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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people here are missing the root cause of why students cheat.

College for the longest time has not had anything to do with learning for the VAST majority of students. You go to college because you have to have a degree to get a job. And you have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job. College is not about actually learning anything - it's a purely monetary investment, where you go into debt totaling up to hundreds of thousands of dollars because you know that it will net you more money in the future. Not cheating is completely risking any hope of financial independence you can ever have for your entire life.

Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat? You take an extremely minimal risk (most profs don't have any clue, or do not care about cheating at all) to avoid a much greater risk (you not getting good grades and potentially never getting any return on your lifelong 6 figure deep debt).

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We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time.

I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand how they relate to the real world. Please give me those advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-world experience.

https://openlearning.mit.edu/courses-programs/mitx-courses

There's good stuff there!

Thanks. I know that all the raw material is available to me, but it's just not the same. It's different when you can completely focus on studying, be part of a community with a bit of peer pressure, and have a social circle that goes through the same experience. You don't get the this from online courses, reading books, or MOOCs.

I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the middle of my career just to study.

On the other hand, if you study now, you can be surprised by how much the material is immediately applicable to your day-to-day work.

Yeah, I had a blast attending “lockdown university” during the deepest part of covid in 2020. Grades only for fun points and just taking classes and doing assignments that I thought would be beneficial.

Us students would generally love to learn too. The problem I often encountered was engineering professors did research first and foremost with teaching a second priority. It often felt like if the teacher isn’t putting in the work why should we? Conversely, my business teachers cared far more for us students and I believe people put far more effort in.

Exactly this. I've noticed in my classes there's less cheating when people respect the professor. It's honestly not hard to get that level of respect from your students; just clearly put in effort for your classes.

Far too many have just been screwed over time and time again from professors who reuse old (usually outdated) course content and whose lectures don't actually add anything to the textbook or slides.

Anecdote time: I took a class where a module taught Python 2.7 in Fall 2021, and I know it was taught again in Spring '22. My professor literally read the slide content to us in lectures, that was it. I found out that a professor wrote all the course content in 2017 and it's just been passed around by all the professors who got assigned to teach that class. The same assignments have been used, and apparently they've been published to every "student assistance" platform around.

As sad as it is, Python 2.7 is still relevant :P

It's not a waste of time, only caring about grades and getting a job is the most efficient use of time. I would've loved to learn too, but when passing classes impact the rest of your life, cheating and taking easier classes to maximize GPA are the right choices.

The "right" choices? For who? It seems like engineering culture has suddenly become rife with this exploitative mindset with zero regard for honor.

When you're faced with a public scandal at your hands as CEO after you've cheated your way up the ladder, are you going to admit fault and take a loss for the sake of society or are you going to make "the right choice" for the business and double down on your deception?

> I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn.

You love the idea of doing something you’re not doing now. I see further down in another comment, you dismissed the idea of learning from free online resources.

If you were in your 30s and in school, you’d love to be able to go off in the and work with your hands — or something else to distract yourself.

I didn't dismiss the idea of learning from online resources. I constantly work through online courses/lectures and books. I only noted that the experience is inferior to going to college where you can completely focus on learning with a group of peers, and where you are held accountable.

I'd love to have the "college experience" again now, but this time with a focus on learning instead of a focus on getting good grades. Focusing on good grades (over learning) is the rational choice as a young student and I don't regret doing so, but now my goals are different.

Seems a bit cynical of a take. Cheating prevents you from learning, otherwise you wouldn't need to. Also, college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job. It only offers a subset of knowledge that is needed to be good at any given job. Cheating is basically showing up to class and avoiding the whole point of being there. Why would you show up to a training, to then ignore the training part.

I think it's a combination of culture and every person's upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either from parents or society, but they don't really want to be there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the motions and will take the path of least resistance which is cheating.

> Why would you show up to a training, to then ignore the training part.

You said it yourself.

> college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job.

The goal isn't to be well prepared for a job. The goal is to get the job. For most students, including myself while I was there, university is a massive signalling exercise. I just cared about the magic combo that would lead to a good paying job.

I’d also like to add that most generic white collar jobs require a bachelor’s degree. Adding the requirement cuts down on the number of applicants, so hiring managers have few qualms with doing this.

If someone went to college with the belief that only the degree at the end mattered and that they weren't going to learn anything along the way, I can see how they might convince themselves that cheating is a low-risk shortcut toward that end goal. I do not subscribe to that belief and have learned quite a bit by trying to absorb the lessons earnestly, as opposed to taking shortcuts.

I have also had the experience where a professor interviewed me and one other student because our homework appear too similar. That experience reinforced my impression that cheating is a risky venture and I want none of it. (Also, leaving printouts of your code around is extremely high risk if helping someone to cheat is roughly as bad as cheating at your university).

Students will also have an opinion on what classes they think are important, and what classes they are only taking because they are required.

The exams were open book, open note and they had a week to complete them.

When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they still cheated. And then plagiarized.

He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures, skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.

Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't do reading, classwork, or study.

This is not even remotely close to behavior of people participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.

> Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat?

In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught cheating, you're out.

Do they still? I had numerous friends caught cheating in the most blatant of ways (i.e. they forget to change the name of the assignment of the student they copied). Less than half even got a zero on the assignment. Plenty got a perfect grade and then were told to not do it again.

Going to the grocer has for a long time been about the food, not the pleasure of the shopping experience. Given this, why wouldn't you steal?

A better example would be: If your goal is to get food, are you really going to complain when one person offers to do everyone's shopping for them? Keep in mind, you'll lose out on the valuable lessons that grocery shopping has to teach!

Which will absolutely suck later in life, when you’ll have to go grocery shopping by yourself for the first time.

If your goal is food. Why aren't you on farm every day to learn how it works? Maybe a few decades there making it all by your hands manually would teach?

risk of getting caught and arrested.

  have to have a good GPA on that degree to get a job.

Maybe at some big name co, but you will probably learn more at some little self funded place that pays a little less and can't attract the top tier graduates.

After a couple years, get a job at a small startup where you and 5 other people write the entire product. From there you will be a far stronger candidate just about anywhere with a real engineering culture.

My GPA was fairly reasonable, but I worked through college, so I got a position at a large name brand company. Drove me nuts after having worked at places where I had written more code in a single year than most of the lifer's had written in their entire career. That is when I went the startup route, and basically did small companies for ~20 years until wife/kids/stability drove me into the arms of a mid sized company where I only work ~40h/week. Now I write code on the weekends to keep my mind active.

I graduated with a poor GPA. The only place that gave me an offer did so because they forgot to ask me for my GPA. I got dozens of rejections purely for my GPA. Not all of them were from large employers.

[Edit]

To state something more on topic, I never once even considered cheating in school. I don't think it ever entered my mind, even when I was in danger of flunking out.

I haven't read through all the other comments here, but attending class and learning the content aren't mutually exclusive.

I sympathize with the reason why students cheat, but I can't see that those reasons are the same as what you say. You don't need to attend classes to learn the content nor display mastery - I appreciate a good syllabus for that reason where you know what is expected and can learn on your own time. I liked the approach the author of the article took for that reason. But none of this requires cheating.

I can see why this would lead students to cheat, but this looks to me like a strawman in addition to victim blaming (on part of the prof).

You wouldn't cheat because once you are out in the real world supposedly applying the knowledge that you learned in college it is going to be really obvious to your boss and coworkers that you don't know what you are doing.

Everybody expects the fresh college grads to be fairly green, but you can really tell when someone has no clue about even the basic principals of their job, the one they supposedly have a degree in.

So the danger is having a good GPA but then washing out in job interviews with real companies. "Wow, a 4.0 in CS from CMU! So why do you seem to be completely mystified by Fizzbuzz?"

You’d think cheaters would consider the issues they’ll experience down the line, but the fact that FizzBuzz even exists and works at all proves they don’t.

Most cheaters don't, work doesn't allow you to procrastinate plus it motivates you with money. Also there is no arbitrary rules like solve this without help from your friends or the internet in the real world.

I feel most cheaters get by in the industry pretty well, cause school is way harder than he average job. The reason they make it at work is that the deadline for work is everyday while you can procrastinate at school for 3 months straight plus you aren't getting paid at school.

Given your cynical take, it’s in the school interest to prevent cheating; if everyone cheats and the word gets around, nobody will take that school seriously anymore.

I'm not sure how it is for other industries, but for computer sciences nobody takes schools seriously anymore.

Your knowledge and skill level is the most important thing they will evaluate you for, for the three SW jobs that I've gotten nobody asked me for my college degree let alone my grades, including a FAANG-type company.

Google asked for my full transcript even after I had been working at another FAANG for 2 years.

Looking back, I wish I'd cheated. College was fun for partying and living alone and having time to study, but coursework was a joke. I remember skipping my CS 101 class, coming in for the midterm, and finding it insane that they were still trying to get through pointers.

Glad that I at least dropped out when it stopped being fun. Highly recommend dropping out after ~2-3 years if you can get away with it.

You pay for school, do whatever you want with it.

And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had.

None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.

Stopped giving <a shit> about undergrad degrees? No signal to be had?! Somehow I'm not getting that read from the tech industry... what I am getting is a willingness to hire non-traditional candidates. That does not translate to not giving a shit.

If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.

I dunno about the 90s, but it definitely feels to me like the industry largely stopped giving a shit about undergrad degrees at some point

Yeah, some bootcamps will hesitate to even admit you without a college degree. And I got offered to skip a technical interview just because I had a fancy degree on my resume that has nothing to do with cs.

Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small percentage gets through and sticks with some small percentage of students.

My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long time to settle into an adult brain.

Happy to. I’ve done well into the hundreds of interviews at FAANG or whatever the acronym du jour is. We didn’t even look at resumes except to see if they were obviously self-disqualifying. Google SteveY’s rants on the subject if you want more corroboration. Also it’s obvious to anyone that isn’t stupid that “daddy bought me into Stanford” doesn’t indicate an ability to do top tier engineering work.

Google isn't turning up anything - mind linking SteveY?

Stevey is his handle. He’s notable enough to have a Wikipedia page[1]. I don’t know if that page will directly get you to his posts on interviewing, but with some cleverness that should be enough to go on.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge

Probably Steve Yegge?

Probably one of these blog posts:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...

Is it possible there was a resume filtering stage before you saw them?

When I was interviewing at Google virtually all the candidates were sourced or referrals, not selected from submitted CVs. I never even looked at the education section. There are was too many universities or there to know if they're meant to be good or bad and education never told you anything useful anyway.

Back then recruiting did a very basic resume screen and then they’d go to an SDE or SDM’s inbox for final screening. I imagine that’s no longer the case.

The Steve Yegge rants were well known... over a decade ago. Does he continue to speak for Google management perspectives today?

Since we're converting purely anecdotal data into blanket generalizations, I am happy to provide a counter point. Graduated in 2004, and most of the companies that I looked into listed a bachelors degree in computer science for entry level software engineering positions.

In several interviews we even went over some of the actual subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering undergrad work during some whiteboarding.

This is false, 99% of engineers at top software companies have a degree and a lot have masters or Phds (especially those doing more specialized work)

People were cheating because they were expecting everyone else to cheat.

In general, cheating isn’t common in college.

This was simple game theory during the pandemic.

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