[Houshalter]

Would you be alarmed if you found out your doctor had entirely cheated their way through medical school and knew very little medicine?

Great, you figured out that grades aren't a perfect metric. But so what? Grades don't prove a student is great, but they can eliminate a lot of students that are bad. If the bad students just cheat their way through, everyone else down the line suffers for it.

[wayn3]

- if you actually read what i wrote, youd have figured out, on your own, that i didnt say that you should cheat in order to learn less, but to leave grades behind in favor of actually acquiring knowledge.

- before a doctor is even allowed to practice medicine, he has to go through 5 years of education followed by 3 years of apprenticeship, followed by 5 years of specialization. by that time, hes logged thousands of hours of supervised doctoring and he only "graduates" from that phase if all his superiors write stellar reference letters from him.

i dont really care if hes cheated on his first year anatomy exam. not particularly.

beyond that, doctors are held to a higher standard than other people for a reason. medical mistakes are usually final. but grades are a very shitty way of figuring out whether someone is compassionate, ethical and honest enough to be good doctors.

- modern society is engineered for efficiency. i consider it any persons right to make the best of it, for themselves. whats best for an individual is very often not the best for society as a whole. if you follow the script of modern society, you end up miserable. im not a fan of that. ideally, nobody would cheat those stupid exams, but i wont hold it against anyone. ideally, i dont want 10 million indians immigrating to every first world country, either, but i wont hold it against any one individual who tries.

(i dont have a problem with indians, its just that there are a lot of them, and it feels kind of overwhelming at times)

[ThomaszKrueger]

Parent of a surgeon here. My son's medical school did away with grades altogether - it's pass / fail. They still have to pass the board exams every year.

[kurtisc]

Is it cheating for a professional software developer to use Stack Overflow? If they copy and paste, perhaps, but not if they use it to get a better understanding of something. It's very difficult to grade understanding.

Doctors go through a lot to graduate. Universities are welcome to put all students through the same level of scrutiny, working closely with a professional who can decide if they are unfit for the course.

Aside from thesis defences, they usually choose not to, because contact hours are prohibitively more expensive than a room full of exams and a few TAs.

[Houshalter]

It's not any more cheating to look at stack overflow, then it is for a doctor to look up more information in a medical reference book. But neither should rely on those resources to do their job for them, with no understanding of the underlying domain. A developer should easily be able to write FizzBuzz without using Stack Overflow.

[tscherno]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel