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Comment by data_maan | Hacker News Reader

I get this drift!

And I think a bit of cheating is healthy.

The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1]

Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential.

For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself!

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/acad.html

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Cheating solves a problem for the cheater, but has the side-effect of entrenching the selection criteria for everyone who comes after. If a genuinely good student, who the professors recognize as good, cannot pass a particular criterion, this motivates the professors to eliminate, or at least discount, the criterion. If the student does pass, then the professors see no harm in continuing to use the criterion for all future students at its current grade weighting.

In addition to this, for those students who will not cheat, they are then required to spend their effort developing a skill which they may never use again, at the expense of developing skills they will use again. And also at the expense of their placement in the class. Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?

I think cheating is unhealthy for the system.

Too late for the edit window, so I'll reply to add:

If a person gets in the habit of cheating because they don't think the thing they are cheating on is important, then they have to develop the skill of always knowing what is important, and what isn't, or they risk cheating on something with serious consequences. Patrascu died at the age of 29 from brain cancer. I wonder if he ignored any symptoms because he didn't think they were consequential.

You make it sound as if Patrascu was a serial cheater, which wasn't the case.

If you look long enough only you will come across stories of how his disease went: there weren't any symptoms.

Such diseases are dangerous things and shouldn't be joked about lightly, for many cancers the medical literature is clear you won't know until it's too late.

Your raise valid points.

But I think they only apply in contexts where people realize cheating is going on (Patrascu was an outlier claiming it publicly, but he was an outlier in many things) and also your grading is done on a relative scale (which I think is much worde than an absolute one, where one's better grade doesn't imply another person's lower grade).

> Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?

I would love it if he were among us to give on of his characteristically snarky answers :D [1]

He would probably have said something along the lines of "not as brilliant, more brilliant; which the fact that the other poor chap who wasn't capable of cheating clearly shows".

[1] https://infoweekly.blogspot.com/2010/11/complexity-theory.ht...

All grading is done on a relative scale. It's relative to the questions the professors thought to ask, or that the accreditation boards required them to ask.

Sam bankman-fried would have agreed with you I'm sure.

Is that a bad thing

Hehe, I knew some people would not be able to take this perspective.

The comparison is wrong BTW because cheating at an exam doesn't hurt anyone - but SBFs actions did.

Well, you can be nice and stay home the whole day and do what other people tell to score nicely on some metrics called "grades", or you can ...

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