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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed it seems that it is always the honest students who gets the short end of the stick.

Thats a good thing though - it prepares the students for the real world.

I think it perpetuates the ideas of how to wield authority. The concept of enticing people to cheat in order to be able to catch people at cheating is of a piece with "anti-terror" operations where federal agents set up fake terrorist cells, recruit feckless malcontents, and guide and cajole them until they can get them to do something illegal.

How is doing this preparing the students for the real world (I'm being serious and not condescending or anything)? I don't see the real world being particularly more difficult than normal high school. Example - didn't file or pay taxes on time? No problemo - just take a penalty and finish up your work late.

Because it causes them to loose (hopefully) any idea that they get anything out of being honest, except shafted.

You've got it backwards: the students who studied honestly had much better retention after two weeks than the kids who wasted time trying to cheat or game the test. It was the teacher's intention to reward honest work by giving the hard-working kids a big advantage over the cheaters, and that's exactly what he accomplished. If only life was always so fair!

Your explanation is for a fantasy-land. Studying honestly in many AP classes comes down to cramming. Here's how Semiapies summed it up in a comment in this thread:

"In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about.

(If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does, nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)"

It's not like the crammers are even bad kids. A lot of them have no choice because if they didn't study that way they wouldn't have enough time to study and will end up getting worse grades.

This would mainly show people that the world screws you over and people who are part of crappy systems will go ahead and screw you over on top of the crappy system. I see little fairness in this situation.

Semiapies' description of AP classes is really bizarre and can only reflect a situation in which the teachers did not give a rat's ass about their students' AP scores. The nice thing about an AP class versus a non-AP class is that the AP test gives teachers an excuse to care whether their students are actually learning or not. Naturally that means the kids end up working a lot harder, but teachers who care at all about the scores at the end of the year (and mine did) will do everything they can to discourage cramming and other fake learning.

Kids who can't pass the class without cramming and who aren't going to retain the material shouldn't be in an AP class in the first place. They're going to run into a concrete wall at the end and waste their money (or the school's money) taking a test they aren't prepared for. Some students can handle it, and that's who the class is for. In my graduating class, there were maybe a dozen kids who got a 5 on at least one AP test, and I think there were two dozen who got a 3 on at least one AP test. That's out of a graduating class of a little over 300. (The entering class was over 400, so you can tell I didn't go to an especially good school.)

The dishonest kids got it much, much worse, though. Personally, as one of the ones who didn't cheat, that's what I cared about.

Prepares them for a life time of being good little DRM'd content consumers?

Oh yes!

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