision to both sanction them for cheating and give them a second chance to engage with the course material. It was very satisfying to see that all of the effort paid off in the end.
His goal is clearly stated: for people to honestly connect with the course material. That's hard if a group like this is poisoned with cynicism. My thought here is how these types of messaging groups spaces have become an incredibly important aspect of the educational experience and beyond. I think about all the 'toxic' cultures in places I have been in and how they usually revolve around people trading information and socializing.
"The argument was that chat groups have become indispensable tools for students taking courses online during the pandemic...I totally agreed with this point"
I think they just really enjoy catching people cheat and see how far it goes. Sort of masochistic tbh
As someone who recently graduated, this student is a freeloader. Comparable to companies who heavily use OSS but never contribute. I expect them to be a terrible coworker.
But something that stood out to me is this:
> For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule.
and then
> I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating.
So basically, this professor know about "low-impact cheating" (cheating in quizzes, where "[t]he quizzes were low stakes"), but instead of saying anything just kept pushing forward.
I wonder if anyone even told those students up front in clear terms that sharing answers on the quizzes was not allowed. In school we're often told to co-operate in assignment. Where is the line between an assignment and a quiz?
Just letting the whole group slide gradually into cheating territory is a lose-lose strategy.
You also shouldn't be sharing the answers to assignments unless the teacher/professor says you can do so.
And finally, read your school's handbook for a proper definition of cheating.
I dont even say that it is good, I just say that is the way it is, was and probably will be.
So you kind of not understand life?
Lots of jobs come through networking, another fact of life.
After the halfway point they tilt strongly from justice to mercy and ethics education.
A course should tell you what works and what doesn't early on, just like a good computer game. If people go down the wrong path early on, it means early on something failed.