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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

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)

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

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.

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