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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

My wife stopped teaching remote CS classes mostly because the cheating was so completely out-of-hand that grading was pointless and miserable.

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.

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Because can you honestly say that you paid $80K to learn? That was your primary goal of spending all that money?

It certainly was not mine. Learning wasn't in my top 5 reasons to attend university.

It was certainly mine and learn a lot I did. I took ethics very strongly as did my university. My friend had to re-do a class final project because some of his team members cheated, even though he didn't himself. His team members were expelled from the university.

You have a point indeed. You don't pay that much money to fail. That puts countries with free university in another perspective

I graduated in a country with a free university, and the students still cheated, but most failed. The teachers were more strict with much more challenging assignments and tests, plus a lot of teachers would allow open books, but the difficulty of the exams was out of this world.

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.

I agree people will always cheat, but the difference is that the university is not afraid to grade accordingly, which is not the case in paid university (maybe the top one would something about it, I don't know)

I attended a cheap university (it's free if you're free enough) and I did it just in case I wanted to work somewhere where they required it. I managed to work a software develope job instead of attending lessons and find a way to pass exams (cramming, cheating, etc). Projects were the best part of the course as they resembled real work and not studying crap I mostly didn't care about.

Most people did it for getting a job.

In my experience, the free university was much harder than the expensive university.

Why wasn't your wife getting these people thrown out of the classes?

She did, but it takes at minimum an hour to write up and defend an academic integrity violation. And that's with no back-and-forth .

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?

At a lot of schools, the administration basically tells the professors to look the other way, because the alternative is giving up a lot of tuition income.

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