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Comment by kilroy_jones | Hacker News Reader

At what point do we stop wasting time and energy trying to build better tools to catch cheaters and start focusing on building a better system of education and assessment?

If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world, what does that say about the validity of the tests? Even futher, what does that say about the world we live in?

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> If a kid can cheat, pass, get a degree and go out and not fail in the real world

I've known many cheaters (they tend to brag about it). The ones that do good work don't need to cheat, and the cheaters don't stop cheating once they graduate.

Who'd you rather work for / hire / trust with your money:

1. a cheater

2. not a cheater

In some countries it's pretty normal and expected for students to cheat in school, but after they find a job where they are treated with trust and respect and given real-world problems to solve, absolute majority will stop playing tricks.

If they have to cheat to solve the toy academic problems, how are they going to solve real problems?

They become managers and hire other people to solve the problem.

Well, toy academic problems often have no relevance to real problems.

Yeah, they're a lot simpler.

Model planes are a lot simpler than real ones, often to the point where they are completely different to work with.

Model airplanes have Center of Gravity, Center of Pressure, stability, lift, drag, weight and thrust - just like real ones.

If you have to cheat to design model airplanes, you have no business designing real ones.

It is simple - college education there is viewed (and I am not sure it is undeserved) as just part of the process to get papers to be employable. I do not know first-hand how useful knowledge received at US colleges is, but I certainly believe it is more of a theatrical show in some other countries with elements of burning in a "good citizen firmware" into students' heads.

I should've given more context. Based on my anecdata in post-Soviet world, ~50% of graduates choose a job completely unrelated to their degree (e.g. a chemist becomes web designer, a linguist becomes QA engineer, and economist becomes barista). They probably realize this during first 1-2 years in college, but they carry along because it's just easier this way, they made friends with classmates, and education is free or cheap.

The point is, they don't care at all about the academic problems because it's (a) not interesting to them and (b) usually professors don't motivate students with real-life examples. E.g. while microeconomics is very much relevant for everyone, the way it was taught to us, it felt insanely boring and inapplicable to real problems.

> In some countries This is very vague. I question the validity of this argument.

Even if the first part were true - this part may not be...

> ...absolute majority will stop playing tricks.

I can only vouch for post-Soviet states, but it's supposedly also widespread in India and China (and who knows where else). I think we inherited it from Soviet era when hard work and imitation of hard work would be compensated the same.

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