this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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On the one hand: awww, poor cheater world's smallest violin meme
On the other hand: expulsion from the university for a first offense seems... harsh.
universities take plagiarism very seriously. Friend of mine teaches stage craft (how to make sets, props, costumes, lighting and sound design/planning/execution/engineering)
First semester, first test, easy pass: Someone pokes their head into the class and my friend goes to the door to answer them, stepping outside for like ~30 seconds
comes to mark the papers:
"In a proscenium theater, what is the very front of the stage called?"
Real answer: apron
55% of the student answers: the same made up word that sounded vaguely Portuguese with no hits on Google.
even though it's super dumb and super easy and barely matters at all and is a one word answer to a basic question - the students ended up being investigated by the university and my friend had all his classes audited.
Just wanna say I took a stage craft class as an elective many, many years ago when college was affordable enough to do such things.
We didn't do anything hands on, just learned how stuff works.
It was one of my most favorite classes. I was a beer chugging, skirt chasing, never went to class burnout back then, but I enthusiastically went to that class every time.
I may be dumb, but to clarify: they were assumed cheating because the word was fake, and the only reason for so many duplicated fake answers would be if they shared a faulty answer sheet. Right?
yeah, I mean a forgivable wrong answer would be "downstage center" "the front" "the lip" "limelights" "footlights" "wing" "leg" "curtain" "pit" - like close but wrong terminology or similar guesses.
The fact that loads of them said the same weird wrong answer was very sus.
Cheating is taken VERY seriously at every decent University. As it should.
Still, cheating to some extent exists everywhere. This just weeds out the real lazy or stupid cheaters. Which is also some kind of quality check, I guess.
To cheat properly, I've has to be a bit clever and shrewd, which is a valuable character trait. Maybe not the most moral one, but real life isn't all moral either. 🤷♂️
Sometimes the best and most efficient solutions are created by just cleverly combining the work of others.
I will say up front that I am not a cheater - not because of good moral character, but because I am a terrible liar. It's less stressful to me to risk failure, than to risk being caught.
That said, a lot of cheating is excellent preparation for work in corporate America. I don't like that it is, but it is. My main beef with capitalism is that it encourages, breeds, and rewards the absolute worst attributes of human nature. There's literally nothing in capitalism that speaks to anything good in people. Knowing how to cheat, cheat profitably, and (most importantly) avoid being caught is perhaps one of the most useful skills in the American capitalist corporate space.
Not getting caught is less important than always having a scapegoat ready. A successful office worker is just like a politician: talk a lot, confuse the issue as much as possible, and in an emergency, deflect blame on someone else. The actual work delivered matters very little, and ideally you can just appropriate the work of someone less well spoken anyway.
Your bosses will praise you for your open communications and dealing well with trouble.
And this is a global truth, not just in the US. I have encountered many a successful worker that contributes nothing to their company or society. And while more noticable at boss and manager levels, this goes all the way down to minimum wage line work, although there it's more difficult to hide.
🤝
I only qualify it for the US because that's where most of my experience has been; I don't doubt capitalism brings out the worst in people in all cultures.
Doesn't mean it has to be tolerated.
If a school is known to go easy on cheaters. Why would anyone actually trust a degree from that school?
You don't learn by just copying someone's github repository and presenting it as your solution.
As someone said. "You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN."
It's a masters program, I have no issue with high level cheaters getting slapped with consequences. When I was in undergrad, first offence was an immediate F in the class, with a second being expulsion. Given the requirements for masters/doctorate (my MIL got both while I was dating my wife), getting an F is probably going to bounce you from the program anyway, so it's not that much difference IMO.
Oh, Mr. Kirk, I'm as upset as you to learn of Dexter's ~~truancy~~ cheating, but surely expulsion is not the answer!
That boy needs therapy.
Purely psychosomatic.
I'm afraid expulsion is the only answer. It is the opinion of the entire staff that Dexter is ~~criminally insane~~ cheating!
I love seeing my favorite plunderphonic in the wild! :D
Well, now, that will be haunting my dreams for years to come. Thanks!
I'm going to allege that such "educational" institutions' focus on "cheating" is harmful and dangerous for their students.
I'm a flight instructor. Students would show up to my class actually afraid to be caught writing things down to refer to them later. They were afraid to be caught using checklists. They would overwhelm themselves trying to commit entire technical manuals to memory. That's not how anything actually works. The FAA prints all these references so pilots can read them. We don't take them away from you when you pass your practical.
Checklist usage in the cockpit is a required skill to pass a practical test. The examiner has to see you using a checklist during the test in order to pass you. Writing things down so you can refer to them later, like flight planning and ATC clearances, also a required skill. Schools make people afraid to do these things.
If you've got a kneeboard that has the tower light gun signal chart printed on it, and you lose the radio and need light gun signals, you're not going to have your license taken away from you if you use that quick reference. Too many students bring that pressure into flight training with them. It's a fun bit of deprogramming to do.
I won't disagree that the overall anti-cheating mentality goes too far, but this example was students literally plagiarizing their first project.
That mentality sounds like instructors aren't properly setting expectations for students. If going over checklists is a required skill, students should be informed regularly that they need to be doing XYZ and should be writing that down. When I was still trying for my CS BS, that was something my profs did regularly. We could bring notes to the final, but you were still expected to write your own code (by hand) on the final.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "it's a fun bit of deprogramming to do." Especially younger students are strongly conditioned to think of tests or performances as "closed book" unless specifically informed otherwise and often demonstrate actual fear of being caught using reference materials or god forbid open a reference manual. Breaking them of that habit often takes more than "setting expectations." It can take some effort to get students to realize the game we're playing here isn't "You have to know everything in all the textbooks," it's "You've got to know which book to find which answer in."
Having gone back to college after becoming a flight instructor, I'm strongly under the impression that college just doesn't matter. There is no certification or accountability requirements for professors; no legal requirement for them to study the fundamentals of instruction, hell I'm not convinced anyone actually interviewed some of my professors before hiring them.
I had an English professor tell me she "likes to give students enough rope to hang themselves with." I want you to imagine hearing that out of a flight instructor.
College professors seem to see themselves as gatekeepers rather than guides. Their classes have to be hard so that only the worthy graduate. Flying an airplane is already complex enough, my job as a flight instructor is to make the process of learning that complexity as easy and safe for my students as possible. What even is college if not corrupt?
I think it's more that it's in their master's capstone class. In undergrad, definitely too harsh. But for a master's program I get it
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Who TF is copying out of github for their masters, though, honestly?
People who relied on it to get there in the first place and now are stuck not knowing how to do anything without it.
Nah fuck em
I hope my Uni had this. I have never cheated, but cheaters sometimes have better grades than me.
I guess that would harm you if the class is graded on a curve. I'm not saying they shouldn't be caught and penalized, only that expulsion from the university is a harsh penalty. Automatic failure of the class would hurt plenty, without utterly destroying someone's life.
It is not harsh. Cheating is immoral and unfair, and every adult knows that. It is in nature a forgery of your degree. Honesty needs to be highly valued and respected. We have cooperations and politicians lying everyday because of this.