I'm actually much more cynical and less naive in real life than the above post would seem to indicate so I don't think I'm fucked. That still doesn't make it any less sad that a majority of people are acting without any serious regard to ethics. I'd really like it if at some point all the crap stopped and everyone started working with the technology more than socially engineering their way up the ladder, but I am a realist at heart and know this will never be the case. If anything, being a bit of an idealist just makes it easier to be terribly cynical and sad about the state of things.
As far as being screwed over by my peers I guess I just always thought the people screwing me over would be from one of the stereotypically unethical backgrounds (who are apparently not really that much worse or better statistically than engineers at not cheating).
Edit: The post above lost all formatting somehow, that will teach me not to use the preview button. If modding the post, please mod this correct version instead.
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves)
The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on.
Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad.
(Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves)
The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on.
Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules.
I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad.
(Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
If someone is truly passionate about a subject, their interest and tenacity will allow them to accomplish a great deal on their own without a lot of external guidance or support. The most important thing to do is just stay out of their way. If you look at most great achievements, they happened when someone interested and talented just sat down and thought about them for a long time. If we structure people's interests too much, they will become obsessed with meeting artificial milestones, winning awards, and other things not all that essential to the process behind discovery and invention.
The best way to support the gifted is to give them the tools they need to work on what they are passionate about, then quietly step out of the way and see what they accomplish. It is important to realize that not getting in their way may mean giving up attempts to balance their lives. If someone really wants to get into something deeply, normal social interactions and such will suffer and that is normally that persons choice.
Using the gifted for PR is also not getting out of their way. The most amazing people and discoveries are usually the ones no one hears about until after work is complete on their personal project. 15 minutes of fame would be an annoyance at best and a real distraction at worst to someone who just wants to hit the books, hit the lab, and get some fun stuff done.
We never actually got to fabricate it, but when my VLSI group finished our chip last semester we put some art in the whitespace. I was too busy with final integration to actually draw it, but the rest of the group agreed it would be cool to put tux on the layout. A groupmate spent 30 minutes or so creating a pixelized version of tux in the Metal 3 layer. We also have names & school logo on the right and a trombone ASCII art on the left (the multiplier was a little long so we had plenty of whitespace). Tux art is blown up in the linked image. Sorry about the poor quality, but I don't want to suck too much bandwidth and anger the sysadmins.
Chip Image
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually much more cynical and less naive in real life than the above post would seem to indicate so I don't think I'm fucked. That still doesn't make it any less sad that a majority of people are acting without any serious regard to ethics. I'd really like it if at some point all the crap stopped and everyone started working with the technology more than socially engineering their way up the ladder, but I am a realist at heart and know this will never be the case. If anything, being a bit of an idealist just makes it easier to be terribly cynical and sad about the state of things.
As far as being screwed over by my peers I guess I just always thought the people screwing me over would be from one of the stereotypically unethical backgrounds (who are apparently not really that much worse or better statistically than engineers at not cheating).
Edit: The post above lost all formatting somehow, that will teach me not to use the preview button. If modding the post, please mod this correct version instead.
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves)
The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on.
Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad.
(Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves) The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on. Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad. (Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
If someone is truly passionate about a subject, their interest and tenacity will allow them to accomplish a great deal on their own without a lot of external guidance or support. The most important thing to do is just stay out of their way. If you look at most great achievements, they happened when someone interested and talented just sat down and thought about them for a long time. If we structure people's interests too much, they will become obsessed with meeting artificial milestones, winning awards, and other things not all that essential to the process behind discovery and invention. The best way to support the gifted is to give them the tools they need to work on what they are passionate about, then quietly step out of the way and see what they accomplish. It is important to realize that not getting in their way may mean giving up attempts to balance their lives. If someone really wants to get into something deeply, normal social interactions and such will suffer and that is normally that persons choice. Using the gifted for PR is also not getting out of their way. The most amazing people and discoveries are usually the ones no one hears about until after work is complete on their personal project. 15 minutes of fame would be an annoyance at best and a real distraction at worst to someone who just wants to hit the books, hit the lab, and get some fun stuff done.
We never actually got to fabricate it, but when my VLSI group finished our chip last semester we put some art in the whitespace. I was too busy with final integration to actually draw it, but the rest of the group agreed it would be cool to put tux on the layout. A groupmate spent 30 minutes or so creating a pixelized version of tux in the Metal 3 layer. We also have names & school logo on the right and a trombone ASCII art on the left (the multiplier was a little long so we had plenty of whitespace). Tux art is blown up in the linked image. Sorry about the poor quality, but I don't want to suck too much bandwidth and anger the sysadmins. Chip Image