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61.9% of Undergraduates Cybercheat
RichDiesal writes "A recent study of 1222 undergraduates found that 61.9% of them 'cybercheat,' which involves using the Internet illicitly to get higher grades. Some of the quotes from students are a bit troubling. As one 19-year-old engineering student put it, 'As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for.'"
Cybercheat?
Your brain is beat.
You're only as smart
As whiskers neat.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And about 97% of drivers "velocitycheat", or drive faster than the posted speed limit. See, I can make up new words too!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Maybe this will lead to a future news story about the the spread of Cybercheating: Cybercheatgate 2011.
What does using the Internet illegally have to do with cheating? There's a huge difference between downloading the newest Ke$ha song and plagiarizing a source online for your paper (where the 61.9% figure comes from).
As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for."
Those of you who agree with this student please stand up and be counted. Post it on your Facebook pages, MySpace thingies, personal blogs, etc. I want to know who you are when I'm interviewing to hire new talent.
"I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant." Just like criminals that use the Internet. There is almost no chance for attackers to be correctly identified and an even slimmer chance that they will be held accountable. It is the reality of the Internet, and will be a major concern for governments. Expect "verified identity" as a key government policy over next few years. And expect the EFF and ACLU to have plenty to do for the foreseeable future.
You don't create a new fucking word by prefixing "cyber-" to it. Didn't we already go through this with that fucking "E-" shit ten years ago?
The word is "cheat," dickholes. It's not any different because it's on the internet. What is this, a fucking patent application? /rant
61.9% have cybersex with someone other than their girl/boyfriends?
87% of students in the pre-internet age copied directly from the encyclopedia.
How is it news that kids cheat? Teachers never had it so good. Google has made it so easy to catch them it is ridiculous.
Guess what: we "cheat" in the real world, universities and schools. We have reference materials to give us facts and information. Our real skill comes from how we *apply* that information, and separates the merely good from the great. Schools don't teach or measure that true ability, all they "teach" is how to recall facts that we can look up in the first place.
It's pathetic. We don't actually learn anything, schools are just a training ground for trivia shows, and give unfair advantage to people that have a better memory. Has nothing to do with your actual skill.
It's time to stop this garbage and teach people real skills and test to that, instead of making schools and universities glorified "Jeopardy!" games.
I found some pretty damning evidence that a relative of mine was cheating in high school, using the "purchase a paper online" method to "write" instead of actually doing the work himself. While he graduated high school without incident, you wouldn't call him a great student. He went on to college, but dropped out after one year of his own volition, though most of us suspected the real issue was (though never confirmed, as he wouldn't share) his grades. The work is there to for educational means. Cheating means you learn nothing, and yes, sooner or later, you will reap just rewards.
You're only cheating yourself.
Nobody cares that you have a degree if you can't even answer simple questions about your subject in an interview.
Being that they don't know basic science http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/01/07/1833206/College-Students-Lack-Scientific-Literacy?from=rss or math http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1940900&cid=34794702
Gotta get ahead/stay afloat somehow.
Does it count as cheating using a test bank / old test that is on line that get reused?
Like in that FL cheating where people where using a test bank / practice test and the professor just uses the same thing for the test is not cheating but it counts as cheating.
TFA does a cheater percentage breakdown by field. They show fields like engineering and tech and computer sciences as having a higher percentage of cheating students in them than other fields. I want to know what types of classes the students are cheating in. TFA mainly discusses using online "paper mills" to print out reports that the student themselves didn't write. As a recent engineering graduate, I rarely had to write a report for any of my classes that actually mattered for my education (math, sciences, engineering applications, etc.) All of the work was done primarily as projects and problem solving. The only reports we did have to write were discussions of our own projects, something that couldn't be plagiarized or downloaded from online.
The classes that did involve report writing were things like Jazz history, Literary Analysis, Political Studies, etc. In other words, us techie majors had to write extensive reports on matters that we just didn't give a fuck about, for classes that added absolutely nothing to the skill set we would need for our careers. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the engineering and and compy sci. students that were cheating, were cheating in their GE and liberal arts classes because they just don't give a shit about those topics. Furthermore, they are probably overworked and under-rested when it comes to studying for the classes they do care about. So, rather than waste their valuable time writing a report about The Scarlet Letter (something that should have been done in HS), they say fuck it and download one. Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.
I would rather see a breakdown by class type that involved cheating for each one of those field breakdowns. If my guess is correct, I say go forth and cheat my young engineers. Spend your time actually learning calculus, mathematical analysis, and designing something. That's what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life so you might as well learn it now.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
As one 19-year-old engineering student put it, "As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.),"
People still use limewire? Is this a dupe from a decade ago? Either this kid was about 8 when limewire was "cool", or this kid is planning his big 30 year birthday party this year.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Let's not forget the education model is still mostly outdated. The breadth and depth of knowledge for many traditional courses has expanded exponentially. Not to mention there are a few new ones particularly in genetics, bio-tech, etc.
Should the study and test model of the industrial age still apply in the (unprecedented volumes of) Information age?
Hope is the currency of fools
Of course not! I would never cybercheat on my cybertests. Those cyberessays are just too vital to my growth as a cyberstudent. Cybercheating would be a cyberdisgrace to my cyberhonor.
It depends on the class whether that is considered cheating though. I had some classes where the prof encouraged us to get to together to work on homework assignments, but we weren't allowed to just copy each other's work. However, they usually also singled out a few assignments that were to be done completely solo.
I think that by "cyber cheating," which is really an unnecessary phrase, since it's really just "cheating," what's meant is stuff like downloading solution manuals and using Cramster.
I'm a physics major, and my experience has been seeing a lot of engineering majors using Cramster incessantly, after maybe trying to work the problem for a couple of minutes. You can say they're only "cheating themselves," but really this sort of academic dishonesty is going to tarnish our university's reputation as well, as someone at some point will recognize the pattern of "engineers from school X are often crappy."
Usually exams are a way of detecting this sort of cheating, but a couple of my professors give take-home exams occasionally.
Hell, I've used a solution manual a couple of times, but I have the foresight required to realize that in order to excel at my profession, I need to know my stuff, and that requires working through problem sets diligently and determinedly.
There are others who are in the same boat as I -- guilty of "cybercheating," but not to a significant extent. I'd be more interested in seeing the percentage of undergrads who do "cybercheat" significantly, which I'm sure is much lower than 61.9%.
Quality post. if I hadn't already posted in this thread, I'd mod you up.
To anyone who disagrees, you mean to tell me that when YOU need to know an answer, you don't google it?
Be realistic. "Higher education" isn't about preparing people for the real world, it's about propagating it's own illusion of requirement for success in the business world without actually teaching skills that you need to know to be successful.
In the real world, if you need to know something, you don't sit there in front of a piece of paper with a pen in your hand trying to recall information you may have heard a few days or weeks ago, you just google it. That's the way the real world works. It is truly ironic that when these kids are googling the answers to their problems, they're doing what any real boss would want their employee to do (exempting obvious plagiarism of course), yet colleges have a huge problem with it.
That what happens in china and other over seas schools lots of work that should be done on there where own is group work. Why do on your own and get a B when you can do it in a group and get a A. Maybe if where was more pass / fail that may drive more OWN work or maybe peoepl there are right doing stuff on your own is a thing of the past.
Agreed... sorta.
There is also a problem solving component to it. Yes, being able to google that problem and find something that at least gets you started is an important skill, but there are occasionally original problems, and sometimes seeing what others have done can hinder creativity.
I always make a habit of working a problem initially with no reference material, to develop a kinda rough first impression solution. Then I'll go looking around at similar problems and how people have solved them. Existing collective experience is too great an asset to ignore, but at the same time if we just copy off one another, nothing moves forward.
I totally agree that making students memorize arbitrary facts is pointless. Memorizing and (more importantly) understanding core best practices is valuable, but having students write a test on "how to use random almost obsolete library X to do Y" is just silly.
(Disclosure: I'm a teacher and I am pretty sure my principal isn't reading slashdot.)
Cheating...
Nearly everything that a "teacher" calls cheating is an accepted practice in the business world. Schools, in the US anyway, are mainly geared toward getting a student involved in some type of business.
Cheating - Looking off someone's work.
Business - Gaining direction.
Cheating - copying.
Business - Using available resources.
Cheating - use of internet.
Business - again, using available resources so you can build on another's success.
Cheating - adjusting grades
Business - Creative accounting.
Cheating - asking a friend for an answer
Business - Collaboration. This person is a team player.
Our educational system is 19th century organization using 19th century ideals. What should we teach today? How about some analysis: Teach not "what is the right answer?" but "Why is this answer right?"
Teach not "what is X?" but "How does X change when Y is introduced?"
Get people to think! You get the idea.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
You ain't tryin!
And, by getting away with it, I mean how do you overcome not having a fundamental understanding of content that might be a prerequisite to higher level classes? It would seem to be exponentially more difficult to cheat your way through classes since at some point in your last years you'll definitely have to be quizzed without a browser accessible.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I have translated the article summary for those of us who only speak Cyber-English "A Cyber-recent study of 1222 Cyber-undergraduates found that 61.9% of them "cybercheat," which involves using the Cyber-Internet illicitly to get higher Cyber-grades. Some of the Cyber-quotes from Cyber-students are a Cyber-bit troubling. As one Cyber-19-year-old engineering Cyber-student put it, "As more and more Cyber-people are using the Cyber-Internet illegally (i.e. limewire Cyber-etc.), I feel that the Cyber-chances of being Cyber-caught or the Cyber-consequences of my Cyber-actions are almost Cyber-insignificant. So I feel no Cyber-pressure in doing what ever Cyber-everybody else is Cyber-doing/Cyber-using the Cyber-Internet for.""
If education didn't carry such a ridiculous profit motive for everybody involved we wouldn't see:
a) situations where kids feel obliged to cheat or else their life is ruined
b) situations where the university passes you even though you know exactly nothing so that they can boast numbers
Education needs to be freely available and de-standardized. Exam grades can't and never prove anything. Like all restrictions of this kind (DRM, War on Drugs, Welfare), it just ends up alienating legitimate users, those who want to go to university to actually learn something and not practice 3-4 years of rote memorisation and regurgitation onto an exam sheet. When you think about it, the exam paradigm such an abhorrently ridiculous method of assessing people, especially in today's climate where I have a permanent connection to the internet, any time of day, anywhere I go.
We are, as a society, done with memorising trivia. The "expert" of yesterday is a relic, all you need is some logic skills and wikipedia and you can be an "expert" in something almost immediately.
I would recommend any who haven't seen to watch this video by RSA Animate on Ken Livingstone's seminar on education paradigms.
I make video lectures, try one. http://www.youtube.com/user/ThoughtSpaceZero
I saw a lot of cheating in labs and in the study rooms when I did Computer Science in the late 1970s. Sharing code printouts was the most common. [I justified my poor marks to myself that I did not have enough friends in Computer Science. It was more like I was easily distracted]
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
People who cheat are not necessarily unintelligent individuals, in fact, they are researching ways of obtaining information pertinent to a topic for their education, but rather than take that time to learn the material, and cite their own work in a paper, people plagiarize or just don't do the work and allow themselves to be robbed of the education that they are paying damn good money for. In some situations, these individuals are paying for their education from their own dollars, but many others are receiving tax payer dollars to get the education paid for. This is where the tax payers should have a right to stop payment on education funding, for those caught cheating, or who admit to cheating openly. For the education these soon to be professionals are supposed to be getting is suppose to help their companies or infrastructures that we as a society build our world on.
If I knew that the engineer who built a bridge I drive on cheated his way through college, I would feel that engineer should be held partially responsible for poor workmanship should that bridge fall apart, or not last as long as it should.
If cheating occurs because it's all about the mighty dollar, then these professional jobs should start paying new employees just above minimum wage until the individual can prove on the job competency. This might deter some people and bring that number down.
And for those individuals who actually put in the work, the time and effort, they should be mad as hell, for they are the ones who will suffer repercussions from the negativity of articles and situations such as these.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
that why we need apprenticeship like systems not teach the test. It may be better to make the tests more hands on with open book / open Google / have or have no test but a as you go grading. The teach the test idea leads to things like paper mcse.
there are people willing to do your homework for $2/hour.
i think it's pretty awesome.
eventually companies will start figuring out that college degrees are worthless, and simply start hiring the people off freelancer who have been doing everyones homework.
the crappy, corrupt colleges will die, the securitized student loan industry will die, Sallie Mae will go bankrupt and get bailed out by the government, the cheating students will become jobless and move back in with their parents, and the eastern europeans and indians, who actually know how to do stuff, will be able to charge $4/hour instead of $2/hour, lifting millions of hard working people out of poverty.
if you ask me, this new world will be a better world than what we started with.
Copy/paste a paper - plagarism.
But what about for math/science? You don't exactly write tons of papers, but you do solve lots of problems.
When I couldn't come up with an algorithm to solve problems in O(whatever) time, as required by an assignment, I would often go to the web. I considered this to be research, as I could adopt a similar approach when confronted with analogous problems in the future.
Plagarism is clearly cheating. But is anything short of completely-original work also considered cheating? Is not one of the cornerstones of modern computer science the idea of re-use?
If i catch my students cheating they get a 0 until they submit their own passable work.
You cheat in my class and I don't catch you? I don't care. "Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves." "What goes around comes around." "You reap what you sow." If you can't do the work yourself in my class, then you can't do the work in the real world and you'll crash and burn. Not my problem to teach you lessons you don't want to learn. As one of my instructors liked to tell his classes ”I don't care if you want to learn what I'm teaching you or not, either way I have your money." If want to learn I'll do everything I can to teach you, but if you cheat you're just wasting your own money, time and life.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Mainly because teachers are overloaded or simply lazy. Tests that only test rote memorization and projects that can easily be "paraphrased" and show little original thought are easily identified by teachers that are making sure students learn. Education also needs to take into account that there is instant access to information in the real world, which puts a premium on people being able to understand, apply and use information.
-- $G
Why do we so much filler classes? make then pass / fail so you can do the min work (with you working hard on stuff actually mattered) and not F* your GPA.
why so many papers in them anyways?
I had a take-home final where the prof basically said, "you can consult with any inanimate object to help with this final." Someone said, "so, we can use the internet, but not a dog?" at which point the prof said, "well, unless your dog has a decent grasp of quantum mechanics, I don't think the dog would help anyway."
It was an interesting strategy, and I actually learned a lot by reading through relevant papers. So long as the problems are obscure enough, there's really no way you can cheat (aside from working off of other students) -- at best you can find a paper which steers you in the right direction, and that's a Good Thing in terms of finishing the final and learning...win-win, in my opinion.
If you're an engineering student and you "cheat"* to get past material you don't understand, you are disgracing the profession. And you're placing our lives in danger. Your core courses aren't chosen haphazardly, and you're expected to understand and respect that. Do us a favour and do it right or find another profession.
And whether you hold to it or not, there is always the Creed:
http://www.nspe.org/Ethics/CodeofEthics/Creed/creed.html
* Let's be careful about what we call cheating, though. There is a case to be made for collaboration between students, as most of us don't work in a vacuum and you'll be better prepared for the workforce if you know how to work with others.
I dti'r na ndall is ri' fear na leathshu'ile.
even when they ask questions they just work off of a list that some other person gave them so you can have the right answer but there list has the answer in a different way that people who know about the job will say it's ok but as HR does not know that you fail.
I purchased an essay once, but only because I didn't want to write a bullshit 20-page paper on how the Matrix (yes, the movie) contextualizes modern political and social boundaries. I was not doing well in the class, so it literally came down to either failing the class or cheating and passing with a C.
I understand the idea behind getting a "well-rounded education", but some of these required courses are ridiculous. I'd rather spend my effort in classes that actually matter. That may diminish my degree in some way, but seeings how it's in Fine Arts, I think I can live with that.
+10% copied >= "a few pages"? Well then, my degree just gained 10% in value over recent grads. The internet facilitates lazy behavior in those who are predisposed. The more of them that cheapen their degree, the more impressive I look.
Quality post. if I hadn't already posted in this thread, I'd mod you up.
Wait. Isn't there a cheat for that?
In this post you are pretending to be more intelligent than your peers. Let's say that is true. Then you go on to compare your results to your peers, effectively saying that they should just be as intelligent as you are and they could slack off too and be successful. If you are as intelligent as you claim, then those people are not your peers and comparing your results to theirs is under achieving crap. Take you class mates, put them in a menial labor job, and they will more than live up to the cognitive demands of their job. The brain load will be trivial and they'll be laughing at their idiot "peers" who have a hard time understanding that they can use a triangle with sides 3, 4 and 5 to make a right angle. That's you. You're the rich investor bragging about making a million dollars a year yet you're making a 0.5% return on your money - you've just got a lot of it. Your advice is not for following by people who want to do better by what they've got - however much that is. As for what your classmates and even a world genius like you (hmm...) can get out of homework, look at overlearning.
One way to look at this is humanity is moving towards more of a hive mind type of intelligence. Rather than having to store vast amounts of information in our brains, we spread that information out across our population. Saves time. Intelligence becomes more about knowing how to ask a question or locate who has the information, rather than wasting time hoarding trivia. The danger is that once one mind is infected, the bad information spreads, and the hive collapses.
They say it's "cheating enabled by the internet", but how far doesn that definition go? When I use Wolfram Alpha to solve integrals that I can't be bothered to spend 15 minutes on, is that "cybercheating"?
So what exactly is cybercheating?
It's when you have cybersex with someone you're not married to, obviously.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
as a liberal arts major, i felt that my time spent studying calculus and chemistry was wasted. when would i ever use that garbage in my career as a translator or marketing manager? why should an accountant have to study physics, or a lawyer have to study biology, or a historian have to study C++?
please tell me the last time anyone had to give the derivative of a polynomial function in their day to day job.
If I'm asked to make some statements about, say, Ohm's law and I use the term V=IR in my paper is that cheating because I did not come up with that from my own original thought ? It seems to me that a whole lot of this "cheating" is the result of doing something laudable (reading about a subject to learn). I don't see the need for creative originality in all of engineering. In some cases it should be just fine to quote authoritative texts.
If you're going to mark the kids down then do so for quoting something irrelevant or wrong not for "standing on the shoulders of giants".
If the assignment called for original thought then it's a fair complaint; but I don't think they are all inventing something new every time. All Engineers have to learn the basics first, even if the liberal artists prefer to sneer and call that part of an engineers education "training". That is why we have documents from the past, it's not just to look at the pictures.
Nullius in verba
Thats why homework should stop being collected as part of your grade, students are so pressured to constantly be "right" that they it's impossible for them to make any mistakes. However making mistakes is probably one of the best, if not the best, way to actually learn something. One of the best profs I had in college assigned homework but never collected it(he gave you the solutions too), he could tell if you did it by how you did on the quizzes and tests. This was just absolutely brilliant, you could attempt the homework and then immediately check to see if you did it right giving you immediate feedback. Plus there was no problem with coming to him and just saying "I have no idea how to do problem x" and he could explain it without worrying about giving you "credit" for said assignment.
Monstar L
Gnumeric's at least as good as Excel 97 and Excel 97 is overkill for 99% of users already.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You must have never actually achieved a traditional degree in Engineering [Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical, Civil, Structural, Material Science, Biomechanical, etc]. The last two years is nothing but application.
It's pathetic. We don't actually learn anything, schools are just a training ground for trivia shows, and give unfair advantage to people that have a better memory. Has nothing to do with your actual skill.
in my experience the ones with better memories are the ones that care about the subject being studied in the first place. I see no problem with letting them have "the advantage"
semantics are everything!
Thats ok. In one of my advanced math classes we only had a mid term and a final. Both were take home tests. It was pure lecture. There were no assignments. The mid term started the week after the last drop date for the class. The midterm had a quarter of its questions on material to be covered later in the class. The final had a quarter of its questions on material to be covered the next semester.
I am pretty sure that professor was there only for the research and he probably never had a student take more than one of his classes.
Cheating is hard work. Why not simply hire some smart kid from pakistan or china to just enroll in school as you. He/shee can take all your classes. You won't not even have to pay them, just pay them with the tuition your not spending. You can still be on campus, live in the dorm, since you, or at least your name is enrolled and matriculation. party for four years and get a degree and a great GPA. Maybe audit a few classes if there's a hot chick. Your impersonator goes home with a great education.
I mean seriously, why not? If cheating makes sense then does this not even make more sense. Plus your not even stealing from your fellow students. They are still competing against a fellow student. Just one that is smart and not cheating.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When I take quizzes that are posted online for Biology and such if I don't know the answer I will look up how the system works to find it.
I know it's not "right", but I feel most classes these days are still thought with pre-internet mentality. Especially Biology and Anatomy. So much of the intricacies are changing that it will be totally different in 10 years. So what I memorize now is half way pointless. This isn't to say that I don't memorize a bulk of the material. It's just that with the internet swelling with current and accurate material, I feel I shouldn't have to memorize it all with such resource at my fingertips.
Once you get past grade school, history is no more about memorization than engineering disciplines are.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
not the same thing lots speeds limits are to low and are set up to make money.
Most interstates are built for 70 but to many of them are at 55.
ALL of I-294, I-88 IL, I-90 (IL toll road parts), I-94 (toll road parts) should be 65.
In the real world, people collaborate.
I suppose in the real world they take credit for other people's work too, so that's all right then.
semantics are everything!
However, they usually also singled out a few assignments that were to be done completely solo.
I can tell you right now that many of the students didn't actually do those assignments solo. I don't need any context to tell you that.
I once went to a job interview, and got one of those problem-solving questions: How would you determine the number of gas stations in the USA?
My answer was simple: I'd search on Google, because there's probably a news article or government report with a better estimate than I could produce on my own. That got me a nice scowl from the interviewer, who expected me to perform extrapolation based on a sample. My guess is that the guy had never left the New England state he worked in, and had never seen a stretch of 150 miles between gas stations on a Great Plains highway.
The rest of the interview was pretty standard, but that one question still annoys me.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The University I attended had a system with "preceptors." A course would have a lecture with all the students from full prof once or twice a week, and a few more times a week a session with a smaller group (~10-15 students). The preceptor could be a grad student, or an assistant prof, or also even the full prof. In that smaller group, the preceptor gets to know the students, which makes cheating impossible. The preceptor would know if some dumb-ass in class wrote a brilliant essay, which was way beyond his or her intellectual faculties. The preceptor also gave you your grade.
Unfortunately, this was not as extremely enforced in engineering, which was my major. But the prof would come by during the lab exercises, and grill everyone on what they were doing and why and what they thought they would learn.
I took a lot of high level literature courses as electives. After the first essay that I had to write for one course, the preceptor pulled me aside after the class. She said, "You're not a literature major, are you? I'll bet that you are an engineering student!" She told me that essays from literature majors had very good ideas, but they tended to ramble. Engineers didn't have the best ideas, but their essays were all very well structured. She knew that I didn't cheat on the essay, because she heard what I said in class.
Want to cut out cheating? Get more direct prof to student contact.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
As a college drop out who is fairly successful but has also returned to college due to the whole "YOU MUST HAVE A DEGREE!!!!" craze, this is an idea that I frequently suggest should be how it's done. Not directly relevant to the degree? Cool, you have to show up and do what work you can, but why force people to try to become "experts" in things that they are not interested in and have little to no use for? In some ways working in the real world for several years and maturing before going back to school have made things easier for me. In some ways it has made it harder. Now I don't just suspect that I'm not likely to ever need the information from World History 101 to do my job, I KNOW I don't need it because I've been doing my job without it for years.
I have been told many times it's to make me more well rounded and ensure that I've been exposed to as many things as possible so that I can discover new things I enjoy. Those people can fuck off. Becoming "well rounded" is for people with spare time and money and/or a true interest in doing so. It's not required for most jobs, but they want to make the college education a requirement for those jobs anyway. With the time and money investment required for college, if it's so that I'm qualified for a job, then the classes that are not related to my job shouldn't affect my grade, future hireability, etc. prefereably I shouldn't even have to pay for or sit through those classes and it should maybe be more like a pure tech school/trade school sort of thing. Perhaps like an extended version of the certificate programs offered at some colleges.
Glad I didn't go to school where you did.
I went to college to learn how to think.
I went to graduate school to learn how to apply that way of thinking to solve problems.
I became a postdoc use my problem solving skills to apprentice in how to be a researcher.
None of it was inane trivia, though in the end a lot of trivia has stuck, and been useful.
I suspect you're mindset was formed in a high school history class that was rather 'date this happened' focused, and you haven't adapted that mindset to newer experiences. Or, you had a shit program in college.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
I hope the 19yo student's engineering skills are better than his/her written ones, using "i.e." instead of "e.g.". I'm surprised I'm the first to catch that or at least the only one being a big enough of a PITA to post it. Then again, I'm sure it'll be pointed out that my written skills suck, too...
Because calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. all help the development of critical thinking and curiosity. It's inherent in the process. Which (imho) is crucial for the individual and society as a whole.
That's not to denigrate history, music or the arts. Quite to the contrary, there's critical thinking there too. A well-rounded person should know these things.
There's way too many folks walking around that think they know science stuff because, well, they think they know it. They think theories are just theories and have no clue that behind the curtain, there's real hard work involved with knowing stuff and making stuff. They only care to see it as magic.
And this lack of critical thinking causes problems all throughout society from discerning scams, to public policy creation to plain out-right kookiness on display every day. Around the water cooler, TV, radio, newspapers and especially the internet.
An educated society with well-rounded citizens will fare better than the opposite. Just a thought.
I disagree. Application comes from the job you do after you get out of school or while you are in school. I know quite a bit about math because I have a M.S. in Math, and I also have a Research Assistant position that has taught me how to use computer clusters for scientific computation, how to do image processing, how to use LaTeX, practical knowledge about signal processing, etc. etc. There are opportunities at universities to do these things, its just that students go the easy way out because they think all they need is a degree to get paid the big bucks. Most college students simply don't belong at a university, but thats the fault of the universities being too easy on their students and letting them get away with partying all the time and doing minimal work but still being able to get a degree. Universities have watered the concept of many degrees (such as marketing/business/psychology) down to the point its homogeneous and you may as well not have one.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
I've been hearing this and similar arguments since I started college way back in 1986 and think it's just an indicator of laziness on the professors' side. Especially in engineering or sciences, it's really easy to write tests and requirements for papers that make cheating almost impossible. But recycling the same questions and the same term papers year after year and decade after decade makes it very easy for students to cheat. And this hasn't changed materially for at least 25 years. At my university, the student government had been keeping all tests and exercises since the founding in 1969 in three ring binders, so you just walked in, paid a small fee and copied the entire semester's materials. The only difference nowadays is that you can copy and paste, so students save a few hours retyping topics or copying them by hand. And one of my professor's argument that if students copy solutions, "They have to at least read it." is completely bogus in my opinion--I've taught enough labs classes to know that you can copy stuff without retaining anything.
But updating teaching materials, varying values, or just putting in actual calculations would make it easier for students to just do it themselves rather than trying to fix apply all the changes. It does require commitment by the professors and TAs, though. And obviously, copying stuff from the smart guy in class is still the preferred way of cheating.
Unfortunately, recycling tests and term papers and then trying to catch cheaters is not only pointless, but also detrimental. One of the things I had to teach newly graduated programmers for 15 years now is NOT to reinvent the wheel all the time. They are so conditioned not to copy anything that they not only search the internet for already existing code, some are even reluctant to use standard libraries. Obviously, this is not just a complete waste of company time, it also introduces hundreds or thousands of bugs, inferior implementations, and highly unmaintainable code. Libraries and other peoples' code (TM) are not perfect, but in most cases, it's good enough and better than what you hack up on your own with less than a couple of years of production coding under your belt.
So seriously academia, just stop whining, get off your butt and work on writing good tests instead of recycled assignments that facilitate copying and pasting.
Just as background, I run software planning for a $3bln+ company....
Yes, and people who fake their way through school are a joy to work with in the workplace. They don't know what they are doing.
Why don't people get this simple fact: you go to college to learn, not to get grades. Your grades are irrelevant after you leave school. What remains is your knowledge and your studehttp://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/08/1527251/619-of-Undergraduates-Cybercheat#nt loan debt. What utter fools people are who leave with the debt and no knowledge.
Interesting that they split up the groups by major but not by which classes were cheated in. As an Engineer I believe that the predominate classes that would have been cyber cheated is English and History as they drive the largest papers. It would be next to impossible to apply the same thing to a Math or Science class. Yes in Science/Engineering we do write quite a bit but it is usually based on experiment results or other factors that would be unique to the work at hand. While the internet was in its infantcy when I took these courses I would have loved to had a bit of help from the cyber world. Also I take exception the assumption that technical majors would be considered the bigger cheaters. If this is the case you would have to consider that we as a group have a less likely chance to be caught in our cheating as we know the systems better. While I agree that Intellectual Property needs to be conserved. I take no issue with an Engineer "CyberCheating" to work his way through an abortion paper that has been written so many times that it is as boring a subject as anything. And would not convey its experience towards the written word in a technical sense.
...is only a problem because students learn to pass a test and the test is written with that objective in mind. If exams forced critical thinking and reasoning, rather than recitation, there would be nothing to look up (apart from "standard forms" and those should be provided with any competent exam anyway).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I had a numerical methods class like that, but it was all homework, no exams. Took 20+ hours per week just to do the homework. The material taught was such that it would make little sense to have exams: you had to get working code, and then "prove" (to teacher's satisfaction) that the results you were getting were correct. That was the "proof in the pudding". It was a very practical class. If you wouldn't do the work, you wouldn't pass. Doing the work was how you learned in that class. I remember it fondly, even though I get sleepy each time I mention it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The first two years however, is a living hell. I dual majored in applied math and computer engineering. I ended up giving up on computer engineering right at the end of my second year because it seemed like a ton of busy work. They would run through mathematical concepts so fast there was no way to fully appreciate nor understand the foundation of it or the "why" if you will. I guess Im more of a math guy anyway. I used to hate how in my physics and circuits classes they would just give us equations without explaining where it came from. Universal law of gravitation? Guess what, that comes from a differential equation. I learned that and had to derive it myself in a math class on dynamics. Funny thing is, my math classes were harder but they actually were rigorous and the work felt like it was useful, i.e. enhancing my understanding of the subject without making me go through twenty different calculations that had the same procedure to solve them. I regret giving up on the Comp.Eng. because all my old engineering buddies told me the third year was easy because it was a blast programming robots and FPGA's, but all the same the first two years of engineering sucked ass.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
The blog post is from 2011, but the article it discusses was published in 2008 (so the study itself was probably done in 2007 or so). (‘Not necessarily a bad thing ’: a study of online plagiarism amongst undergraduate students. Neil Selwyn, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1469-297X, Volume 33, Issue 5, First published 2008, Pages 465 – 479.)
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
is from October of 2008, if you actually follow through to the study (not very new, but, okay, fine). Also, it's not measuring "cheating", it's measuring "plagiarism", which by any standard is not the only means of cheating. And, it's a study of 1222 students in the UK which means it probably wouldn't be generalizable across the pond. I don't want to pay to get the full article, but I'd be curious if there was control for any regional differences, and if the sample adequately represented students from institutions at all selectivity levels. If the sample was only from the author's institution, I'd be concerned whether it could be generalized at all, other than to say that they've got a fair bit of plagiarism at that school.
You know, I never cheated in college, as indicated by my 3.2 GPA, but hey, that GPA was all me and limme tell you how many times I've been asked about my BS in Computer Science GPA in the 6 years since I finished it: 0.
I did, however, download and use a couple problem solution in my Abstract Data Types class taught by Dr. Robert Blumofe shortly before he left UT to build Akamai. He had a policy that you could use any other works as long as you provided full references to those works.
What he should have thought about was actually changing his homework assignments between semesters because a group of my friends simply turned in homework assignments from the previous semester referencing fully their origination. LOL.
I assume they cheat on home exams and such? Home exams can be a good idea, but it's obviously not suited to some types of exams (the bad ones). If all you need to do for the exam is regurgitate facts, then of course students will use whatever resources are available to them in a non-proctored environment. How about designing the exams such that they need some original though, and assumes that you're going to make use of the Internet or other as a source of information. I at least have never had a home exam that only requires you to regurgitate some facts, if you're going to insist on making such an exam, you better make sure its proctored.
For essays there are services that can detect plagiarizing, I don't know how well they work only that it's pretty common at my university whenever essay writing is involved.
>>If it wasn't 99% memorization no one would cheat
Actually, I think you may be completely factually wrong here.
Nobody "cybercheats" on rote memorization tests (listing the state capitals or whatever) because the only time those things are tested are in closely monitored classroom situations. No teacher is going to give out a closed-book take-home exam.
The kinds of assignments that people actually use the internet to cheat on are *intended* to test the "application of information."
The problem here is that the internet is FULL of analysis and applied information on a huge variety of subjects, so it's easy for students to pawn off someone else's analysis as their own.
The further problem is that teachers are expected to have the ability to apply some kind of retarded Turing Test to determine whether the paper they're reading is the mediocre ramblings a freshman typed up at 2am before the assignment was due, or the mediocre ramblings said freshman copied from the internet. And if teachers fall short in that psychic capacity, it's taken by you as evidence that they're only teaching rote memorization.
What motive is there for cheating? I'd say it's about the same reason athletes are using steroids.
Let's look at the economic incentives behind the choices in that case.
1. Don't use them and spend the rest of your life in some dead end minimum wage job with no benefits or pension.
2. Use them and become a professional athlete with an eight figure salary. (You might even become governor of California someday).
Cheating in academics is motivated in much the same way, except that the contrast may not be quit as stark.
So you paid to take a class to learn. Then you cheated at that class because it was too hard and you deemed it a waste of your time? And then you brag about this decision?
Unfortunately there is no class called common sense 101. Because that was pretty dumb IMHO. You missed out on something wonderful because you were shortsighted and that is too bad. Only you can live your life. But that's a waste of time and money.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
The problem is that things that would test real skill and knowledge are easier to cheat at. Projects are by far the best way to learn. The problem is they're very easy to cheat. Just copy an old project. Or you can leach of others. Just ask any engineering student.
"It's time to stop this garbage and teach people real skills and test to that"
Yeah... its just hard to test real skills for a large number of people. You need real one on one relationships to do that. That's typically what PHDs or professional schools do.
It's easy to find fault in things. It's harder to pose better solutions.
Much of our society is based on educational credentials. Everyone cannot be a doctor, lawyer, nurse, scientist, teacher... so you need to find a way to exclude people. We do this via grades.
The wider the number of test applications, the more it focuses on 'basic' learning which is just often memorization. As the number of test applications is shortened, you then have a workable number where you can have an expert teacher actually test skill and pass on 'real skill'. This occurs in later years at university... or in your masters/PHD programs... or in professional schools (med schools...).
And quite frankly, if you can't handle enough memorization to get through the early years... you don't deserve to be in the more advanced classes where you can apply your actual skill.
If you really are a genius who just doesn't fit the mold...then you're free to do your own thing and maybe prove everyone wrong and be in Einstein or something.
High 5 on totally getting the point of Locke's post.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Sorry to disappoint you, but you need to know things before you can apply what you know.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
The simple solution to this is that homework no longer counts. No more take-home tests. And any long-form papers, theses, etc. that are due must include citations from N sources prescribed by the professor (where N is a moderately small integer)
There will still be homework, but the grade on it will merely be feedback for your benefit.
There will still be tests, but they will be in-class, with all personal possessions placed in bins at the front of the room.
And if the citations aren't integrated properly into the paper, or if your paper looks just like someone else's, you get a 0.
Begin.
Sorry son, but that's all *you* got out of college. *You* didn't actually learn anything except trivia.
As a college physics prof, I can tell you--I have students *every single quarter* who are motivated, interested, and get a huge amount out of their classes (not just mine). They use their classes as the starting point of their intellectual explorations, not as a barrier.
Oh, and btw: Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason college was so valueless to you is that you cheated rather than studied?
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Ya gotta cache in the brain.
Yes, it's true you can become an expert in anything these days. I've done it, going from one research field to another, and I'm expert enough to get paid to do the research. But you still have to know a lot of stuff, because it takes 300 milliseconds to pull a fact up from the ol' grey matter and it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 hours to find it on the internet. If you need the internet to answer basic questions about your area of expertise, you aren't an expert. Or, at least your a verrrrrrrrry sloooooow expert.
the next group of up and coming political leaders. Doesnt it fill you with such respect for the future generations that they feel cheating is a no stresser???
Joe Investor
Remembering stuff is just cheating at being creative.
And you interview people to find out that they're competent, you don't hire them as a test. So your HR department and managers are probably the result of cheating in school as well, and the people who hired them were lazy.
Do what the rest of us do. Let the company screw itself up, and ride the top of the curve to a better gig.
Sure thing buddy. Apparently you did not even read my post. The first two years of engineering programs go over the math so quickly and in such high volume, that you only end up with a superficial, macro idea of how things work. My example was in Physics, you are given Newton's law of universal gravitation, and just told "Hey, it works!" rather than why. In my Dynamics class I had to actually derive the equation myself from others and model it with matlab and xppaut. We also had to derive the same law for three bodies. Same thing occurred in my circuits classes. "Hey, this is how you solve an LRC circuit, repeat this procedure for any one you see!". Ok, so I need to go through twenty similar examples to learn how to do this? Nope. Its much more informative to take differential equations and learn why it works that way rather than being given cookie-cutter solution techniques.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
"...which involves using the Internet illicitly to get higher grades..." is wrong. The students are not using the internet illicitly unless they are getting internet access without paying for it or some such thing. What is likely meant is that the students are getting their higher grades illicitly. Thus, the adverb "illicitly" in the sentence from the summary should be moved either to immediately before the word "get" or else after the word "grades".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In most science classes I took, from about school year 10 up to university graduation, I could bring reference material to tests.
Often it would be something like "2 pages, handwritten", sometimes it would be "anything you want, bring a library if you like". Tests were focused on problem solving and speed. If you were prepared, you would look at your huge stack of material like once or twice during that test.
If you didn't learn, you would spend so much time searching your material for answers, that you wouldn't have time to finish anything.
That can work in a small class; I had several classes with less than 10 students as a physics undergrad where that was the case, and it worked well due to the amount of discussion in lecture and the resulting constant threat of it being outed as a lazy bastard should you actually be one.
I have since TA'ed general physics classes that took the exact approach you mention, and I cannot stress enough what a horrible idea it is in a class with 300 students. People assume, often correctly, that regardless of the stated policy on curving, the instructor will not fail two thirds of the class and most other students are as lazy as they are.. A quarter of the students never look at the solutions and just try to memorize old exams. Another quarter read over the solutions but never attempt the homework on their own. About 40% "reverse engineer" the solutions then pat themselves on the back for doing "unnecessary" homework. The remaining 10% actually make an effort to solve the problems without simultaneously consulting the solutions.
In my opinion, there would be no problem with this approach if the instructor were willing to fail 80% of the class, but they never are. One professor here did actually fail the majority of the students in his general physics class, and the engineering department threw a fit. Since the people teaching general physics are usually newer non-tenured professors or staff lecturers, they generally buckle.
In contrast, when I was lecturing general physics one summer, one student spent three hours in my office working on a mandatory three layer Gauss' law problem, and reteaching himself calculus. In my experience, there are few if any students who start out that unprepared that would be willing to put in the effort on an assignment they didn't actually have to do, when they can just, often correctly, assume that they can look over old exams when the time comes and make a C because half the class is doing the same worthless stuff.
"If Nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by Nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property..... Grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, may produce more evil than good [think RIAA and MPAA]." - Thomas Jefferson 1780s
.
>>>There's a huge difference between downloading the newest Ke$ha song and plagiarizing a source online for your paper
Ke$ha has a new song? - "Yeah it sounds just like the last one, which sounded like Katy Perry's California Girls." - Oh she's cybercheating then.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Look. If cheating gets kids excited about learning new things, good! Can you remember the last time you got all sweaty and your heart rate increased thinking about a new technology? It is good! Grading is really unnecessary and just serves to filter out kids that might otherwise have a great learning experience.
Don't take this as a personal slant, but have you had a job in any major profession outside of teaching? A lot of teachers live in a bubble and assume stuff like this based on overexposure to bad news as well as superimposing their pessimism on the world around them. Some of the examples you used make sense (Asking a friend, use of internet), but the others are way off base. Am I missing the satire, are you basing this off of a bad work experience, or are you delusional?
The bad apple is the exception, not the rule...it just receives more attention.
They are both thefts, stealing ideas or stealing merchandise, where is the difference? Both are the products of others. What if the online source is a paid subscription model? Would that make the two equal? Is it OK to take from an public source like Wikipedia? Does that lessen the crime or just make one victim stand out more than another?
I don't see a difference except in who is getting cheated, in the first you are depriving someone the profits of their successful livelihood, in the second your depriving yourself of becoming better, in fact your caving into the problem many see in "this generation" (which this generation is this at the time is subject to those looking down on them) which is too do as little as possible for the greatest reward. You are establishing a work method that will likely stick with you your entire career and it will hobble them in it.
Downloading a copy of a Ke$ha song and listening to it for one's own entertainment generally does not lead to passing it off as one's own song.
On the other hand, copying down what an expert says about one's topic into a paper without citing that expert is, in fact, passing it off as one's own work.
It's the difference between downloading Firefox and downloading the source code to Firefox, removing references to the people who wrote the code, compiling/packaging it, and giving it to someone, calling it "this awesome web browser I wrote".
(I know, that analogy is flawed in some ways, but it illustrates the main point...)
I could see a gigantic consequence of this being that people go online for the quick answer and people start losing the ability to conceptualize exactly what that answer means--they'll be so wrapped up in finding the right and narrow answer that their point of view in the subject matter will be greatly narrowed. I think we've seen it manifest itself already in the past couple of decades.
A great concept, this notion of mass cheating on an overwhelming level (or so it seems) when you're talking about passing a test or turning in a paper. But, in the long term, I could see this concept as being a tool to humanity's intellectual demise.
Not that there's any way you can stop it, I suppose. It's like a train that you see coming in the distance, and you're entranced by it like a deer in headlights and it seems there's nothing you can do to move out of the way.
I don't think for an instant that cheating kids get excited about learning new things. I think they're just trying to do what they can to get the A, and little do they know they're potentially trading out a little bit of cognitive enrichment pertaining to the subject on which they're so desperate for that answer to get that A.
Not to say I didn't have my own bouts with cheating back in the day (I'm only human). In retrospect, however, now I can see the bigger picture a bit better. And I can also see how it likely robbed me of some of the essence of the subject...and, if you're getting a degree in higher education, aren't you there because of a certain passion for the subject? In that case, shouldn't essence be everything? A physics professor of mine once said it best: it's not all about the answer, it's all about the journey.
I'm an advocate of the notion that you learn more when you fail than when you succeed; stumbling through to come to a wrong answer can be more beneficial than breezing through to get the right one.
Thanks for a great rebuttal. Your points are all great. I suppose I could be a litte more clear in my original post. I certainly do not condone the idea of business that I pictured.
Again, thanks for a great response.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
As long as the education doesn't put a focus on the ability to think and select/process knowledge but to memorize knowledge, this is bound to happen. And the losers are the students, as the parent post exemplifies.
The most enjoyable exam I stayed was one with all the books I needed available: I still worked like a dog for 4 hours to solve the single problem I was given. The examiner worked also about 1 hour to uncover the tiny mistake (an incorrect sign) I made about 2/3rd in finding the solution and still validate the method I approached as correct... fair is fair, I passed the exam, not with the maximum grade and I still remember it as the best exam I stayed.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
What's wrong with this? Copying without understanding and without context is wrong and downright dumb. But copying after realizing the context and modifying the text to suit your paper is not wrong. Do you cite Newton and Einstein every time you solve a mechanics problem? Or quote Descartes after answering(if there is a definite one) a philosophical riddle?
I haven't ever written a single submission without 'referring' to the internet and surfing through those e-books, g-books, jstor, sciencedirect etc. and I can safely say it has contributed to my intelligence and knowledge. Of course I mention the text every now and then, but if a text has no solid copyable material which I can use to build upon in my answer then it does not deserve to be quoted.
Math, physical sciences, and engineering are slightly different in this regard. It's not about chugging numbers, it's about getting practice with the methods you were supposed to learn to solve problems. The issue isn't so much "solve this integral", it's "show that you know how to do integration by parts". Even though there are concrete numbers to make it more "real" for some students, or at least more tractable (so you don't have long strings of abstract variables), practicing is there for the practicing of concepts.
I'll grant you, though, that in subjects like history, assignments, test, and quizzes ought to be more conceptual. Students don't care (nor should they) whether a specific event happened in 1565 or 1566. Memorizing names, dates, sequences (of monarchs, e.g.), etc. has absolutely 0 meaning. Learning how two events, people, etc. interacted and why does.
More people should cheat. It will promote change in the education system.
Education in the past half-century has been about:
1. taking random information someone else wrote and re-writing it.
2. memorizing shit for a few days long enough to pass a test.
3. following inane instructions
But we are at the point now that the body of human knowledge is so vast that general knowledge is not as important as focused in-depth knowledge. And we have such great tools for instant learning the need for memorization is depreciated even greater.
The strange thing is that even though we have gained so much knowlage, there are still vast numbers of ignorant people.
it confounds me that people take for granted the intellegence that created their cell phone. Or put their trust into the technology that keeps a jumbo jet aloft. But when those same people say that the earth is getting warmer or that rocks are 4 billion years old, and suddenly they are subject to disbeleif as if they were arguing over how many dinosaurs could dance on the head of a pin.
There should be more of the following in education:
Interpersonal relations (lets talk instead of gettin jerry springer on your ass)
Self awareness (gee my glass seems full when im not watching bowflex ads)
Community involvement (including economics and government)
Creative solution development
Deep and thorough understanding of a single subject
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
When you're a bridge builder, it is critical you have a thorough understanding of physics. Same goes if you're designing the new Boeing airliner. Same goes if you're designing medical equipment. These are topics where your ability to understand the topics at hand are critical. Lives depend on it.
;)
If you're a doctor specializing in virii, I hope to hell you passed both organic chemistry and biochemistry with flying colors.
If you're a political science, law, psychology, marketing, business, english lit, etc... student, cheat all you want. It really doesn't matter if you actually learn anything in school. It's not like you'll actually need to use it. You're not really at school to learn anything anyway. Psychology is more about how you perform, political science is about how you talk (unless you're a political analyst at which time it's more important that you can listen), marketing... well that's just funny to think it's actually a course in school, business it's about how you talk and how well you delegate to smart people. English lit, well, you took that major because you didn't actually want to study in school to begin with.
Possibly the only course located outside of the sciences in the university which requires any actual studying and research is economics. If you're going to educated as a gambler, you should at the very least understand statistics and hopefully cause and effect.
So, the real issue is, what percentage of the science and engineering students cheated. When they cheated, did they cheat on something important or did they cheat on their IBM 370 Mainframe assembler class? I read a statistic sometime somewhere (based on polling) that the two most cheated on papers by science and engineering students was ethics and technical writing. Technical writing is obvious. Ethics is ironic
In my experience as a TA, ~10% will hit on you to try and up their grade, 2/3 of those will be of the opposite sex.
It was a computer programming job. If a programmer's first instinct is "Gather lots of details, then write a specific solution from scratch" his programs will be buggy, bloated, and take far longer to produce than they should. A programmer whose first instinct is to check for pre-built solutions saves time and money.
I should have noted it was my first answer. The second answer (delivered immediately without further prompting) was a process of estimation pretty similar to what you described.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.