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Comment by Glawen | Hacker News Reader

With COVID I think we have reached a new level of cheating, I feel that students do not feel anymore ashamed to do it because that is what they did during lockdown.

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

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I attended a well known university and I graduated before COVID.

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.

I went to university long before covid, and all the old exams + usually the (professors) solutions were available online, mostly on professors own websites, so the students would know what types of assignments were on exams and could prepare properly (there was still a very wide variety).

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.

> In school, using a library is cheating.

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.

I think they might have meant "using a library" in the context of computer classes, like sorting a list using a library

The original comment does make more sense in that context.

Turn in an assignment using libraries and see what happens. You will either get a bad grade or get summoned.

If the assignment doesn't permit you to use a certain library and you use it anyway, I don't see why you would expect it to be OK with the instructor.

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.

You're right, cheating has always been there and nobody cares about anything but the piece of paper.

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.

I think you and I have a different definition of "know". No, I don't expect the exact languages/platforms/tools they learned in Uni to be of significant practical utility. But I certainly expect a student's ability to impose self-discipline, to find/figure stuff for themselves, and to think critically and analytically to be well-developed after passing a university degree. Ideally they'd have learned some basic software engineering principles too, but honestly if they'd done a pure mathematics or science degree that'd be fine too.

University need to do something about it real quick, otherwise their diplomas will not be worth anything.

Too late.

Why too late? First thing is to ditch multiple choice exams, prefer essay type questions. That instantly makes it much harder to cheat. Ditch also homework unless they are essays, and finally makes exams physically, old school style, without computer.

Even as recently as the late 90s or early 2000s, I think most people would have concurred that a degree represented some amount of training and skills, earned with some amount of legitimacy, from most institutions.

I don't think that's true anymore.

I agree, and now I understand why it is difficult to find decent engineers from the new crop

Is it? Neither memorizing information, doing good work (beyond what will make the boss happy), nor integrity have been important at any of my workplaces.

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