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Comment by gwerbret | Hacker News Reader

> I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.

...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.

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Let’s be real though, the honest students are getting far more out of this than the ones cheating. I promise you the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were. It’s still ultimately all about who you know, and those kids likely have a cushy job awaiting them back home. The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers.

Foreign students are absolutely a grift at US universities, though I suspect COVID may have ended that one. A great many will come to the US hoping to land a job but most will go home with a name-brand degree and a stake in the moderately successful family business.

> the second your ass enters the work world

Yes, but the name of your school and your GPA does tend to affect the manner of your posterior's entry.

It does affect your chances of getting into grad school or being hired as a TA.

I specifically try to hire TAs who struggled in my classes and demonstrated that they increased their competency through the semester. A student who got a C on the first exam but an A on the final and a B+ average makes a much better TA than one who got As on every assignment. They are able to empathize with the kinds of students who come to see them during office hours.

Sure, but thats like saying "If I work for a company and get a poor performance rating, I won't get promoted". Just go do something else.

Even if you want to learn, its not like academia is the gatekeeper to learning.

So a professor should make that decision on behalf of an honest student while giving the cheaters a better shot? Give me a break.

Also, learning isn’t always the end goal. Maybe you want to be a professor and teach, or maybe you want to do academic research.

> The honest students get the knowledge and connections with their peers.

A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults.

Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.

> the second your ass enters the work world nobody will give a shit what percentile of your class you graduated in or what your SAT/GMAT/LSAT/MCAT scores were.

I guarantee you they do. I guarantee you I know people with PhDs in neuroscience who've been asked their SAT scores.

I guarantee you that Boeing or some other major defense contractor (it's hard to keep track with how many were on campus) has made it well known at my school that if you graduate with a 3.7, you automatically get a job.

I guarantee you that when a school like mine does grade deflation to the point where the average engineer gets a 2.7, the people who cheat make it such that the people who didn't cheat struggle to find a job. Then when they do find a job their success is delayed substantially.

I guarantee you that people who already study their ass off for tests also cheat so that they guarantee that A. They also guarantee what would have been an A ends up as a B. There are only so many spots at top universities, guess who those spots go to.

Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace. Guess how hard it is for the smart ones who didn't cheat to find a good job.

Cheating does a lot more damage than you give it credit for.

(I've also met a lot of brilliant people that didn't cheat but there are far more smart people who do than don't)

“...enters the workforce...”

All the things you mentioned are before entering the workforce.

If that was the case, it would be just that much more important than the effects while in the workforce. In actuality, a lot of these things can affect you when you already have a job and are looking for another. It also turns out that you can go to grad school while being in the workforce.

All of this is kinda anectodal.

Working on a PhD in Neuroscience or for Boeing is not the end goal (in fact you should probably avoid Boeing if you have a degree in Aerospace)

There is a huge demand for tech workers, its all over the published media. As long as you get that degree, and can pass the entrance interview (for which a degree is far from a requirement), you can get a job.

Also

>Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace.

Literally nothing. Entrance interviews are a thing, and there is enough "padding" to absorb the lack of skill, especially in jobs with goverment contracting involved, where the company places someone on the project just to charge the goverment a certain rate for them, even if they don't do anything.

Worse, the contractor probably gets a benefit in the contracting process for having X new graduates from Y tier of university on the project.

Some of these cycles are self-perpetuating. If cheaters make it high enough in the corporate world the "you don't need to know that skill anyway" mentality can sink in (after all they were successful) and then nothing really matters except the school that someone came from.

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