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Comment by mrep | Hacker News Reader

I went to a public university with a large international population and this doesn't surprise me in the slightest. A lot of the international students were extremely poor at english. One of the guys on my software project team was an international student who confirmed that it was very easy to pay someone to take the english proficiency exam.

Us Americans aren't so innocent though. The amount of adderall/vyvanse/ritalin... that goes through college campuses is ridiculous.

Honestly, I feel that it's just a symptom of extreme competition. With colleges and first time jobs taking such extreme care to filter on GPA and the likes, every little bit usually pays off.

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To be fair, there is a difference between adderall and actual cheating. One of these is a thing that helps you do your own work better, and the other is hiring someone else to do your work for you.

One of these things is fraudulent, and the other is simply performance enhancement. Taking Adderall to study doesn't make you less competent at the subject in question, whereas cheating your way through tests does.

100% agree with you and that's why I said "Us Americans aren't so innocent", not "we're just as guilty" (Albeit, there are a lot of us who cheat also).

>"Taking Adderall to study doesn't make you less competent at the subject in question"

What happens when you stop taking it?

We frown upon doping in school for the same reason we frown upon it in sports. It creates an environment where people are forced to deal with the side effects to compete, or receive a lower grade.

Employers will expect that you continue your performance outside of school. If you stop doping after school, your employer will notice the new correlation between GPA and performance - hurting those with legitimate work ethic and skill. If you don't stop doping, you will start to experience some serious health issues.

(Even if employers don't think that GPA matters, so long as any significant number hire based on it the zero-sum fault will persist.)

what correlation between GPA and performance? Has one ever been found?

Google has not found one. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...

> Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found.

Small_correlation != no_correlation

Doubt the employer would notice it, being that GPA and performance are not necessarily correlated. Doping in any situation gives an edge at the upper levels, but won't make an average person superhuman. (It makes superhumans even more superhuman).

We frown on doping because it's dangerous due to bad health effects. Forcing someone to use performance enhancers to compete and damage their health is the ethical problem in my mind. Collateral harm.

Plus, since Adderall and the like are in limited supply, you're preventing people who actually need it to function from getting the access they need.

It's absurdly easy to get diagnosed with ADHD/ADD and get an Adderall or equivalent prescription.

I don't think the pharmaceutical companies have any qualms about producing more supply, if there is demand for it.

No, production is limited by the US Drug Enforcement Agency:

http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/670035.pdf

"As part of its work to prevent diversion of controlled substances, DEA sets limits, known as quotas, on the amount of certain classes of controlled substances available for use in the United States"

There are distribution issues because of drug control regulations. Didn't mean to imply that it's hard to produce

Excuse me, ADHD is very serious and real. Let me show you a few relevant quotes. Here's the relevant literature linked.

"Given these deficits in academic skills and behavior, it is not surprising to find that as many as 56% of children with ADHD may require academic tutoring, approximately 30% may repeat a grade in school, and 30–40% may be placed in one or more special education programs. As many as 46% may be suspended from school and 10–35% may drop out entirely and fail to complete high school (Barkley, DuPaul, & McMurray, 1990; Barkley, Fischer, Edelbrock, & Smallish, 1990; Barkley, Fischer, Smallish, & Fletcher, 2006; Faraone et al., 1993; Szatmari, Offord, & Boyle, 1989; Weiss & Hechtman, 1993)." It causes an order of magnitude more problems in your life.

http://l.facebook.com/l.php? u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS0160289615001312&h=ZAQFx8Qkc

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10204423904275949&se...

http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drthomasebrow...

http://www.psychiatrist.com/jcp/article/Pages/2012/v73n07/v7...

^^ 16 year follow up of life outcomes, know that getting medicated gives you remission the majority of the time. I can post more links if necessary.

https://t.co/n1mUvGpOrn

^^ Medication effects on I.Q && Working memory. WM > I.Q. There is one study that has found an increase of up to 4.5 points for kids that are medicated if they have ADHD. Very serious. Deserves to be taken very seriously.

Stop doubting something extremely real and significant.

http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.medicalnewsto...

^ 2-4x increases your mortality rate.

I am in no way doubting the effects and seriousness of real diagnoses of ADD/ADHD. For those that actually need it, it works wonders.

But there is a serious percentage of college-aged ADHD diagnoses that are about as legitimate as most medical marijuana prescriptions. These kids are just snorting Adderall so they can cram for an exam or pull an all-nighter and finish a term paper. I've seen it first hand, and it's an incredibly wide-spread practice at some top-tier US universities.

Adderall is not in limited supply. It is incredibly trivial and cheap to manufacture.

Right, but because of the rules set in place (since it's categorized as a meth derivative or something), a lot of pharmacies don't stock a lot, or are completely unwilling to fill a prescription.

If you check out places like /r/ADHD you'll see some stories of people unable to get their prescription filled.

> Taking Adderall to study doesn't make you less competent at the subject in question

1. Is exam-cram really the same as knowledge?

2. Test performance can often a zero-sum game, when curved. So dopers may have better performance, but they are indirectly harming all the honest kids.

3. Is it desirable to tie better-performance to having money/connections and weak ethics? (Whether similar to full-time work or not.)

These types of discussions always depress me. You'd think from reading them that everyone has cheated or popped some Adderall at some point, and it's a normal part of college. Is that really true? I never have, unless you count making up excuses for turning in the occasional thing late. I worked hard in school and got decent but not amazing grades (3.7 something). When I hear this shit it makes me feel like I was playing the game handicapped all along.

Either that or the cheaters among is are always looking for ways to rationalize it by making it seem more normative.

I think it is essentially true. I recently graduated and definitely 99.9 pct of students cheated/took adderral at some point in their studies.

Cheaters definitely rationalize. I myself never had anyone else sit exams for me, nor used anyone else's work as my own, nor copied homework answers. I think cheating is common but there are definitely people who don't do it. You just don't hear much about them.

In my experience, a lot of the cheaters do, in fact, believe (or want to believe) that just about everyone else is doing it too. Don't buy it.

I wasn't aware of anyone in my circle of friends or even friendly acquaintances who cheated in college or grad school. (I heard about occasional incidents involving people I didn't know. But if there was an active cheating subculture, nobody talked about it when I was in earshot.) And my experience as a professor is that there are an awful lot of students who I work with one on one and whose homework and exam grades are right in line with my firsthand experience of their work.

I didn't either, and don't believe I knew anyone that did (grad and undergrad CS, knew 2-3 other students who likely did not). Anecdotal data point, but there it is.

Don't feel bad. Cheating is like taking on technical debt. It's a short term reward, but it usually comes back to haunt you. After graduating, their employer will learn that they aren't nearly as good as their resume said they were and with your greater knowledge and word ethic, you'll probably come out ahead.

Yup, that's what I've seen. I have an engineering degree and it is was a common understanding that the cheaters were the guys and gals that ended up being technical reps, while the hard workers ended up doing the exciting work. It only takes 1-2 years in the work force to see who has got the chops and who doesn't.

I've never cheated or taken non-caffeine stimulants. I haven't seen anyone around me cheat. As a TA grading other students' work, I caught three students cheating out of ~40 whose work I graded. I did see another student taking Adderall once.

So, while cheating and stimulants are not unheard-of, they certainly aren't normal where I am. It probably varies from school to school, though.

When I went to college, I saw smart people who not only studied insanely hard, but ALSO took adderall AND cheated just to stomp out the competition. I saw a few friends end up in the hospital, but they had no regrets.

Where I live the modus operandi is amphetamines 48 hours before exam with aspirin. Study without sleeping. Take exam. Sleep. Forget everything. At least the kids don't do it for important professions - the ones I knew did it were mostly medical students and civil engineers /s.

Stimulants (of any kind) don't complete your work for you, at best they provide a little extra capacity and focus.

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