I'm a College Professor Who Faked Dissertation Data on the Side | Hacker News Reader

I'm a College Professor Who Faked Dissertation Data on the Side

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108 pointsdanso124 comments

Sadly, it's insanely common to have advanced degrees plagiarized. I worked as a high school teacher and the number of co-workers who phoned it in for advanced degrees just to get the pay increase was insane.

I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything.

The worst was a couple of "Doctors", who essentially bought their way to getting EdD's. It was just disgusting. Our admins and leaders CHEATING their way to getting advanced degrees and then expecting us to respect them as educators.

And they had the gall to make people call them "doctor". One of the many reasons why I quit working for them.

When I was in high school, the county's highest paid teacher (on account of the credentials) worked there. She taught typing. TYPING! And she wasn't even very good at it! I don't think a single student really respected her.

I was friendly with the school's IT guys. One of them told me the story of her mouse "breaking", and him going to fix it. Somebody had just put some scotch tape over the sensor. He silently removed it, told her it was fixed, and went back to his office for a good laugh.

People only get the EdD because it's required to be a superintendent in most places. I'm scraping by on a part time higher ed gig, and it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam. At least the people who work in it could try to believe in their own product, but even they don't.

This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.

As someone who has worked in higher ed, part of the degree requirements are to reduce corruption. Otherwise low tier state schools and community colleges would just be packed with the top administrator's buddies. Requiring a doctorate at least means you can't give the job to your pal Joey from Bayonne or whatever. Well, you still can, but he has to grind a mail order doctorate first.

State-level certification exams would fix this. You either pass the exam, or you don't, doesn't matter how you acquired the knowledge.

But then people will just memorize for the test. We've all seen the IT guys who crammed for some certification, but don't know anything.

That is a problem with particular certification exams, not insurmountable at all. E.g. memorizing brain dumps for Microsoft MSCE is one thing, but that trick does not work for the CCIE.

Is the CCIE one of the "hands on" exams, like the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams?

I have less familiarity with the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams, but yes -- the CCIE is a lab exam. Started out at two days but IIRC it is currently at one full eight-hour day in the lab. We have a few CCIEs where I work and the amount of studying to earn the certification is phenominal. The overall pass rate is about roughly 25%, which is notably low.

I imagine that if you're cramming for a test on how to do differential equations, and you're able to pass that test, you actually know how to solve differential equations.

"IT People" cramming for tests and memorizing the test for those certifications is a testament to the failure of those certifications, not for certifications in general.

I've done the California "Fundamentals of Engineering" Civil Engineering exam long time ago and it was no joke. Its been a while but I think they let you bring reference books or gave you one. You really had to know your stuff because you had no time to look at the reference material.

The test for e.g. programming could be "build a program to do X", where X is determined on the spot, and you have e.g. 6 hours to do it on premise...

Memorization wont help with that...

The Progressive Case for the Qing Imperial Confucian Civil Service Exam

This needs to be done for Law, Medicine and Engineering degrees. Remove the power and higher ed institutional oligopoly. In a lot of places it's regulated by "professional associations", "councils", "boards" etc. that are a horrible cross between a union and a regulatory authority. Usually due to being the first mover or through lobbying or a bit of both. They can restrict school intake numbers, set legally significant policies across the industry, dispense judgement for malpractice, sometimes even whether to allow building a new institution or not. You don't hear much about them as compared to unions because they somehow acquired regulatory powers and a fair bit of upper middle class run in their circles but they are not exactly part of the State executive/legislative hierarchy either. It's popular to complain about "cultural problems" in hospitals like massive overtime, resistance to innovation etc. You want to fix it? Move the regulatory and certification parts to under the direct oversight and control of the government and remove the limits on supply. Don't complain about talent going to work in optimizing ad consumption instead of solving human problems when most industries are rarely as flexible or easy to enter as software's.

Have you ever worked with an attorney?

You don't want Law to be run like software.

it is called marketing and higher ed has that down pat. they have pretty much convinced more than one generation of the requirement to have college degree to have a good life and about every regulatory body of the need to have even higher tiers to be suitable for the job.

that they also got the Federal government to step in and become a loan factory on encouraged them more. it will only stop when the Federal government in turn tells them how much they can charge per course credit and which courses if not degrees warrant Federal money

Agreed. I remember when this was frowned upon. No need to go into student loan debt for a stem job.

> it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam

I think an unbiased look at the evidence might say they're right.

Would that be the evidence that college educated workers make more money than those without[1,2], or the evidence that the unemployment rate is lower for those with a college degree than for those without[3,4]?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660

That certainly confirms degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise!

Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

I do feel lumping all higher education together is a bit unfair and a breakdown would be far more telling where scams are and aren't.

> Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

Shouldn't you present evidence if you're saying an unbiased look at the evidence shows something is a scam?

In a scientific paper, yes. Elsewhere, it depends but generally that isn't needed unless we are doubting a person's claims. For example, the claim that many people were told that a degree was a valid path to success but weren't informed their degree (and the prestige of the degree) would matter or that it was possible for it to be less of a boost than the costs incurred. Also some claims shouldn't need backing as they are common knowledge, such as the existence of diploma mills.

Also, claim that people with degrees are more likely to be employed or make more money doesn't mean the degree is worth both the debt and time investment. It also talks about degrees as a whole, which people generally don't intend to target despite often using overly general speech that could give such an impression.

Nobody gives a toss about unemployment rates when you're working at Starbucks despite holding an advanced degree.

You're in luck. Compare links [1] and [2] in the post you replied to.

If you don't control for IQ, the observation is useless.

IQ is a vanity measure at best. Look at a site as brainstats this would imply if you control for IQ it would rule out people from whole continents.

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

Are you really quoting a sketchy website based on the risible work of Vanhanen and Lynn?

That's not how controlling for a variable works. You don't "rule out people" - the question you need to answer is whether a college education makes people more successful than would be predicted by IQ alone, and if so, by how much?

Is your contention also that SAT/ACT are vanity measures? The correlation between IQ and ACT is very strong, or in other words they are both strongly g-loaded and are good measures for general intelligence.

http://iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf

We also have ample evidence that general intelligence correlates with economic success:

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.intell.2006.09.004

Vanity measure, my foot.

Given that institutions of higher education aggressively select for high-scoring SAT/ACT individuals, and thus high IQ individuals, the burden of proof is on them to show that a degree results in significant socioeconomic success that cannot be explained by the preexisting psychometric attributes of the college bound population.

It's possible for a group to have more smart people despite lower mean IQ; I learned that in college (hint; it's about the variance). Anyway, college is basically a badly formulated IQ test and DEFINITELY a vanity measure. I mean it costs a hell of a lot more.

There is a very obvious correlation vs. causation counterargument that you need to address.

The point of providing those links is that a basic look at the data provides no support for the hypothesis that higher education is a scam. I was responding to someone who, without evidence, claimed that an unbiased look at the evidence would show the opposite. There's a massive academic literature on the topic that finds the same thing.

The problem with showing graphs that college degrees being correlated with higher income is that it's still what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

A useful graph would show data that is different than what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

I think it's generally understood that "top" schools merely select the best students, they don't create the best graduates.

Unfortunately there’s little reason to believe that’s due to treatment rather than selection. Smart people both get more education and make more money, but the impact of education on income is mostly mediated by intelligence, not education. Otherwise the long project to get more and more people into university would have had more drastic effects on incomes rather than diminishing the usefulness of a university education as a signal of a certain minimum level of intelligence.

> Herrnstein's Syllogism: Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on IQ, Education, and Income.

> Environmental influences due to a common shared environmental factor were 0.23 for IQ, 0.18 for education, and 0.08 for income. The model predicted a correlation of 0.63 between IQ and education and 0.34 between IQ and income. Sixty-eight percent of the former and 59% of the latter was genetically mediated; the remainder was mediated by common shared environment.

Teaching should be qualified on certifications only, of which a degree is not a qualifier. Good teachers are under paid, bad teachers are over paid, why support the system? Don't use public schools.

I would say that most 4 year degrees are mostly 'useless' knowledge. I would say most high schools are mostly useless knowledge. I don't know what society is optimizing for, I think it's optimizing for more and more expensive education.

As much as I like to believe people can teach themselves anything, if you look at places like Kaggle, there are really no self-taught people. It's just a parade of Phd holders and grad students. I'm sure there are one or two, but clearly for most people coughing up the dough for a Computer Science / Data Science degree is indeed worth it.

I agree with your statements, but dont forget the people who value education are the same ones with degrees and the same ones who self learn. when I was amazed at how we can now take classes at schools like Havard for free on Coursera, my nephew was like 'well what do i get out of it?' *face palm

likewise with kaggle. I love participating on it when I have time, but when people who want to be data scientists but dont have a masters/phd and no experience, I tell them to participate there. They always say, I dont want to do that, what else? =|

Don't use public schools? What do you propose instead? What should teenagers do instead of learn how to read, write and do math?

If you're still learning how to read, write, and do basic math as a teenager, society has failed you.

I propose homeschooling or private schooling for those who can afford it. I have determined that the public school curriculum is trash, the people creating it are trash, and the people teaching it are trash. If you want trash students, please, send them to trash schools.

Homeschooling is mostly awful. Parents don't have the time or skill to teach students properly.

You don't really propose anything that can help, you just say everything is "trash".

If a man meets one asshole, then that's unlucky, if a man meets a 100 assholes, then maybe he's the asshole.

If you went through 4 years of high school and had only "trash" experiences, maybe the school wasn't the problem.

If you can't propose anything of value or any real ways to improve our flawed system, then you opinions are essentially useless.

> Homeschooling is mostly awful. Parents don't have the time or skill to teach students properly.

Care to back that up with some data...

We're all about challenging societal norms here. Except public school, never question it's authority and place in society.

Once again, you have zero suggestions for how to school 99% of the population.

Homeschooling isn't feasible (or preferable) to a majority of the population, so unless you suggest something else, then you are just complaining.

It's like you are bitching about having a military, but you don't suggest another way to protect our country.

> Once again, you have zero suggestions for how to school 99% of the population.

99% of the population could be home, private, or co-op schooled. Perhaps we can do an ACA-style voucher system. Everyone above X over the poverty line pays for their school, everyone else gets some kind of voucher.

> Homeschooling isn't feasible (or preferable) to a majority of the population

That's just your assertion, it's not backed up by an facts.

> It's like you are bitching about having a military, but you don't suggest another way to protect our country.

Who does the country need protection from, at this point? And if that country took control of our country, how would things be materially different than they are today?

Again, which public school? I can think of several excellent public high schools within thirty miles of where I sit, and I can think of a number of others that are mediocre or worse.

Not any reliable data, it's admittedly anecdotal. I have been in education for about 15 years and haven't seen any quality homeschooling. Students would have been much better off going to a decent public school.

And homeschooling isn't feasible for the vast majority of the population, so using homeschooling as solution is ridiculous.

All the OP (to whom I oddly can’t reapond) has is anecdotes, so I’ll offer an opposing one. I was homeschooled. I just finished a (real) STEM PhD. My sister was also homeschooled. She holds a (real) masters degree. Neither of my parents went to college. The idea that homeschooling produces an inferior education rings hollow to my ear.

Growing up, our family was lower middle class. Our lack of financial resources combined with my parents limited formal education makes it difficult for my to understand why homeschooling is infeasible for most. The biggest downside is probably an inferior socialization.

>I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything

I don't think this is the goal.

If I can just for example pay for like $15k in order to get $15k pay increase, then to me its a good deal.

Good deal for the person getting the 15k sure, a terrible deal for the people paying property taxes to fund that raise.

Also a terrible deal for people at the receiving end of the services of such a person.

Not if the extra $15k keeps an otherwise good teacher/educator from leaving and going to a private company.

I'm happy to pay the good teachers more so long as we can pay the bad ones less and get rid of them easily. The unions fight measures like that hard in my experience.

Unions fight to protect their members. If taxpayers arent willing to fund enough compensation to attract quality candidates, it is gaurenteed to create a bad situation. Unions protecting bad teachers is a symptom not a cause.

You might get more earnest learners if the degree weren't tied to pay or prestige. Everyone wants pay and prestige, but only some people want to learn.

I have a friend who has a Doctorate and teaches some high school teachers, and is a high school teacher/administrator herself, and she always complains about teachers doing things like taking phone calls in the middle of lecture, or just never showing up and complaining to the colleges administration if she gives a poor grade. The older they are the worse they behave, so she says.

Of course, her side job teaching them in the summer probably wouldn't exist if they didn't get pay increases for degrees, so...

Just anecdotes from one person, but she also said that those perusing degrees were more engaged and less likely to just be taking calls etc. than those who were doing continuing education credits.

This is the most high profile case that comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-p...

You just sadly reminded me of when I was an undergrad taking a grad class on "History of Mathematics".

Two undergrads taking the class because it just sounded neat, and the professor made things interesting. 10 graduate students who were teachers taking the class for the increased salary. An evening seminar of three hours per week after work where we examined as much as possible over how people did math through the ages and through time.

You could tell these grads were bored. But, fine, dealing with kids all day, then having to learn something new that isn't likely to ever be more than a trivia point in a lecture might not be a great thing.

Then... We get to a point where it looks like Archimedes came this close to discovering integral calculus. [insert appropriate WOW! meme here]

A couple of grunts from the grads. Me and the other undergrad were gobsmacked.

There were other examples, but that's the one that always sticks in my head. It's also what contributed to me not being very impressed by some of the grade school teachers I met as my kids were enrolled.

I dont understand what you're trying to convey. I like history but someone almost discovering something holds no appeal for me; what actually happened does. And these people were not interested in the course in the first place.

What would the world look like, if the calculus had been discovered two millenia earlier?

  [TL;DR]
  It's not the destination, it's the journey.

  Archimedes didn't reach the destination of integral calculus,
  but he at least started the journey, and I appreciate it.
  [/TL;DR]

I think it's a sense of wonder thing.

The scope of knowledge (to my understanding) didn't exist back then to imagine infinitesimals. I believe they were having issues with irrationals, let alone things that approached 0 but weren't exactly 0.

There's a sibling comment along the lines of "what if calculus had been discovered 2,000 years earlier" that touches on this, but I think for me there's added the idea that there's proof that some people, some times, can almost see what's next in terms of discoverable knowledge, and it keeps me hopeful.

Most of us have some "off" theory/fantasy/hope with no rigid proof of validity. And many of those are just random neurons firing that might make a good fanfic. But there's that person over there who has a mostly fleshed out idea for (insert super tech here) and just needs to figure out step 37.

It turns out she'll never invent the super tech defined. But X-2891q in the year 3971 will meme a holograph that brings that super tech into reality. While the super tech likely adds to society, the original person who came up with elements of the concept enriched herself in doing so, by my perspective.

I mean this is the most positive way: you are a bona-fide nerd.

I would would also be really intrigued/interested to learn that. But my experience with teachers is that most of them are not nerds - the ones that are tend to have that beaten out of them by the profession. Not all though.

Thank you! It's nice to be recognized properly.

It wasn't until I dated a middle school teacher for a while that I realized how crazy the pay scale is there. Her pay would automatically go up for any grad degree. She was teaching middle school science, but she could have gotten an online Master's in sociology and received a pay bump.

I absolutely would have gone online and done the absolute minimum in the easiest possible program I could find, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it. The fact that any Master's degree would do already tells me that it's irrelevant to the school district whether the degree improves teaching (and let's be honest, even getting a Master's in bio won't really help a third grade science teacher), so what difference does it make if it's a total BS degree?

This all depends on the school district and/or state. Many places, you have to actually get degrees in Education rather than random subjects. (And you are expected to do this to stay employed, rather than to get pay bumps).

Seems weird that you have to do it to stay employed. If you're a middle school science teacher for several years, why would they fire you for not getting an additional credential just because you've been in the job for a certain amount of time, when they've been allowing you to do the job without it?

Well, in the situation I’m describing, you’re expected to have an education bachelors to get a teaching job in the first place, with the condition that you get a masters within a certain number of years (followed by continuing education credits). This is essentially dictated by the Teachers Union, to keep salaries high and reduce the supply of qualified educators (though they also negotiate for partial or full reimbursement of education costs for their members so teachers aren’t paying completely out of pocket).

I was taught (as a Canadian from an English family) that the only people who should be addressed as "doctor" in normal conversation are MDs and active/retired college/university professors. What is common etiquette today?

Still the same I think, except in certain provinces such as BC chiropractors and naturopaths can unfortunately refer to themselves as "doctors" and do so at every opportunity. But maybe that doesn't fall under the definition of "normal conversation".

I wouldn't call anyone "doctor" in normal conversation. Also, at least in my experience (several friends/family are professors), it can be seen as disrespectful to refer to a professor as "doctor" because that is the title that you get when you finish your PhD, but before you have a job as an actual professor.

For reference, I live in Palo Alto and went to universities in the US.

My mother worked for years as secretary for an EdD who was unable to draft a coherent paragraph: she wrote all of his business letters for him. He did, I believe, enjoy being referred to as "Doctor".

My 5th grader referred to her principal as “doctor” so and so... I told her he is not a doctor.

Now, on the other hand, I am one. With a license to practice and I never demand anyone use it. That’s just absurd!

An Ed.D. is not an advanced degree. It is an abomination. You cannot cheapen an Ed.D. or an M.Ed. by cheating to get it because no one with any familiarity with them respects them. Degrees in education have no effect on teaching effectiveness, they’re among the clearest possible examples of pure credentialism and gatekeeping.

I took partial differential equations as an undergrad, which thoroughly kicked my ass. There was a lot of stuff that I found confusing, and so once I finally understood it, I made a Youtube video explaning separation of variables for the clamped heat equation, and posted it hoping that either I or someone else could benefit from that.

A few weeks later, I got a private Youtube message from someone claiming that he was a PhD student that was willing to pay me $600 to do his PDE homework for him. As a broke college kid, $600 might as well have been $600,000 to me at the time, so I eagerly agreed, but shortly after realized that this was incredibly unethical and I started feeling guilty. Before he could send me the money, I came up with an excuse saying something like "my computer caught on fire".

Looking back, it was sort of a surreal thing; I wouldn't have thought that a PhD'd person would need a lot of help from some gauky undergrad making a crappy tutorial with Mathtype and screen recording software. I guess this stuff must be pretty prevalent though...maybe if I had known about it I wouldn't have dropped out of school the next semester :) .

I superficially like the idea of a meritocracy, where hard work and success move you up the in the order of things. Then I remember cheating, the difficulty of quantifying success, the shifting nature of what kind of success we want to reward, yada yada. Now I am more in the egalitarian camp, where I want everyone to have enough to be comfortable, but I still want there to be rewards for being successful. Some sort of egalitarian free for all, where everyone is a winner, but some win more than others.

I have this thought that keeps popping into my head. N people are on an island. On the island is a tree that makes enough X units of food, where X is greater than N, and each unit of food is enough to sustain one person. The N people work together to make sure that everyone gets at least 1 unit of food, and X - N units left over are split up by some fair enough competition.

One argument in favor of UBI I found particularly thought-provoking (paraphrasing): "UBI isn't anti-capitalist, UBI enables capitalism. By providing the basic requirements for living, it allows everyone to actually participate in the competition instead of keeping the poor too busy and too at-risk to attempt business ventures."

I'm still undecided on UBI, but that argument definitely made me think of things from some different angles.

“Basic requirements for living” though isn’t a pile of cash; it’s food, water, shelter, clothing and some form of transportation. I’ve yet to see a UBI scheme proposed that provides those things to people so they can spend their time pursuing other ventures.

Homer Simpson's brain would like to have a word with you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA&t=8s

I understand where you're coming from, but the idea that every person has the same basic requirements falls flat immediately.

Take just a small sample of different folks

Person A: Single 35yo female with high blood pressure

Person B: Married 62yo with dementia

Person C: 14yo with Type 1 diabetes

Person D: Married 36yo with a knee replacement

Person E: Single 21yo attending college

That's 5 people. Not a one of them is all that rare. They each require some form of the goods you've described, but the actual needs of each person vary A LOT.

The 21yo in college probably doesn't need a car. The guy with dementia probably can't have a car. The 36yo will need a form of transportation that accommodates the knee. The food requirements of the person with diabetes and the person with high blood pressure are specific and different. The meds those two people need are specific and different.

And that's just 5 people with relatively common situations. Once you actually start trying to get those "basic requirements for living" to work for the entire populace you quickly realize that "basic" is not actually basic, and usually the person best able to decide what they need is... drumroll... that person.

So instead of a condescending, authoritarian approach where the government strictly provides goods, UBI tries to give each person the ability to choose for themselves what they need, and how they'd like to prioritize it.

-----

Now, I still have a lot of problems with UBI, and I'm fairly convinced it won't work. But I do strongly believe that the "pile of cash" approach is the most egalitarian and efficient solution to meet the specific needs of the incredibly varied population if UBI is something we're going to try.

The government absolutely has to be on the supply side of that exchange. If the state gives person C $X for diabetes meds, and then does not also produce enough diabetes meds for one person exactly like person C and place it on the market for $X, then the person or firm that does produce the meds that person C uses can capture all the $X checks from all the diabetics by supplying one unit less than is required for all of them and making them play a game of musical chairs where the highest bidders sit first, and the one left without a seat at the end dies.

It works for every need--housing, meds, transport, etc. If the government does not add to the market supply, the incumbent suppliers can capture all the benefit.

So if the people need more housing, the government can't just give people money and tell them to rent. They can't just build houses and assign people to them. They have to build houses that are competitive on the open market, and also give people enough money to buy or rent them.

Even if some rich landlord snaps up all the state-built houses to rent out, the potential of capturing the benefit by raising rents is still mitigated by the increase in housing supply.

Helicopter-dropped piles of cash go hand in hand with ensuring a supply exists to spend that cash on.

But the dilemma is, that the privatization of social services in favor of UBI might increase the costs for those services (We’ve observed over the past that unregulated competition doesn’t lead to more competitive prices and rather monopolization and exploitation), up to the point that people who really need those services wouldn’t afford it even with UBI. That is why I think UBI should be done in adjunction to existing public social services (such as healthcare).

It's basic income, not basic job or basic requirements for living. If it was basic requirements for living, then you couldn't supplement what was given to make it better. You'd get a rack in a barracks and be fed crap because most people wouldn't be using the benefit. It wouldn't be universal.

I couldn't choose to use the money to get a place out in the country where the cost of living was low, and grow stuff in a garden. And I couldn't choose to get a place with a roommate that I trusted. I couldn't decide that I wanted to splurge and get something good for dinner, instead of red beans and rice.

No a pile of cash isn't food, water, clothing, or transportation. But it can buy all of them. Money doesn't buy happiness, but lack of money sure causes alot of misery.

It's kinda like how donating food and clothing is the worst form of charity you can supply. You pay retail rates to give stuff to a charity that they may not need, when if they had cash they could get what they need, possibly at wholesale rates.

Money doesn't buy happiness; money buys what is needed in order to allow happiness.

I agree. If you have an idea that realistically has a 10% chance of huge success, with UBI you just go ahead and try it. 10% chance that you succeed, and 90% chance that you will spend a few years doing something interesting, learn a lot, but ultimately won't achieve the imagined success. Which is not a bad outcome.

Without UBI... well, for people from rich families it is the same. But for everyone else, it means 90% chance that your kids will starve. Not fun.

This is especially clear when you look at the special case of health care. So many people would like to start a business but can’t leave their job because they need the health insurance that comes with it. This was especially bad before the ACA, when someone with a pre-existing condition would be completely screwed without being part of a group plan. Now they’re just mostly screwed because the plans are too expensive in general.

If there's enough food to sustain everyone, why is competition necessary? Is everyone just fighting over the chance to get fat, or would the winners have better nutrition and gain a permanent advantage, even if they won initially due to luck?

What makes the competition fair? The guy who's good at chess wants a chess competition. The ex-basketball player wants a jumping competition. Would a fair competition be one that plays to existing strengths, or one that everyone is equally likely to win? If it's the first, how do you decide whose merits are most worthy of being rewarded? If it's the second, where does merit come in?

Haven't you ever played a game, won, and felt good about winning? If not, try it sometime. You may find that winning is fun. It's even more fun when the other players like you enough to play with you again. What sucks is winning when the losers starve to death.

I like winning. It's fun without the loser eating less because I won.

You can play a game without adding an external reward to it.

There is a psychological part where doing things makes you happy, eventually you exhaust that and the amount of money is the only measure you have. That is what makes people greedy even if they have billions, they still want more. Just how we evolved.

If the goal is to keep score, you can do that directly. A score tally sounds a lot more satisfying than a hoard of rotting food.

When I was an undergrad, I too struggled with PDEs. If I hadn't taken it in undergrad and it became a requirement in grad school, it wouldn't have been any easier for me.

PhD students are just people who stayed in school longer and started doing research. Someone who is still taking classes like PDEs probably hasn't done much research yet.

Yeah, that's fair enough; I guess as an undergrad (and even now, though to a lesser extent), it's easy to have this romanticized idea of "PhDs are the best of the best of the best", especially in the coolest field ever (math); I guess it was easy for me to forget that these are still people.

Still, kind of unethical to ask some kid from Youtube to do your homework for you.

No, no, no. You have it _all_ wrong.

The coolest field ever is physics.

;)

Pssh, Is there any term in physics like "endofunctor" or "comonad"? If not then there's nothing further to discuss.

sbottom squark and wino aren't good enough for you?

Sbottom squark and wino sound like the goofy villains in a 90's cartoon. Endofunctor sounds like a disease, and is inherently much cooler as a result.

Speaking of terms, I've been pushing for replacing cocompact with mpact at the last conference I went to.

Turns out, the finest minds out there are already on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocompact_group_action

I dualed in math/physics undergrad, and I appreciate the banter. Relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/435/

Joke: How can you tell if someone is a physics major?

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

It's definitely unethical to pay someone to do your homework at any level of education. I was only commenting on your surprise that a PhD candidate would need help with their homework.

That was much milder than expected, but not particularly surprising. I made this point recently in an unrelated thread; having taught academic skills classes at a research university and talking to many of my friends who didn't go to research universities, the one big problem is that people don't know what research entails. They don't know how to conduct it, how to express it, and (a fundamentally problematic one) why it's done.

This is partially a problem with unethical students who just want their degree or title, but that's just one part of it. There's a problem with research education. That's why we have students who are just dumbfounded at the effort needed to write research papers worth reading and studying.

> That was much milder than expected,

Just keep scrolling and reading. There's cheating story after cheating story, maybe one of the other ones gets you more excited :-)

"I also didn't—and still don't—know if this woman had some sort of agreement with the school, and they were feeding her these students. For all I know they were in on it."

This section really made me realize the extent to which the mind can really rationalize anything. Something to guard against..

I should point out that this is not all that crazy when certain for profit schools are involved...

That doesn't serve as a rationalization for doing the cheating for pay, it doesn't excuse it; it could serve as a rationalization for not telling the school about it.

I think it's also not at all an implausible suspicion.

If this is widespread, it might explain the absolutely bonkers survey results that I see from time to time.

As an aside, it is sad that lurking just under the surface of so many academic stories is that strong undercurrent of scarcity.

what do you mean by "strong undercurrent of scarcity"?

I mean, a contributing factor to the author's actions was the sense that he wasn't getting paid much.

> "It's definitely the lowest pay available at the college, and our school is one of the lowest paid ones in the state."

Take this in context but I think this is partly due to the overinflation education requirements for employment.

... which is, in part, driven by the devaluation of credentials through this sort of thing.

is it that widespread?

online accredited phd program? Really. Unimaginable.

Why is that unimaginable? Seems very imaginable to me, depending on the field.

>I'm a communications professor at a small liberal arts college

Stop reading + its vice.

Pathetic^

Can we all agree that the author of that article wrote incredibly unsparingly, and did not presenT any form of an interesting narrative, for something that could have been a quite interesting topic/personal story. In fact, it felt like I was reading the work of someone who was not interested in writing whatsoever, which is funny considering that they are a professor at a liberal arts college.

No, we can't. I enjoyed reading it. It was light, honest and I liked the differences in pace.

It would be very funny indeed, except that the writing is done by a journalist.

Personally I abhor the trend of needing to create a complete personal story out of every experience. I am not interested in several paragraphs of where the author happens to be in life, how their morning went and all their personal relationships and thoughts where I am really interested in the topic they're supposed to be talking about.

I read to expand my views, not to feel artificially connected to whomever the author is.

I prefer the writing style in this piece over most articles on Vice, TBH.

I too hate long-form writing, I cannot bear to read it ever ever ever. If you need to flex your imagery chops on the reader that badly then write fiction, otherwise get to the damn point!

"It was an early Sunday morning when I've first met X while he was holding his hand full of bagels. Only later that day I would learn that it was actually for his dog as he is a big and naughty fan of them"

Articles that start like this make me puke. Go and write a book if you want to be a writer.

In fact, it felt like I was reading the work of someone who was not interested in writing whatsoever, which is funny considering that they are a professor at a liberal arts college.

Remember, you're not reading the words written by the original author... you're reading a (possibly heavily) edited version that reflects as much on the editor as the author. As the disclaimer at the bottom says The above has been edited and condensed for clarity.

FWIW, I've had a handful of articles published online (mainly at Infoworld) and I can attest that the editing process can, at times, be pretty severe in terms of how much the original text is altered.

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