Comment by temp453463343 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temp453463343 | Hacker News Reader

This is a completely idiotic way of testing people. I could have come into class not knowing anything, waited till the end of the test and then offered 100 dollars to anyone to be allowed to copy their whole test. And I would have passed the class?

It kinda reminds me of CS-whores. The one or two CS girls in each graduation class that regularly used sex-appeal/flirtation to get CS guys to do their homework (very successfully too!).

At some point your no longer testing people's knowledge and creative thinking, but their social skills and ability to manipulate others (and maybe their breast size/size of their 6 pack).

I feel like the professor treated this like a sick little game and enjoyed himself while doing it.

At the end of the day you are competing against your peers either through a curve, or through your raw grades because you're all going into the same fields and are competing for the same jobs with your GPAs. Making a system where cut-throat behavior is encouraged and putting down your pays off is really sad.

I completely disagree. I found this to be an excellent example of real world training. I worked through college in IT and from that job on, working in the real world was exactly like this. We worked on projects with teams of people. We looked for the best possible solutions to every problem we faced. Even when working alone on something, you had your peers as resources. You weren't locked in a closet coding on a computer, offline, without access to books or other tools. That's what test taking was like for me.

Some people, like me, are experiential learners. Others find their best thoughts through discussion and the evolution of ideas. I would have loved to have taken many classes like this. Fortunately, that's what the real world has been like for me - being a member or leading a team to produce the best product we can, either as a team, department or company. As you called it my "pay off" is education. I found mine through methods like this. Not through memorizing facts and methods just to pass a test.

While I agree that the process is more similar to the "real world" - the fundamental problem is that the grading is not. When you work as a team towards some goal whoever is evaluating you is doing so based on your contribution to the team.

Here the fundamental scoring method is still the test, so an individual's motivation is to do better for himself; the teams success is secondary (and if the test is curved it may be non existent). Free riders aren't punished or penalized and all sorts of outside influences come in where people start trading on money/sex/favors/friendships/etc.

Arguably those outside influences exist in the real world, but why create a system that explicitly has no mechanisms to counteract them? (ie. the prof says you can do anything that is legal and doesn't try to catch "cheaters")

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