| > When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating.. Not here where I leave (not USA).. > If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well. I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam? > CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it. Do you think we are police officers or what?! There's a limit for what we are able to do, and what students are able to tolerate.. > The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing (...) If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis? Ok, I get your point now! You probably live in some third world country where there's lots of wealth inequality and the state does not help its own citizens. Here in Portugal (and I guess almost all of EU) the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year), so I wouldn't consider failed experiments for now.. |
> I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam? Do you think we are police officers or what?!
Nope. You have to watch them do it anyway, if you want your credentials to mean anything. Arguably they already don't, very few companies are willing to hire a software developer given just a proof of a degree exactly because universities are so willing to graduate people who can't do the work. But that's not sustainable. It may take decades but that path leads to Venezuela. Eventually, this will catch up with universities and they will be gone because they're not delivering value.
> the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year)
The price charged up front is 700EUR/year but the cost is a lot higher than that, obviously. All your government does with this policy is force everyone else to pay for the industrial-scale production of well rewarded cheaters, enabled by professors who don't care enough to stop them. It's a socially corrosive policy.