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My partner recently finished her PhD and has started working as a medical writer. During her academic career, it was beat into her head don’t plagiarize, everything must be yours.

In her first review after a few weeks on the job, her manager says that she takes too long to do her work; they just need her to take what the client says verbatim, fact check it, and then slap it in a document. She was treating her work like an academic assignment and putting in the effort to craft something unique, when they really just need a fact checking typist.

8 years in higher ed, published study on cancer drugs, thousands of mice died, millions of dollars spent on the lab... all so she can transcribe some text and then validate it against the studies.

Academia is the worst job training program ever.

Why would she take a job as a glorified typist after completing a Phd? Why is the company hiring a Phd to be a glorified typist?

Academia was never meant to be a jobs training program. The fact that many students treat it as such is not really the fault of the institutions.

Unfortunately each faculty member produces about 30 PhD students in their career (one per year). The number of faculty positions has been close to flat since the 1970's. So one in 30 PhD's will get to be faculty member. She probably took the job because she wants/needs a job and the company likes to have the status of PhDs doing the work.

Sure, so what? Anyone smart and dedicated enough to complete a Phd is smart enough to realize this going in. Surely the vast majority of people getting Phds don't expect to ever become academics and have some other plan.

> Anyone smart and dedicated enough to complete a Phd is smart enough to realize this going in.

No, this isn't true at all. People don't complete PhD's because they looked at their options and thought that one was the best. They do it because other people told them they should, and they just never thought about it.

Society treats university as a jobs training program. Observationally it seems like the universities (in Asia in particular, and the US to a lesser degree) encourage you to treat your diploma like a golden ticket to a good job.

> Academia is the worst job training program ever.

Pet peeve of mine. Academia is not a training program for jobs. The role of academia is not to produce business-perfect-candidates.

If business wants trained workers, they should train them. Cutting costs by not training them, then blaming universities for not producing trained workers is disingenuous at best.

Yes... and no. Yes, what you say is true - that isn't the point of an academic degree.

But no, because the way students (and parents) think about it is "go to college so you can get a good job". And many, many employers require a degree or they won't look at the candidate. In the real world, academia is functioning as a job training program.

Or at least as a gateway to the good jobs. But if it's going to be a gateway, but not do any training... that's pretty inefficient.

>> People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do.

As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system.

Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.

The idea that an honor code is enough is belied by the fact that software like this catches cheaters, no?

I mean, we're obviously upset about false positives, and we should be. But I'm presuming that some people are caught who were cheating, and without the software they would have cheated and not been caught.

We can suggest that with an honor code in place, maybe some of those cheating students would have not cheated, because... I mean, if they were willing to cheat with software in place, I'm not sure why would have been deterred by an honor code.

I think in about 98-99% of cases, people who claim an honor code prevents cheating are deluding themselves. Yeah, if you don't have any way of catching cheaters, then you can pretend you have a 0% cheating rate. But it's pretend.

P.S. I'm not speaking for my employer at all.

It's not certain that the software catches cheaters. It could be security theater. Even the false positives could just be to make people nervous.

Where would they get reliable training data?

There's a pile of money to be spent on this stuff, and virtually zero accountability. What's that a recipe for?

I have taught at multiple honor-code institutions (and still do). It does not prevent cheating. However, it shifts focus: I can go about my teaching life starting from an assumption that students are not cheaters—and I'm personally convinced that most aren't.

The flipside is that when you do catch a cheating case, you completely throw the book at them. It's legitimately easier to cheat under an honor system, if that's what you're wanting to do... so my assumption is that if we catch you at it, it's likely part of a pattern, and if we catch you multiple times the pattern is irreformable. It is not uncommon at honor-code institutions to expel students on the second offence (sometimes even on the first).

I do think that cheating is less prevalent at my institution (and my previous institution) than it is in the larger university population.

I perhaps wasn't clear enough but I meant solely when it comes to these type of anti-cheat systems being used. Obviously it would be different for in-person vs remote/take home.

I don't see why we should allow for the possibility that the ratio of cheaters would stay the same with or without the surveillance. That could only be true if the ratio of potential cheaters were so low that the threat of detection introduced by the spyware can't reduce the ratio further.

We may hate the software on ethical grounds, or because it degrades the exam-experience on many levels, or because its use can be considered abusive, but obviously it has an effect in the intended direction.

I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.

Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.

> I had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.

We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book in person exams, I'm specifically talking about take home exams.

> Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.

Really easy to do so in a take home exam.

If someone can figure out how to cheat on an exam where each answer depends on the previous, and the original seed is unique to each student, wouldn't it show a pretty thorough mastery of the subject matter?

I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.

Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....

The problem is COVID. You can’t have a large gathering. So everyone is doing their exam at home.

Please tell me how you would structure such an exam without a proctoring system as described.

It depends on the subject. I studied computer science and econ.

Computer science: Solve a complex problem in code. Include a git history. Be ready to defend your program design if I get suspicious.

Econ: Long answer question: Pick 5 concepts that we learned about that you think are most important. Explain them as you would to a ten year old.

One option, if you have a reasonably low student-to-instructor ratio: make it an oral 1-1 exam for each student. A video call with the instructor and the student; you ask questions, they answer. If you have 20-ish students, it will eat up half a work-week or so, which is more work than grading 20 exam papers, but not _that_ much more.

Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...

How do you propose that this should work e.g. in proof-based maths courses? You can't just tweak a theorem to prove by the value of some "unique seed", the theorem might become wrong.

It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.

You do what my teachers do and have unique problem generation software.

what? how does that work?

You give it a few hundred problem classes, and constraints for possible answers, and it will randomize the class of problems and generate a unique problem as well as calculate the answer. Then you submit the answer as well as your work and it gets corrected.

For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and then prove the theorem.

Do you have any example of any software that can generate problems for actual proof-based courses (e.g. abstract algebra)? I'm having a really hard time imagining this, we can't even fully automate theorem proving - how are we supposed to automate theorem generation? And this ignores the fact that you also need to make sure that all the proofs are "of the same difficulty" in terms of fairness.

Ah, no, the theorems would have to be manually selected. But given a high enough number and an automatically generated context it makes cheating much harder.

> had my fair share of uncheatable open book exams, calculators allowed back in college. One I had on Calculus (or was it Linear Algebra?) was way harder than a comparable closed book exam. You really needed to know the subject to pass vs just memorizing a couple of formulas and plugging them in the right place.

You can always just pay someone to do it for you.

> One of the issues is also just academia being so hyper-focused on thinking everyone is there to become an academic which is not the case for the vast majority of people

I'm not sure I follow why this is bad. I think academic rigor and being a decent scholar, as well as being able to parse and produce research are good things (and in my mind, those are the corner stones of being an academic). Did misunderstand you?

FWIW, in germany (and likely other european countries) we have a two tier system for higher education, consisting of universities and "applied universities", with the latter focusing on applied skills and the former focusing on research, which in think is sensible.

I don't think the problem is that academic rigor isn't good. I also should have stated I was talking more about US universities in this particular case.

The problem I see is that what you talk about as academic rigor isn't what is taught and evaluated in many of the programs and classes that I've seen or been a part of. A lot of these exams and assessments don't particularly evaluate you on your ability to research and understand knowledge. If I know for example that my physics professor uses a bank of questions then it is much more incentivized for me to memorize that bank of questions vs. understanding the content and working the problems myself. Whereas in say a Discrete Math or Algorithm based class, the final exam/grade is based on a proof you have to write yourself, that encourages (or rather at times forces) you to learn and research like you said.

I also think the issue, and this may just be me looking at from my own experience, a lot of people don't want to be scholars, as you put it. They went to a University based on the unfortunate expectation for some jobs that say you need that diploma as your entry ticket.

in germany (and likely other european countries) we have a two tier system for higher education, consisting of universities and "applied universities", with the latter focusing on applied skills and the former focusing on research

While it isn't codified, we effectively have this in the US as well.

Most of the "brand name" universities, plus the flagship state universities, conduct research and grant various doctoral degrees.

Then we have the middle-tier colleges (state and private) that grant masters (often only professional degrees like nursing, MBAs, etc).

And thousands of Baccalaureate-only and 2-year community colleges.

Also, in the US, "university" generally indicates a post-graduate degree granting institution. And "college" usually refers to a 2-year and Baccalaureate-only school. But, also not codified and there are notable exceptions (ex: The College of William & Mary is a top-notch full university who's name pre-dates the convention).

In the US, "college" means narrow subject matter, and "university" means a wide variety of colleges all together on one campus.

For example, there may be a "College of Engineering" and a "College of Arts and Science" that are part of one university.

It's possible to have a stand-alone college that isn't in a university. A good example is Berklee College of Music, which is narrowly focused on music.

I’ve never seen “narrow focus” as a definition for college. I’ve always seen it used as US News uses it.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018...

But, you are correct that subject schools within a larger uni are often called College of Such and Such.