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Comment by amp108 | Hacker News Reader

One thing universities should teach is efficient problem solving. If it was more work to cheat than to memorize, I'd say you might want to re-evaluate whether "not memorizing things" is a principle you should cling so dogmatically to.

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I'm sure he learned much more useful stuff by coding up that monstrosity, and in the real world he can just google to look up those formulas he didn't memorize.

The fully elaborated version of the underlying principle is probably something like: "I have much better ways to spend my time than on memorizing formulas that I could easily look up later".

If an individual's philosophy is that you can always google stuff so you don't need to know anything, I don't see why that person should waste time in school.

There's more to learning than memorization.

There's more to exams than memorization too, and cheating because you don't like memorization is childish. If the exams really test only memorization, drop the class.

Some classes are on the critical path to graduation. I wouldn't suggest delaying an entire degree because one or two classes have bad exams.

Cheating to avoid memorization is childish, but let's not forget that students are usually children, or still in the process of maturing into adults.

It's already terrible enough the extent to which higher education has become an infantilizing scam in the US.

Failing to learn critical coursework should delay graduation, and cheating should result in expulsion. These are good things.

In a perfect university teaching environment, yes. However, in real life sometimes cheating is necessary. Real university environments are flawed, rules and requirements often stacked against the student. They have to pay up, get a massive loan, endure narcis/dumb teachers and stupid administratory requirements, and educate themselves despite that environment. After a lot of invested time and money donated by state/parents, if faced with particularly nasty course exam they are unable to pass in a legal way, it would be crazy to fold and waste all that investment.

University students are legally adults and we’re considered so until recently. I don’t thin infantalizing young adults is healthy.

In the US the legal age of adulthood is 18. This is very far from the actual maturity point. It's not infantalizing to be accepting and unsuprised when a 18-22 year old does something childish.

Edit: Being a child, and acting childish is an important part of the life cycle that allows development. We seem to be bumping into some biological limits on how late we can extend it, but if it were possible I would.

When I worked in baseball concessions as a teenager, the employees who were the most responsible and dependable were the university students. The older workers tended to be more experienced, but some of them were a little sketchy and a couple were fired for showing up drunk.

There is a tremendous variation between individuals. Part of the point of the university degree as a credential is to identify those people who are responsible enough to complete the program. I graduated at the age of 21 and immediately became an Engineer in Training, working on code that could kill people if it behaved improperly. I took that responsibility very seriously, and I'm thankful that my employer and coworkers took me seriously in return.

I fear that a focus on age tends to lead to prejudice. If you just want to ensure young adults can be allowed to make mistakes without ruining their lives, I would encourage you to expand your goal. There are many adults who could benefit from a bit more compassion and forgiveness. We don't need to restrict it to the young.

I strongly remember a mandatory English (literature) exam in Highschool where you had to write an essay in response to a question that was known beforehand, in relation to one of three or so books you had studied beforehand (You didn't know which on the day). The way this test was practiced was to get every student to write the full essay for all 3 books and then to memorize that. Most other English tests I had to take in Highschool were similar to this, but not quite as bad. I think you have too high of expectations from education systems to think that all tests test more than memorization or that people can simply "drop the class".

If a particular exam has more to it than memorization, then even open book you shouldn't be able to ace it without knowing the material!

I dislike open book exams so much that I took nothing into my last one. It was a unit without much memorisation that focused much more heavily on applying concepts, and I feel that having it as open book was a trap for ill-prepared students.

One of my highschool teachers mentioned that a book wouldn't help much before her first open-book test, then openly stated that afterwards that it was a small trick to see who wouldn't study. She was among the best and most-liked teachers in the school.

if only if it was that easy to just not take class

I'm not defending what they did, but it's worth pointing out that electives aren't exactly universal. During my university I was allowed to choose exactly 4 classes out of 6, in my last semester. Every single other course was compulsory. I never cheated, and looking back on it I'm glad I didn't, but I certainly did my share of useless learning.

Edit: that being said, in a system where there is such a thing as non-compulsory courses, and the critical path to graduation is sane, cheating on an exam on the critical path should definitely not be acceptable, even if it's "only" memorization. Some things really do need to be memorized.

Not every academic system allows to freely drop classes, to drop a class without an economic penalty, or to drop a class without falling behind in your studies.

There is not more to exams than memorisation thats their only function, they don't teach then exam.

Knowing and memorizing are not the same thing. I went to school to learn, not to memorize.

Yes, although a lot of thing can be learned much better by yourself rather than go to school, I think.

I had a programmable calculator during A Levels (UK sixth form college). Was talking Computer Science, Maths, Further Maths, a couple of others. These were not AS Levels, full A Levels.

I also had the seemingly good idea it would be nice to program the calculator, initially just writing algorithms like bubble-sort for CS that could be referred to, then extending to Statistics showing working for various statistical methods (the exam required steps showing working steps, learnt a little about data structures myself for that, then extending to matrix algebra and curvature). I also didn't go to most classes, only attending the ones that would be more useful than time in the library.

Typing character-by-character on a numerical keypad, getting a series of working systems. Was pretty fun.

And in the end, having working 'cheating systems'... I could do it faster in my head and never even took the calculator to the exam.

That's learning, I suppose. Did very well on the exams.

I also wrote programs to run long equations on my calculator. This wasn't forbidden at the time because it was too early, I suppose. Regardless, you had to show your work to get credit anyway so they just functioned as a way to check my work instantly.

I had a lot of fun writing little programs to help out on long arduous problems though. I wish I had all my TI programs.

Unless the exam allows notes, it can make sense to forbid using programs that are already stored and require to write the program during the time needed for the exam if you want to do that (even to program it to show the work if you want to add that into the program too; I think someone once did this), then it can be OK to allow it, I suppose.

I wrote a raster graphics editor for my Casio programmable graphing calculator. I also wrote it exclusively on the calculator. Did it to one-up my class mate, who had done one previously--mine had better features (no dot in the center of circles, could also do ellipses, had a spray function), and it was half the LOC.

Casio BASIC had subroutines in IIRC 36 registers ([A-Z0-9], conditional jumps and labels.

I wish I had that source code. I can't see how I would ever do something like it again.

its not work if its fun, which im sure this was

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