[voilavilla]

>> (where everyone cheated anyways)

This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?

[Balgair]

Even before LLMs, if you walked into any frat and asked to see their test bank, you'd get thousands of files. Though not technically cheating, having every test a professor ever gave was a huge advantage. Especially since most profs would just reuse tests and HWs without any changes anyway.

To my generation, it wasn't that cheating was a 'thing' as much as it was impossible to avoid. Profs were so lazy that any semi-good test prep would have you discover that the profs were phoning it in and had been for a while. Things like not updating the course page with all the answers on them were unfortunately common. You could go and tell the prof, and most of us did, but then you'd be at a huge disadvantage relative to your peers who did download the answer key. Especially since the prof would still not update the questions! I want to make it clear: this is a common thing at R1 universities before LLMs.

The main issue is that at most R1s, the prof isn't really graded on their classes. That's maybe 5% of their tenure review. The thing they are most incentivized by is the amount of money they pull in from grants. I'm not all that familiar with R2 and below, but I'd imagine they have the same incentives (correct me if I'm wrong!). And with ~35% of students that go to R2 and below, the incentives for the profs for ~65% of students isn't well correlated with teaching said students.

[voilavilla]

Seems to me that studying a collection of every test over the years, without knowing what questions will be on the exam is... actually learning? >_<

[chipsrafferty]

It's a lot easier to memorize AABBCCBDDADBADABCCABAD than the actual information.

[Macha]

Did you have a lot of multiple choice tests in higher education? I know Americans used them a lot in high school, but didn't realise that extended to college.

[phito]

Not really. I had fellow students who understood nothing, could not program at all, but could tell you the answer to question 6 of the 2015 Java exam because they had memorized it all.

[voilavilla]

Then I would hire that person to be a requirements & specifications archival expert! ;)

[BobbyTables2]

Don’t know about frats, but I went to a lowly ranked “third tier” university and a “top 10” one.

While most of the classes were taught pretty well at both, the third tier ones were taught much better. Just couldn’t get an interview upon graduation despite near 4.0…

It is utterly bizarre that we use graduate research dollars to evaluate the quality of undergraduate education.

[anon84873628]

Here's how cheating advanced since then.

1. People in the Greek system would save all homework sets and exams in a "library" for future members taking a given course. While professors do change (and a single professor will try to mix up problems) with enough time you eventually have an inventory of all the possible problems, to either copy outright or study.

2. Eventually a similar thing moved online, both with "black market" hired help, then the likes of Chegg Inc.

3. All the students in a course join a WhatsApp or Discord group and text each other the answers. (HN had a good blog about this from a data science professor, but I can't find it now. College cheating has been mentioned many times on HN).