[sgustard]

"best not to blame the students"

There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

[ekidd]

> The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.

Historically, the penalty for cheating at Dartmouth was a 9-month suspension for a first offense (no matter how small, in theory), and permanent "separation from the college" for a second offense. Back in the 90s, there were multiple incidents where this wasn't properly applied to the CS department because the academic committees in charge of punishment were bad at evaluating plagiarism of source code.

Dartmouth certainly should blame the students. Their policy is historically clear on that point. It is the responsibility of professors to use their syllabus to clearly define "cheating" for a particular course, and it is the responsibility of the students not to cheat. The only case where this should be even slightly complicated is if the professor hasn't been sufficiently about what constitutes cheating (and there was one major historic scandal related to this).

I certainly agree that any degree which allows rampant cheating will quickly become a joke to employers.

[rincebrain]

My only contention is the word "quickly".

Employers past a certain scale are not really using degrees as anything other than a low pass filter, and the people judging how qualified hires were in practice are not the ones deciding the minimum requirements, so there's no avenue for feedback on that point.

[rocqua]

Sure, blame the people not the system.

Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.

[nairboon]

Yes, unfortunately that is exactly how most education systems are designed. A lot of it is also historical baggage (at least in the European school tradition), where states were faced with the issue of educating the masses, which required a lot of standardization and thus also grades. Although nowadays, educational science has long established the detrimental effects of grades, they are still very widespread. Grades are institutionalized nowadays; you have generations of students who excelled in this Skinner box and became teachers themselves, thus perpetuating the grade box.

Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, schools without grades, that don't focus on short-term recall but long-term understanding, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and self-actualization, like the Ecole d'Humanité in the Swiss Alps: https://ecole.ch/

[boogieknite]

You said it well and my brain automatically rephrased your comment while I was reading it:

Our whole everything is setup as a skinner box for mulah. People finding tricks for more mulah are massively rewarded. Efforts are optimized for ROI within a fraction of a second. And management are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

[jmmcd]

A lot of us went through a similar system and still retained both honour and desire to actually learn.

[intended]

The issue is that education is the only way to get a well paying job. This means that students aren’t there to study the subject, they are there to get to a job.

When further education wasn’t mandatory, things like the honor code made sense.

[MengerSponge]

There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.

Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.

[JumpCrisscross]

Totally agree. The moral decay in higher education has a lot to do with it deciding to trade its integrity around cheating by students and professors in exchange for tuition cheques and grant money.

[ShinyLeftPad]

Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.

[no-name-here]

Couldn't a similar criticism be made against calculator companies if students used calculators to avoid learning addition, multiplication, etc?

[ShinyLeftPad]

if students used calculators to avoid learning addition that would be a problem. thankfully calculators are easily banned...

[nerdsniper]

What sort of measures would those be? The government also banned alcohol on campus (except Louisiana) but as a 20 year old I was too stubborn to care.

[MattGaiser]

I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about.

I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.

[jonahx]

> The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions

What? The concept of cheating exists in marriages, sports, relationships, business agreements, accounting, and nearly every facet of human life.

[tancop]

when you cheat on your partner you hurt them by betraying their trust. when you score from offside you can steal a win from the other team thats playing fair. if you lie about your company financials you steal from the government or your creditors.

cheating in schools is nothing like that. there is no direct harm to anyone, financial or emotional. the only real thing is if enough students do it thats bad for the schools reputation and others will treat degrees coming from there as more suspicious.

thats a very abstract and indirect harm, and it depends on employers caring about what school you came from more than a basic "reputable or total scam". to be fair thats pretty common in some industries (it shouldnt be) but i dont think the average student will get worse job offers because some of their classmates cheated.

[atiedebee]

By cheating you gain a certificate that says you can do things which you cannot. The difference between cheating in university and forging a degree is the time it takes.

When going to a doctor, you wouldn't want them to have cheated for their exams during training. You expect them to be well equipped to practice medicine and to ensure you get correct diagnoses and care. When hiring a programmer or software engineer, you should expect them to be able to provide you a proper, well architected application given the requirements.

[onion2k]

The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.

Universities need to stay ahead of how people actually work. Framing the use of AI as 'cheating' gives a university a reputation that it isn't keeping up with industry, which has a wildly negative impact on admissions. You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

[rahimnathwani]

You're conflating two different types of work, which each have a different purpose:

- making a change to your own mind and/or body (studying math, lifting weights)

- making a change to the world (optimizing ad placement, operating a forklift truck)

Do you think gyms should allow people to lift heavy weights with forklift trucks, so that they can work like they do in the real world?

[onion2k]

That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training.

So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the equivalent of a forklift truck license, and people do want to drive their forklift truck to the gym. Because they're paying to be able to do that.

[rahimnathwani]

If you use AI to complete all your assignments and exams, then getting a degree is less like getting a forklift truck licence (which indicates you've learned some useful skill that few people have) and more like getting a Waymo account (showing that you're competent enough to enter your credit card details and destination into a mobile app).

[underdeserver]

Undergraduate degrees are not vocational in any of the leading universities in any field. They are sometimes a prerequisite to vocational training, but aren't one in and of themselves.

There's a pretty good reason for that - the base assumption is that training in fundamentals, methods and ways of thinking is something you won't get anywhere else.

[gameman144]

> You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

You totally can, though. In the real world if I can't remember something, I might look it up in a textbook. Closed-book tests have historically been a totally accepted practice, though, and getting caught bringing notecards with textbook info secretly into a closed-book test would absolutely bring about disciplinary action.

[tedd4u]

One problem here is that students that use AI to outsource thinking become people who cannot think. These people are not likely to be very useful to employers or even society. We have to figure out how to allow AI to outsource drudgery but not the thinking itself. It should be a better and better bicycle for the mind not a replacement for the brain.

[sayamqazi]

> 'working like they do in the real world'.

But in real life I am allowed to look at any material available while solving a problem yet school exams dont allow it.