A billion-dollar industry helping students at Australian universities cheat
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Some minimal cheating is still possible, but otherwise, it's a lot better than the current online situation.
students would just remotely connect to their laptops at home
The point of requiring university-owned lab computers is that it'd be feasible to lock them down to prevent this sort of thing.
International students are cash cows, and college is a joke.
I don’t see college changing any time soon. I work with people that still think certain schools are “great schools” implying they produce knowledgeable graduates. Even seconds after an interview ends in flames because a graduate doesn’t know how to touch a computer.
My question to you. Given what I implied about pay and what I said about apathy of my bosses on this issue what makes you think you’d respond differently than me after 25 years in the system?
Dealing with football and basketball coaches whose players were failing, on the other hand, was absurd.
Don’t make me sit through an hour long academic integrity presentation if everyone can cheat and there are no consequences.
It would save students a lot of time to just admit they would purchase homework solutions. Give them passing grades, and then there’s less grading work for the TA to boot. Kabuki theater college is ridiculous.
I don’t give quizzes or graded assignments anymore. I just give a few tests because, well, as you said, Kabuki theater college is ridiculous.
The value to the student is as a key to further opportunities: academic, social, commercial. The value to the institution is almost entirely financial.
My proposal is that the degree-granting institutions be separated from educational institutions.
To get a degree, you submit a request for examination. That will be an intensive two or three week long process of written, practical, and interview assessments conducted by a team of people who attempt to satisfy themselves that you meet the requirements of the degree. The cost (and difficulty) will vary, depending on the institution you select. You pay for the assessment, regardless of the result. The institution's motivation is to ensure that its graduates actually meet the degree criteria. If it issues degrees for sub-par applicants, its degrees become worth less (and ultimately, worthless), and fewer people will bother to acquire one.
Educational institutions can then be separate. They can be exam-prep, cramming specialists with experience in getting students past a particular degree-granting institution's assessment, or they can be a genuine, broad-based, learning facility that students can attend to learn whatever they want, for however long they want, subject to continuing to pay for that tuition.
If you want to teach yourself off YouTube, go ahead, and then test for the degree. If you want to be a well-rounded, educated person, maybe spend some time at a learning facility.
For example, the value of a degree from MIT is not just the degree itself, but also quality and depth of the course work. We assume that if a student passed with A+ grades, they have a solid understanding. But we also know that, i.e., MIT teaches CS in a way that's very applicable to the CS industry, including many bits of non-standard knowledge that are not tested in the exam.
Imagine that MIT decides to become a degree-granting institution, and I obtain an "MIT CS Degree". How would an employer know whether I learned at a top-quality education provider and gained deep knowledge that covers more than the exam ever could -- or if I self-taught and scraped through the exam with the bare minimum knowledge.
I guess MIT could structure their exams so that they cover the subject deeply, but to cover 2 years worth of intense learning, surely they would need a very long (maybe impractically long) exam period?
Maybe I'm over-thinking this - I guess an MIT student would list on their CV "2 years studying at MIT".
Anyway, I think this is a fantastic idea and I'm very interested to see what other HN users think!
MIT could absolutely ask you any sort of question they would expect you to know, or ask you to do anything you’re expected to know how to do.
I envisage it being a multi-week process. I think for undergrad CS, maybe two weeks is enough? But it’s be up to the degree-granting institution how long they take and how it works. I can easily see it taking a variable amount of time too, depending on the applicant. A one-day multiple-choice vs a two-week hands-on assessment would mean the degrees would have quite different value.
then you can go to MIT to study, take tests and pass courses, but to get the actual degree you have to go elsewhere.
the school can provide transcripts of the classes you attended and any projects and tests you did.
if the company cares they can look at that, or maybe they are satisfied with a proof that you were enrolled at MIT for 4 years.
for a company that wants MIT graduates, the only risk would be that someone paid for being at MIT but not actually study there. i don't know, maybe that's possible if you live in boston already and pay only for one class per term, but again, they could find out through the transcript.
isn't that exactly what happens with the bar exam? you can study wherever you want, but in order to work as a lawyer you have to pass a state bar exam. later when people are interested in a lawyers credentials, they don't ask where you passed the exam, but where you studied.
When I was in university one of our projects was to submit a functional web application handling sales and loans. It was a group assignment with 3 other students, and I asked everyone to contribute on git, not for any technical reasons but because I wanted an audit trail.
One of the group members, a ‘full fee’ student, submitted something so obviously copied, including a bunch of comments in another language, and that looked nothing like our UI, that I googled a snippet and got back almost the entire thing.
I immediately sent the commit link and link to where it came from to both the class tutor and the lecturer because I’m not risking this having my name on it, and the response was nonexistent. The student still passed the class.
That’s the state of Australian universities as far as I’m concerned, having lived it for 6 years and never seen any other action taken against any instance of it.
I worked briefly at Chegg and the only viewpoint I heard expressed, from either management or regular employees, was that the company was enhancing education, not hurting it. If anyone acknowledged that students were using the platform to cheat, the fact was framed as an unfortunate edge case, not the norm. It definitely felt to me like a bit of a "drink-the-koolaid" company culture.
Doesn't matter how creative or new or engaging the homework assignments were. Over half the class pays someone, shares work, or finds someone to do it for them.
It certainly was not mine. Learning wasn't in my top 5 reasons to attend university.
Half the class would fail, and because of the difficulty, chances are, If you cheated, it was also wrong.
If the teacher caught you cheating, it was a big fat zero right away, and there would be a board of teachers to protect the decision.
And the University is free,even to re-enroll, you only need to pass the entrance exam, which was super easy for any course except for the doctor, law, or engineering. (CS is super easy to enter because they have more spots than students interested in it)
So I don't know; people will cheat rather than put in the hard work and learn.
Most people did it for getting a job.
If more than a handful of people in the class cheat, you're spending most of your time on this than grading.
And it's extremely stressful. You can be absolutely sure that 90% of the class is cheating, and there's still a margin of error for each individual case. And there are subtleties. What if this student was helping someone, and the other student copied their work without permission?
A lot of my friends here in Australia are uncomfortable with the potential effects of this on domestic education outcomes, and certainly allowing certain students to cheat is going to reduce the value of a degree to those who are genuinely trying to bootstrap their career.
¹ https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/trade-investme...
² https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/11/australias-37-6b-in...
Covid made this worse by pushing more people through bootcamps who did it for the tech salary rather than genuine interest, which just added to the noise.
The thing is that good developers could be anywhere. I've had great hires come through good unis with fantastic grades, as well as some who transitioned from a different industry and did a bootcamp.
Unis for a lot of industries are losing their relevance. Here in Australia they'll continue to be subsidised by internationals who get favourable visa conditions upon graduation that can be worked into a family immigration plan, but for the rest of us it's just a lot of unnecessary debt.
Again, what I'm saying is despite all this most candidates still don't have anything they can talk about because they're disinterested in IT and doing it for a tech salary. You don't sound like you fit that profile, but most candidates that we receive wouldn't be found on HN anyway.
1. Their "homework help" service is more of a "do my homework for me" service
2. They intentionally don't require any verification that questions submitted are actually from homework rather than from an exam
I am amazed at all the possibilities of cheating which were technically impossible when I studied. Look at it now, students can have answers on chegg. They can translate using DeepL. They can find teachers explaining any topic they like on YouTube. Seriously there is no excuse to fail anything now. University need to do something about it real quick, otherwise their diplomas will not be worth anything
Cheating in next to universal. You didn't just cheat with people you knew. You could go ask any member of the year above for assignment solutions and quiz/test answer keys. You could ask any member of the prior section for what was on the quiz. Student union ran a solutions bank for past tests.
And yeah, plenty of us had Chegg.
Why do we do this? Very few of us went to university to learn. We wanted an access pass to the upper middle class.
Same thing with the students I mentor for remote interviews. I offer to help them cheat on them by sitting on a second webcam and feeding them the answers. Only one has turned me down, and not for moral reasons, but because they fear getting caught.
If you offered to just give everyone an A for a given course, maybe 10% of students would attend.
I am not sure that businesses care all that much, because the same skills work in companies too and it is considered legitimate outside of the academic world to take the work of others. In school, using a library is cheating. At work, it is good work.
Exams were done in classrooms, with multiple people (usually TAs) watching, pen, paper, usually notes/book or even old exams were allowed (or at minimum 1 sheet of whatever you wanted on). Yeah sure, some minimal cheating was still possible, but not a lot.
No, that’s learning.
Similarly here someone thought that watching YouTube videos of lectures is cheating!
The fact that you can’t seem to tell what is cheating and what is education is… very telling.
If the assignment does permit you to use a certain library and you use it, I don't see why the instructor would complain.
If it's ambiguous, then I would possibly ask for clarification.
Personally I would expect an assignment using a language like Python, Java, or C++ (for example) to permit use of the standard library (including STL in the case of C++) unless otherwise specified, or unless it was clear that the assignment was to reimplement some function or algorithm which is already part of the standard library.
I think we greatly need to reduce the scope of what we test and require for a job. Maybe create smaller project based certifications that prove you know X.
I don't need a graduate to know that much in software, they already know very little of practical utility straight out of uni. Other professions are different and you need to know more fundamentals before doing something productive.
Too late.
I don't think that's true anymore.
I'd posit it's the latter; huge sums of money are at-risk for a fail grade not to mention time invested. People want to get on with their lives. Meanwhile institutions act as gatekeepers while jointly setting arbitrary standards and acting with the pretense that they're institutions of higher learning which simply isn't the case: they produce licensure for occupations. All of that pretense, the arbitrary expectations set makes it far more worthwhile to cheat. Why type up a paper on Shakespeare in a class deemed mandatory that a student has zero interest in or application for? And that can be stated about so many facets of college, the textbooks I've been expected to buy are formatted like a dumpster fire. The tuition I'm paying for what is essentially proctoring burns my ass. The fact I can get superior products across the board and actually have a gamut of options in instruction, methods, curriculum and resources - at significantly lower cost makes it a whole lot more justifiable both at the ethical and at the rational level to "cheat", I find it strange that someone might be upset that someone is swindling the swindler.
Having said that, I'd propose a bifurcation: actual higher learning institutions and vocational institutions. This weird amalgam that has developed, by my reckoning at least, results in the worst of both worlds.
Think of it this way:
If the institution implies that it is the arbiter of knowledge, or if society promotes it to be as such, and those who are empowered to act with the authority of such institutions lack the scruples to remedy the myriad issues, this is just the most seamless means to escape it.
Since then I strongly believe tests in the college are pointless. Doctors and such should have a strict licensing exam outside.
Did they require a thumbprint on the exam? Did you write all of the written assignments as well so that your handwriting would match?
More seriously, it seems like it would be hard to pull off in a small course where the instructors might recognize the students.
2. No one remembers students’ handwriting.
3. In our system professors only read lectures before large groups of students. They have “docents” (not sure what’s English word for that) who do smaller practical classes professors were taking the exams. Also, some of them passingly saw my face in the hall. Once or twice I got by mistake to my former professors - the company had to fix the issue (with money)
Yup. That test recognition and maybe recall - never really a fan.
Ultimately the universities are exchanging reputation for near term profits. When I hire in Melbourne for graduate software engineers the university they trained at is not a signal to me at all (despite all the advertising for say Melbourne University promoting how employees regard their distinguished degrees) and I rely purely on technical ability.
And unfortunately, in my experience as both a university tutor back in the day, and now as a hiring manager for some candidates - international students, even those who studied at local universities - are by far the least qualified in all areas.
The international student game is a billion dollar industry that lines the pockets of university staff, allows constant round-the-year renovations of university facilities, and allows the universities to present themselves as "diverse and inclusive" learning environments.
The problem will never be solved as long as money is involved.
0 of them, 0, could declare variables and get through hello world.
It really helps alleviate hints of imposter syndrome, honestly.
For what it's worth, I also skipped uni (this was 25 years ago) and went straight into the industry. I'm not as talented as many, particularly in things like algo design but much of the day to day programming in Australia is fairly straightforward.
This is of course only the administrative/management levels. The staff doing the actual teaching and grading are lumped with all the work “as part of the job”, and also the money doesn’t see the post-grad or research sides of the university.
However sometimes people wouldn’t even get to that point! We had a person interview with a masters in mechanical engineering over video chat and I swear he was getting coached via a chat app or something during the interview, because he kept glancing at his screen, especially when we’d ask questions.
Another person who had a computer science degree and was a team lead with over six years experience very confidently asserted that “interfaces make software more secure”. Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt we asked him to explain what he meant by that and his explanation was basically “they just are”.