These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.
It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is extinguished a little.
Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
Give them more interesting things to do and they will cooperate in more productive ways too!
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I also disagree that you have to learn everything for yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to the ability to rely on others.
I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning with other people before going on to spend time on things.
I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second of the day.
Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each other.
This is laughably naive. Most of the cheaters I dealt with in my courses were masters students who had zero interest in learning. They were paying for the M.S. on their resume for job prospects or for visa reasons.
You’re right that some students will cheat on rote stuff because they just get bored. Where you’re wrong is thinking that’s the majority of the issue. Huge chunks of students are in college for entirely the wrong reasons.
Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don’t take a math class to simply say “I’ll just skip the classes and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn as little as possible.” Why even take the class then?
In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
I suspect you aren't trying to argue about this situation, though.
I think you're asking about comparing the performance of the student who does know the material well, and the student who needs assistance with it. The answer is not to forbid assistance, it's to design tests where assistance becomes obvious.
Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true.
The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan.
Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them.
My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit."
At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
Companies would fail if everyone worked in isolation.
I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt).
Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
Also, "cheating" may be viewed as "not re-inventing the wheel" (someone already made the proof for this theorem, just copy paste it from your smartphone), "not doing the same work twice" (your neigboor just solved the equation, why re-solve it ? ), and "using the fastest, most reliable solution" (your neigboor is better than you in Maths, just take his answers). This is similar to taking a library (ex : deep-equal) or framework (nextjs) or service (carrds, netlify) instead of doing it yourselves.
I agree that, the issue is mostly not the student but the school (and society):
1. Does the student really need to remember historical dates, or Maths equations, when nowadays he can just google them in 10sec ? (Aka : unnecessary use of memory)
2. Does the student really need to understand the notion by himselves ? For example, I don't know how to use quaternion myself, buy I know how to work with, in Unity. I also don't care about Pythagore theorem proof, I know it works, that's all I need (all Maths lover will condemn me).
The thing is that we believe that school focus on teaching. They don't. They are called schools, but behave a lot more like evaluation (grading) centers. And mostly evaluate (grade) memorization and servitude btw, not actual understanding.
To be clear, evaluation (grading) is what you in job interview and for pilot, to make sure he knows how to fly the plane.
Is evaluation a part of learning ? It is. But not the same type of evaluation.
"I am able to make a small game like ping pong from scratch ?" - evaluate yourselves, test your skills. If you have success, it means learning phase is completed.
When evaluation is part of learning: - You do it for yourselves, not for someone or something else (employer, school, teacher, parents, certification organism). That is called intresic motivation (vs extrinsic). - There may be or not be grading, but only you care about grading.
The employer doesn't care about how you grade to the tests he send to you, what he care about is that you've got the skills he need. And grading is just a means for that.
Everything the school does should be a means for making someone a good person for the society, a happy person, a person that can contribute to the society (a phrasing more large than employable).
What I have seen in my scolarity, is students and teacher focused on "passing exams", "getting good grades". But completly forgetting exams and grading "means to".
In a pure teaching environnement, grades and exams only purpose is to give a learning status indication to the student.
In school (in France national education), they also serve to give you right/priority on school entrances. And serve as social status indicator (the dumbs and the smarts).
Cheating in a pure learning environnement make no sense. If students cheat, it means your environnment contains more than just learning.
When you create extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick), it override intrinsic motivation. And you end up with student doing the homework ONLY if it is graded (carrot) or if not doing it is punishable (stick). And not because it give them a learning opportunity.
Schools (I am still referring to France national education) believe that humans dislike learning. This is false. Babies loves learning. School is teaching us that learning should be hard and painful.
If you do teaching, you don't need a carrot or a stick, because authentic learning is fun by itselves !
(I don't want to make this text longer, but this make me question if schools are just doing big mistakes, or if they have been designed in a way that favour something else than learning (eq : have there been malicious intention ?)).
I also agree with you that in an ideal world we would not need the gatekeeper role and tests would only help the students on how far along their learning journey they are. However, reality means we do need gatekeeping, we need to test that a student has sufficient knowledge to perform a certain task, because literally lives can depend on it, e.g. we would not let people drive on the roads without an exam or let a doctor operate someone without proven knowledge that they can do it.
Because of the gatekeeping requirements and the interests of students they will optimize for outcomes, that might mean they learn some subjects in depth, but it will also mean they learn some subjects with the bare minimum to pass (and that is fine).
Unfortunately the students who optimize for outcomes generally outweigh the students who want to learn (at least vocally). I think everyone who taught will be able to tell you that students are incredibly conservative towards changes, even if they improve their learning outcomes (give us recipe instructions, not try to get us to figure out things for ourselves), because it might mean more work.
And I agree that ideally (and practically) we should need much less carrot and stick, but saying we will never need them is quite unrealistic IMO.