[chongli]

Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.

What students are paying for is accreditation. It’s not just their name that goes on the piece of paper, it’s the school’s name. Cheating undermines that business entirely. If a school looks the other way long enough there will be cheating scandals in the news and the school’s reputation will be damaged.

[akiselev]

> Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.

Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a professor at Caltech even sponsored me as a visiting faculty member so I could check out books from the university libraries. No one in the administration even blinked an eye.

I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal systems group project with several other graduate students who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.

[1] https://www.pellegrino.caltech.edu/aarest1

[jacurtis]

When I was in college, I was dating a girl who was taking a philosophy class that was particularly interesting to me. One day we were hanging out before her class and she was telling me about their discussions, and it covered some ideas I really enjoyed discussing. Since I was in computer science, I never got the opportunity to take a lot of humanities like Philosophy and so I mentioned that I wished I could take this class. She had to go to class and just said "you can come with me if you want".

I went with her and just sat down. I took notes, I participated in discussion, and ended up going back for several weeks. I eventually stopped going as they moved onto another chapter. I popped back in a few weeks later and the only thing the teacher said when they saw me come into the lecture hall was "hey it's good to see you again". The prof knew I existed but either didn't realize or didn't care that I wasn't actually on the class roll.

[jasmer]

That's fine though, and it's exactly how we would want it to be aka it's for the students but if someone is ernest they can just 'participate' in some thing. That's a positive outcome I can't fathom getting upset by that.

That said, showing up for a class isn't exactly 'an education' either.

[jkaptur]

True most of the time, but interestingly enough, this is not the case in China (even pre-COVID). The Tsinghua University gate had serious guards - you absolutely could not proceed onto campus without the proper authorization.