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Comment by onetimeusename | Hacker News Reader

You can buy problem sets and answers online and I suspect that's one way people might cheat especially on homework. A lot of schools just reuse textbook problem sets or have a bank of questions they use for problem sets and exams, especially for larger classes, and people can buy all the answers online and find the ones they need. I think during the Covid pandemic when things moved online that really accelerated but previously it was a grey area since it could be just a form of studying.

It's sad because I think a lot of those classes are curved and people who don't cheat probably have a disadvantage. Despite putting more effort in and maybe even knowing more than other students, people who don't cheat could end up at the bottom of the curve but might have actually fared better under different conditions.

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Tests always get leaked somehow. The students that were hit by the curve were, like me in school, struggling honestly toward the middle. That method is probably not as good at knowledge acquisition as the various methods of cheating, but hopefully better at flexible problem solving. I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter; the curve probably did not affect them.

> Tests always get leaked somehow.

This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests cannot be leaked. Problem solved.

Or maybe don't do stupid tests for computer science.

This is a space where whiteboarding is a good idea, in fact, interactive whiteboarding with a whole class is a great way to teach and work through problems.

Any type of interactive test is hard to fake.

> This is the side effect of lazy teaching. Unique tests cannot be leaked. Problem solved.

I have never heard of lazy teachers ever getting any consequences, so why should they stop doing these things? You could make it a part of their job, but of course lazy principals wont do that either. There just aren't any incentives to run a school properly.

The fact is few teachers at the university level are interested in teaching the majority of classes that students take. Some professors may enjoy teaching the higher grad level coursework, but overall professors are generally terrible teachers.

Teachers go to learn how to teach, in the abstract sense, for 4 years, to go to teach high school kids. They learn the techniques and tools to effectively translate subjects and educate people.

Professors do not do this.

Fun example about lazy teaching: Our undergrad's HKN chapter kept a test bank of past exams in Physics, CS, etc. When I was studying for my Physics final I went back to past midterms and realized the professor recycled questions from previous years with some numbers changed up. I ended up filling my entire cheat sheet with the questions that weren't already on midterms but were in the test bank.

The result? The final contained a majority of questions from that cheat sheet. I still pose this scenario to a couple friends nowadays asking if this would be considered cheating, and the responses are actually a mix of "no, you're just taking what's publicly available" and "yes, you're manipulating the system to get where you are and taking spots from someone with academic integrity".

Just ask yourself. Did you learn the course well enough that you could have done as well without those questions saved?

As others have said, we go to college these days for a fastpass to middle class. If you haven’t needed the knowledge since, maybe you got what you needed out of the class and you worked the system in a legal way. Or maybe you paid a lot of money for that class and yet cheated yourself out of the knowledge you were paying to be taught. On some level it comes down to how you feel about it.

Since that class I've reached the conclusion that school is not the best way to learn concepts and materials but to learn how to work a bureaucratic organization to reach your own end goal (whether it's a job, ticket to the middle class, or simply knowledge), which in itself is a valuable skill. I think museums, seminars, and some NPR shows ended up being the best ways for me to really master the material I would've otherwise learned in school.

I think anyone who is naive enough to think that school is about anything but conformance deserves to fail. I did some courses before college and got a high grade and when I went there for my bachelor's degree, they didn't count that course towards my credit points, I had to do it again. In other words, my knowledge means jackshit at a educational institution. The only thing that matters is whether I can navigate the bureaucracy. Get that in your head.

>I think these unique bottom cases were playing a different game where the rules are made up and the scores don’t matter

you may be on to something with this one

> Tests always get leaked somehow.

Tangentially, it seems incredibly unfair that self-plagarism is a thing because "if you're not coming up with new material then you're not engaging with the course" and yet professors aren't even taking the incredibly simple step of changing a few numbers between repeats of an exam. It's basically self-plagarism from the professor, the professor isn't engaging with the course in the same way that a self-plagarizing student is not.

The dead-simple answer to students who are looking at test banks is to produce semi-novel material for each course, in the same fashion that students are expected to produce semi-novel material for each course. In both cases, yeah, it's kinda trite, there's only so many novel takes you can have on the best way to factor an integer or the implications of shakespeare on russian 20th century literature, but that's the system we've agreed upon.

It should cut both ways and the fact that professors suffer consequences and difficulty from not producing novel material is not really the student's problem. The solutions of forcing syllabus-level contracts-of-adhesion above and beyond the school academic policies is not a fair solution either.

I realize there's usually a "and whatever the syllabus says goes" clause but that's shitty, a lazy professor should not be able to exempt themselves from academic diligence by adding a "and it's OK for this professor to be lazy" clause in a contract of adhesion.

this was a huge deal back in the 40s-70s. They were called 'bibles'

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