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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice.

If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.

There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.

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Yeah, it's sadly predictable that OP is seeing this play out in the workplace. People who cheat to get hired are also likely to scheme and manipulate their way up the corporate ladder. This happens at almost every company, every day.

Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.

The solution is simple: promote from below.

Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a co-op dev studio that was based on 18th century pirate charters (https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...).

Dahl wrote about this (which you might already know): https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520058774/a-preface-to-econ...

While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies.

I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...

Why didn't they told them so, what a shitty professors

Good question, bad assessment.

I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.

EDIT typo

So rather than try to improve the situation by teaching them techniques for doing this winnowing and skimming, which would a) reduce the stress on their students (both in the class and in the real world), and b) increase the efficiency and productivity of the students once they were out there working, they instead chose to perpetuate the significantly more negative status quo.

That sounds like bad professors to me.

Your comment reads as though you were saying that cheating on an assignment is “flexible thinking.” That’s quite a stretch.

he's thinking flexibly

When the rules of civilization change to the rules of the jungle, society collapses. Many societies have collapsed, even in modern times. It's not fun.

So when was the golden age of “society” where it was morally better?

When you import people from the jungle, you eventually become the jungle.

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