[HN Gopher] Academic "Ghost-Writing": The Cheating Scandal No On... ___________________________________________________________________ Academic "Ghost-Writing": The Cheating Scandal No One Will Discuss Author : paulpauper Score : 113 points Date : 2021-03-21 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (logosnews.tech) (TXT) w3m dump (logosnews.tech) | drummer wrote: | One more reason why credentials dont mean much. People have to be | able to demonstrate their skills. | ALittleLight wrote: | I always cringe when I have to interview someone with a masters | degree in computer science because in my interview I ask a | FizzBuzz style question and CS masters people, for whatever | reason, don't have a good record (for me) with questions like | that. Plus, it's just more awkward watching someone flub the | question and thinking about CS education (which I assume from | my undergrad experience is much more math, algorithms, theory, | and pseudocode) versus programming in practice which, in our | case, is much more about "implement this straightforward | logic". | nradov wrote: | What point are you trying to make? Every hiring manager | should know that a CS Master's degree focuses mainly on | theory and doesn't necessarily teach much coding. If you just | need programmers to do simple stuff then you'll obtain better | results by hiring from trade schools, or finding candidates | who are self taught. | ALittleLight wrote: | I was responding to "credentials don't mean much" with my | experience. People with what some might assume is a | relevant credential don't seem to be that suitable. | | E: Another point - I know people who do more complicated | things when programming, the thing is, they are also able | to do simple things. I'd be really uncomfortable about | hiring someone to do something complicated if they couldn't | do something simple. | albntomat0 wrote: | As someone with a masters in CS from a big name US school, | the demographics of my cohort were super interesting. With | the exception of a very small number of folks (<5% of total), | everyone either had specific outside support (mainly | government computer security scholarships of some kind) or | was from outside the US. | | I think this is because the cost of getting a masters doesnt | make sense for someone with a CS undergrad who can easily | apply to FAANG/etc. | ghaff wrote: | I guess I would have assumed that the typical CS masters | didn't cost the person much (other than the opportunity | cost). When I got an engineering masters (non-CS) most of | it was covered via stipend. | | Opportunity cost can be significant of course. | SamvitJ wrote: | As a counter-point, here are three examples of highly | successful individuals in the tech industry with an M.S. in | computer science as their highest degree: | | - Soumith Chintala (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumith): Co- | inventor of PyTorch; Distinguished Engineer at Facebook AI | | - Jacob Devlin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob- | devlin-135ab048): Inventor of BERT; SWE at Google AI | | - Yuxin Wu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppwwyyxx): Lead | developer on Detectron2; SWE at Facebook AI | | If we include successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, the list | becomes larger still. | | Of course, these examples are cherry-picked, but I'd be | careful with your assumptions. | | Many people who pursue Master's degrees in the U.S. are | international students who didn't have the luxury to do their | undergrad in the U.S., a large number of whom have gone on to | great success in the tech industry. At the high end, M.S. in | computer science grads represent the best and brightest of | three groups: international students, PhD dropouts, and those | curious enough about CS to pursue it at the graduate level. | ALittleLight wrote: | I don't think that's a counter point. I'm not saying that | CS masters people can't be successful employees or | entrepreneurs, just that in my experience the ones I've | interviewed tend not to do well on simple "implement this | function" type questions. I'm not making a broader claim, | just stating my experience. | BurningFrog wrote: | Only 1/2 joking: | | Finding a good ghostwriter demonstrates a number of useful | skills. | zdragnar wrote: | https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job- | chi... | | My favorite bit of the story is that he had been known as the | best developer in house, and in a different article I can't | find anymore there were more quotes from his coworkers about | how it seemed like he could do anything, no matter the | technology / programming language. | dr_dshiv wrote: | Too bad it seems impossible to contract to get good academic | writing done. Otherwise more companies would publish. | tyoma wrote: | This is neither new nor related to high costs of college. | | My parents told me of very similar setups when they were growing | up in the 1960s USSR. | | A roommate in the mid-2000s did similar work as a side hustle. | | The actual practice is surely as old as university credentials. | finexplained wrote: | The scale matters when classes are graded on a curve. If a few | students cheat the score distribution doesn't change too much, | if a significant fraction of students cheat it _really_ hurts | those who don 't. | threatofrain wrote: | I've seen a case where about half the class was cheating. | People would pay those who took the test earlier to give the | exam. Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any | particular student for cheating. | cbozeman wrote: | > Given this, it would be cruel to come down hard on any | particular student for cheating. | | That's why you have to come down hard on everyone. | harry8 wrote: | Only if you come down equally hard on paid academics for | being so incredibly lazy that they encourage cheating. | Yes students should resist that temptation but man alive | what the academics are doing to put that temptation in | their way is completely unconscionable. | | An academic with a cheating problem in their course has a | problem they need to solve it they are knowingly screwing | the honest. From a position of power. | anonporridge wrote: | Just like a lot of things where the best thing to do for the | individual only works out if only a tiny minority of | parasites do it. | | e.g. getting a vaccine. You're arguably best off if you're | part of the 1% of the population who choose not to get one | but still get protected by herd immunity. But if that 1% | grows to 10/20/30%, suddenly, not only does the defection | advantage disappear, but the whole herd starts to suffer. | Tragedy of the commons. | | We're all stuck between a rock and a hard place of | simultaneously not wanting to restrict individual freedom, | autonomy, and privacy, but also recognizing that when being a | parasite is a disproportionately advantageous role for an | individual to choose, it eventually kills the host. | murgindrag wrote: | I had exactly one class in college where cheating was | rampant. I don't know why, but most of that class cheated on | exams; the prof reused exams, and frats had bibles. I didn't | see much cheating in my other classes; it was exceptionally | rare. | | That class was graded on a curve. | | I got a 'B', and I would say I was in the 90th percentile for | understanding the material. It would have been neigh- | impossible to get an 'A' without cheating. | PeterisP wrote: | If universities are not capable to prevent such cheating, | perhaps they must stop grading on a curve, that's something | they can do. | blowski wrote: | The main character in the film Grease 2 (released in 1982) was | paid by his fellow students to write their essays. I remember | because he inspired me to set up a similar business in the 90s. | colechristensen wrote: | Most people don't "need" a high level education nor do they | actually want one, a degree is just another metric about a person | and when you make something a metric you tend to ruin it. | | Most people would benefit from a liberal education, that is the | literal meaning of liberals to make one free, but most don't | actually get it at university because it's hard to do and to | measure (and not many actually care). | burnished wrote: | Just wanted to nit pick >No doubt the rise of the Internet - and | today's "cut and paste" culture -- has cheapened the value of | "original" work. | | I think broad statements like these, that blame a shift in | culture, do so out of a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary past. | Isn't it more likely that the effect the author sees is simply | part of the culture and that changing technology allowed for new | expressions of it? | msla wrote: | There's a trick to it: | | Whenever an author says "No doubt" or similar, there _are_ | doubts the author can 't answer. It's a rhetorical sleight-of- | hand, something to get you looking over _here_ while the hole | in their logic slips quietly past over _there_. Do it deftly | enough and you can get people to swallow camels in your | article, even if they 'd strain at gnats in an article written | without such devices. | vvram wrote: | What's not talked enough is how this is normalized in Saas | digital marketing today. | Jan454 wrote: | Maybe we just should not care? In the end, if someone claims | sth., she always has to give proof. If da Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. | super plus claims sth. without proof, and a pink hair colored | teenager claims sth. with proof, everyone _should_ believe the | teen (actually believing the proof, not the person). Sadly thats | not the case, lots of people still believe "eminence based proof" | instead of "evidence based proof". | Bootvis wrote: | That works nicely for maths but any subject that requires a non | trivial amount of data gathering needs to be build on a certain | amount of trust. | Jan454 wrote: | which comes from peer-review and other scientists verifying | it. | | .. there are too many Prof. Dr. Dr. that did not "cheat" but | still claim covid isn't real .. so the title really doesn't | mean anything at all to me .. also having studied myself | seeing what kind of idiots also got their exams .. it's maybe | just a proof they can 'write' and 'read', but even believing | this would proof 'understanding' is a big overestimation of | the title itself .. | Bootvis wrote: | In addition to the sibling comment, the replication crisis | shows that this mechanic isn't working as well as you hope | it would. | PeterisP wrote: | Peer review is about relevance, methodology and the | appriopriateness of your conclusions given your | observations as you describe them. | | Peer review does not even attempt to control for fabricated | experimental results or other data. | renewiltord wrote: | The fact that we haven't seen some massively decline in | productivity when there started to be rampant "ghost writing" | means it's probably fairly meaningless. | | It reminds me of the fact that when I was five to nine, my school | assigned loads of academic busywork that was completely | pointless. | | My mum did it for me and let me go out and play. Our class ranks | were based solely on exam performance, and I was top of every | class. | | University probably has loads of pointless busywork too. Though I | recall my Masters degree in CS actually being a rather enjoyable | experience all around with fun assignments. | | For CS classes at least, it seems like you're missing out if you | don't do the work because it's so much fun! | Aunche wrote: | Technological productivity has been increasing, but social | productivity seems to be declining. Compare the 2020 | Presidential debates to JFK vs Nixon's debate, for instance. I | don't think that ghostwriting is to blame though. | choeger wrote: | University is, at least in the classical form, a _scientific_ | institution. And science is communicated _in writing_. So at | least in principle, exercising the writing of papers and essays | under time pressure is completely natural. | | In practice, though, the writing is often hardly instructive. | There are very few people that take stuff like "The Elements of | Style" seriously. And the subjects are usually quite trivial. | | But calling writing per se is as much "busywork" as learning a | programming language, CAD modeling, or working out mathematical | proofs by induction. | chowells wrote: | > There are very few people that take stuff like "The | Elements of Style" seriously. | | That's because it's garbage. Learning to write is great. But | that is best done by reading good writing and practicing. A | list of rules that constantly violates its own advice because | obeying it would make the text hard to read is not of any | value. | | https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid- | grammar... | turbinerneiter wrote: | I'd be interested to know if this happens more or less in | different fields, and whether or not this has an impact on | people's careers, again by field. | slyall wrote: | That site was very hard to read on my browser. Every couple of | seconds the author's byeline would flicker (too fast for me to | see what it changed to) and the text would jump up and down. | dang wrote: | " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-button | breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be | interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then | friendly feedback might be helpful._" | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | I don't mean to pick on you personally--the problem is more | that these things tend to get upvoted to the top of the thread, | where they choke out on-topic conversation. This happens | because the annoyances are real, not because they're unreal. At | the same time this comes up so often that we have to try to | avoid the repetition. | BeetleB wrote: | I agree in general. In this particular case, though, it was | jarring. Having the screen jump every few seconds without the | user interacting at all is a bit extreme. | bArray wrote: | It's bad enough that I have to enable JS in a private tab, then | the force-enabled JS makes it near unreadable. | | I ended up using uBlock Origin to select the element and to | block it, causing whatever crazy JS that is to die. | sliken wrote: | Same here, in chrome and firefox, and firefox reading mode | wouldn't work. | temp667 wrote: | does anyone know how AMP seems to avoid this (despite the hate | here). On AMP sites I rarely get the post paint jumping around | insanity. | | My own metric - non AMP site + clickbait headline = jank and | constant jumps as dynamic stuff happens (be it ads changing or | show off or attention grabbers or analytics maybe). | DiggyJohnson wrote: | > My own metric | | This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you saying that you | experience jumping content on many blogs. | | The way any site avoids this is not being bad. | zepto wrote: | This just reveals that colleges simply aren't doing anything that | can be called _tuition_. | | If the college did any amount of meaningful in-person teaching, | it would be immediately obvious that a student had not written | their own coursework. | jonnycomputer wrote: | You're sort of assuming people are paying for A+ quality work. | But they're not stupid. For many, a B is quite fine. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Colleges are simply doing something called _collecting money_ | so there 's no incentive to fix this problem. | | And it is a problem, because it means the output of colleges is | increasingly just noise. | | It will become even more of a problem in the future, because | you can't run a civilisation packed full of 'qualified' people | who can't do shit. | | Except cheat. | paulpauper wrote: | This what happens when professors are too busy to notice/care nd | everything is outsourced to overworked assistants who are paid | little | tppiotrowski wrote: | This seems to indicate that some careers require a college degree | without actually requiring the knowledge dispensed at the | university. | | If a job really required university knowledge you would be fired | pretty quickly if you didn't do the assignments but because | people keep investing money in paying ghost writers it would | indicate that it's paying off. | | I personally see this on CodeMentor: "I don't care how it works, | I don't need to understand it, I just need it done in the next 60 | minutes". | casefields wrote: | Enterprise Rent-a-car used to have commercials all the time | about how they're one of the largest employers of college | grads. Why on earth does someone at a counter handing out car | rentals even need a college degree? | al2o3cr wrote: | This goes out of its way to specifically hyperlink _one_ | particular ghostwriting company twice: smells like thinly- | disguised SEO spam. | galkk wrote: | I think you're right. It's even has interesting formatting in | one paragraphs, and description that sounds like the ad. | One of the first and best known academic ghost-writing web | sites is SITENAME.com based out of Montreal, | Canada. It's been in business for nearly 20 years, longer than | most. | k__ wrote: | After I worked as a ghostwriter for a few years I saw the world- | especially the online world-with other eyes. | jimhefferon wrote: | Please, say more. | k__ wrote: | There are many things you get for texts, not just degrees. | Academic degrees are just the ones that are regulated, so | it's against the law to get them with the help of a | ghostwriter. | | But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for all | kinds of publications. | carmen_sandiego wrote: | > But you get prestige and awards on "the free market" for | all kinds of publications. | | Yeah, but those are for the low end of the hiring market. | Personally I mostly just ignore 'awards', unless it's a | Nobel Prize or something. | | In fact, too much award fluff is a big negative weighting | for me. Same with patents and ECs. | | I assume it's similar anywhere that ability actually | matters. Sure you might get a boring entry-level IB job at | some meat factory whose mild 'prestige' will impress your | parents/schoolmates, but who cares in the grand scheme of | things. | k__ wrote: | The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. | tomohawk wrote: | There are a lot of courses that people are forced to take that | have nothing to do with what they are trying to do in life. For | example, nurses being forced to take an algebra (equivalent of HS | algebra 1, algebra 2, trig, and and some analytic geometry). It | is a big impediment for those students to pass that class and | many cannot. So, nurses are selected on a skill they will never | use or see again. | | I can't blame students in that predicament for cheating on those | kinds of courses. | | They are merely jumping through the hoop. A hoop that serves no | purpose, and is itself unethical. | | I've seen many such students cheat on those courses so they can | focus on their core learning and get on with their lives. | AcerbicZero wrote: | There is a drastic difference between getting a college degree | and getting a "good college education" | | This article drops that ball right out of the gate, and doesn't | seem to notice. | Bodell wrote: | In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior. | I'll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my | be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may | appreciate the details so I've included them. | | I'm currently going back to school and my experience in doing so | is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes, | English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not | at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean | learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving | feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a | full formal essay or test. | | In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather | generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a | total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before | putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for | one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response | to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its | effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were | "evolving" into man/machine "centaurs" such as the super powers | of "ESP" that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other | was an article from The Atlantic titled "Is google making us | stoopid?" (no, I did not misspell "stupid", that was the title). | The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive. | | I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some | sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people | losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought | about by an industry of attention battling (too many | distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human | brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the | portion where the article's author talked to a neurologist. | | In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of | general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one | note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing | robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response | displaying how intelligent robots actually are. | | So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were | persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that | intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the | foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay | explaining that even though computers played chess (a main | sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything | near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an | overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I | myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state | championships as a child and currently after not playing for a | long time have a rating of around 1600-1700). | | I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions | of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time | to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis | "side-stepped the entire point of the exercise". I wrote my | professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my | thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected. | The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of | each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back | to the "gist". My final essay was scored poorly on the summary | section for "only capturing the gist". I also pointed out that in | my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my | teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in | any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages | or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored | and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks. | | He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and | that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since | I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I | was three weeks into our next essay. It's interesting to note | that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this | "formal research essay" as well because it contained "too much | research" and was not "opinionated enough". | | The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to | actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I | want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to | doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work: | better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc. | | My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two | textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well | as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for | understanding what you should study for the test. However, you | are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and | quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe | did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from | this approach to learning. | | Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely | why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am | not one of those people but the design of the institution, at | least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and | further circumvent actual practice and learning. | | On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my | issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my | generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading | software. Something I had not before known existed and was | mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of | the subject matter my class was concerned with. | | Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing | their jobs. | | An example of this software: | https://elearningindustry.com/artificial-intelligence-new-ro... | m4lvin wrote: | Thank you for sharing! I enjoyed your writing and feel sorry | for the mediocre feedback you get from your teachers. | lolc wrote: | An older relative once gave me the hint to bury a question in | my text to see whether the examiner would address it. I was | actually surprised to get an answer when I tried that. | jonnycomputer wrote: | I once caught a fellow grad student out on hiring someone to do | our assignment. I was looking for free-lance work and happened | upon an ad, which contained a copy of the assignment | instructions. I felt no compunction at all at reporting to the | instructor. The assignment was a lot of work. | CJefferson wrote: | Universities discuss this all the time. It's incredibly hard to | prove. | | This is one reason we keep exams -- while they have many problems | (particularly in Computer Science), forcing someone to sit in a | room and answer questions gives a way of checking the student | really does understand the course. | albntomat0 wrote: | I also personally appreciated the time limits of exams as well. | They seemed like a good balance to projects whose outcome was | primarily decided by how much time one could spend (there's a | clear balance in the real world utility of performing well | under unstrained time, and time management, etc). | ghaff wrote: | Projects are great. But the best ones are time-consuming | because, as you suggest, you can often iterate one more time. | This is especially true if the problem space is at least | somewhat unconstrained even if the result isn't. I probably | got more out of project-oriented courses undergrad/masters | (and my Masters thesis) but it doesn't scale to the whole | curriculum. | zozbot234 wrote: | People love to complain about whiteboarding but it's extremely | effective at assessing knowledge, far more than even most | exams. Exams are used in an academic context b/c they're less | resource intensive, though. | ska wrote: | This is sort of true. | | White-boarding or "oral exams" are effective in proportion to | the skill of the person giving them. Most people have little | natural skill in this even (perhaps especially) if they are | expert in the domain being examined. | thechao wrote: | While a grad student at TX A&M CS, I rolled out a grading | rubric (for a couple of intro courses) which required the | students to pass _individually_ each of the homework, quiz, and | exams, separately, to pass the course. | | This nipped HW cheating in the bud by the 3rd semester, because | the students knew that you couldn't game the system by | maximizing HW grades to bring up exam & quiz grades. Exams & | quizzes were autogenerated from a set of parametric problems, | and put in random order on the print out -- made side-by-side | and answer-sheet cheating basically impossible. | | Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades, though. | Teever wrote: | What's fascinating to me is about all of this is that | techniques like the ones you implemented and others are all | that is needed to eliminate cheating. It's the kind of stuff | that is analogous to the protocols developed by the air | industry in the mid 20th century that has almost eliminated | entire classes of error that could result in loss of life | from flying. | | It is especially troubling because post-secondary education | is a sort of cornerstone of all other human endeavours so the | cascading effects of people cheating and not learning the | material that they need to be better at their jobs influences | lives just as much as a plane crashing. | | The silly part is that post-secondary education is something | that is far older than the flight industry yet no such | standardization of controls over testing / grading have been | implemented. | | It seems like it's almost a choice. | | > Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades, | though. | | Yeah. it's a choice. | fallingknife wrote: | The scientific research that goes on in post secondary | education is the cornerstone. The academic setting is just | the way we do it now and can, and I would argue should, | change. Grad students could just as easily be junior | employees if the same work were done in the private sector | and would be financially much better off for it. | barry-cotter wrote: | > It is especially troubling because post-secondary | education is a sort of cornerstone of all other human | endeavours so the cascading effects of people cheating and | not learning the material that they need to be better at | their jobs influences lives just as much as a plane | crashing. | | This is insane. Most people never attend university and do | plenty of productive work. Most people who do attend | university never work a day in the field they did their | degree in. Most people who do work in the field they did | their degree in never use the large majority of what they | leaned there. On top of this a large majority of | professionally relevant material is learned on the job. | | The reason that there's no real effort to check people | aren't cheating is because school isn't primarily about | learning, it's about ranking and sorting. | CJefferson wrote: | I'm suprised people were so opposed to it, that kind of | system is standard in all UK Universities I've taught in. | vasco wrote: | > Faculty weren't as charmed with the cratered grades, | though. | | Maybe focus more on the teaching and less on the testing. | barry-cotter wrote: | Faculty get jobs at universities to research, not to teach. | The less time spent on teaching the better. | Google234 wrote: | Maybe grade inflation is a thing? | hn_asker wrote: | This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was | one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and | learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural | approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all. | Robotbeat wrote: | Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the | push-back on standardized testing is partly because | students cannot chea-- I mean rely on "social | collaboration"? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But | part of it..) | warlog wrote: | Collaboration to learn isn't penalized. Just the collab to | cheat part. | tmpz22 wrote: | Are there any downsides to removing the potential for | students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with strong | homework and take-home work? | | I remember having some terrible graduate instructors at the | University of Oregon who clearly had 0 desire to teach and | routinely expressed frustration when first year students | could not keep up with their doctorate level notation and | language styles. Most students passed by a hair thanks to | homework and quizzes, mixed with study groups and studying | topics which weren't covered properly in the class. Had it | not been for a heavy weight on HW (about ~35% IIRC) most of | the class would have failed. And cynically that homework | weight must've been intentional - they knew there was a | problem with their course instruction and they covered up | presumably high fail rates by bumping HW grading... | | The problem with evaluating large groups of people is that | many will fall through the cracks, not due to malice but | because there is no one-size-fits all solution. Yeah you can | improve cheating metrics but how many non-cheaters, good | qualified students who put in the work, were also negatively | affected by your grading rubric? 0? 1? 100? 1000? Unknown? | | And as a corollary this bleeds right into tech recruiting | where scores of qualified candidates are put through a song | and dance routine which arbitrarily and sometimes biasely | culls for no valid reason other then being a day that ends in | y. | ska wrote: | > Are there any downsides to removing the potential for | students to compensate poor test and quiz scores with | strong homework and take-home work? | | It facilitates cheating in a way that's almost impossible | to counteract. | | The other way around works though, where you work hard to | make sure your final exam isn't something they can cheat | on, then allow that to overide or pull up the other grades. | This isn't really helpful for people with high test anxiety | but it does help. | | You can't get this stuff perfect, but you can make sure the | result is at least fair. | hiq wrote: | > required the students to pass individually each of the | homework, quiz, and exams, separately, to pass the course | | How was the final grade determined? min(HW, Quiz, exams)? | fedorareis wrote: | Not OP, but it could still be an average (either weighted | or not) and have a requirement to pass certain things to be | eligible to pass. One of my core CS classes had the | requirement that you had to complete at least 1 project, | complete all daily assignments, and pass at least 4 of the | 6 lab tests. However the overall grade for the class once | you met those requirements was just an average like it was | for my other classes. | nitwit005 wrote: | No one will discuss? I got a rambling story from a history | professor about how he used to write papers for beer money. He | claimed he stopped when one of his clients was caught. | | The unfortunate lesson I got from university is that they were | very aware of cheating, but not all that enthused about | penalizing people for it. 11 people in one of my freshmen classes | got copying an assignment to keep a journal over the semester. In | theory, they should have failed the class or been expelled, but | the professor didn't want such a high rate of her class failing | and just gave them a zero for the one assignment. | [deleted] | nmca wrote: | galaxy-brain: a great deal of resources are wasted in the | university signalling game, by devaluing university these | cheaters are contributing to societal progress in the long run. | zdragnar wrote: | Reposting as a top level comment because it fits: | https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi... | | Guy outsourced his entire programming job and got away with it | for quite awhile. I guess the company didn't do much peer | programming. | cbozeman wrote: | I think its fucking fabulous. | | At a society level, companies and billionaires are outsourcing | every goddamn thing they can to anywhere but America and | Americans, and unfortunately that extends to other Western | nations as well now. | | They only got pissed off because for once, the little guy was | winning here and outsmarted the greedy sons of bitches. | | If you want a powerful Western society, you have to pay Western | residents Western wages. Now China is on the rise and clearly | the most dangerous threat not just to the United States, but | the rest of the Western world, but no one sees it because they | want their $999 iPhone that would be $1999 if it were actually | assembled in California by people asking for a measly $15 an | hour. | zdragnar wrote: | I'm pretty sure they were pissed off because they are a | "critical infrastructure" company whose employee exfiltrated | their entire source code. Not to mention, if they were doing | any government work, they may have inadvertently let in | foreign actors- not great for "critical infrastructure" since | management aren't likely to have been the worst hurt had | anything gone more wrong. | | Bear in mind he was getting a 6 figure salary- he was hardly | the little guy making under $15 an hour. | hn_asker wrote: | Big Pharma uses this heavily to bias research in academia for | their marketing purposes. It used to be that academic research | was rigorous and objective. An academic title had prestige and | respect. Now it's so watered down. | nonpolitic wrote: | It's going to be interesting when these people figure out GPT-3 | exists. The days of the take-home essay as a useful grading tool | are definitely numbered, at least in non-science disciplines. | intended wrote: | I'm willing to be persuaded differently, but any discussion on | Academics and Academia is always a jobs/employment discussion | with extra steps. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-21 23:00 UTC)