NZ police uncover large educational cheating service | Hacker News Reader

NZ police uncover large educational cheating service

stuff.co.nz

21 pointsarjn12 comments

It's more-or-less impossible to prove that any kind of take-home assignment was actually done by the student himself/herself.

This is why a large proportion of a degree should be based on in-class work where the student is physically present.

Also, when these people graduate without understanding the subjects they cheated on, won't they be too incompetent to hold down the jobs their degrees are supposed to enable?

I have a terrible suspicion that they will, and that is a partial reason for some things that are wrong in the world...

Particularly when the said jobs are in politics, government, quangos.

It's not like good performance in exams means you'll perform well in the real world anyway. It just means you can perform well in exams... In that respect, even if there were no cheaters, you couldn't be sure that someone won't be incompetent (or, conversely, that someone "under-qualified" isn't actually really quite bright but just happens to suck at exams).

There's no guarantee that good performance in exams means good performance in actual work.

But there is a correlation, as in "numerous studies have found modest to sizeable correlations between school achievement and work performance, even after controlling for the effects of general ability measures."

This is why a large proportion of a degree should be based on in-class work where the student is physically present.

I must disagree. The biggest perk of many university classes is only showing up for the exams and still getting an A.

Well, when a student doesn't understand his own work, that's a dead giveaway.

>This is why a large proportion of a degree should be based on in-class work where the student is physically present.

I disagree. That's good for a test or two.

I have a horribly executed course this semester where all the work is done in class. It's on Android and all the requirements are given at the start of the class. It basically encourages copying from Stack Overflow because you don't have time to learn the API. It advantages people who are familiar with Android because those who aren't don't have time to make up for it by learning. The only thing you can do is learn some specifics beforehand and hope that it will be what the tasks will require.

Speed programming is bad programming. Like the saying goes, if the code I wrote so far was a horse, I'd shoot it in the head.

I just wonder, as a student, is it more important to get your qualification than it is to learn something?

As a student, that seems to be right (qualification > learning). It is the university's job to make sure qualification <--iff--> learning.

water is wet, the sky is blue.

the only thing mildly surprising about this is that police care.

Yeah cheating by students is a reality but this is taking it to a whole new level.

If you read the article, it says that the NZ government 'amended the Education Act in 2011 to make it an offence to advertise or provide cheating services'. If it's happening on a large scale isn't it comparable to fraud?

Yes it is fraud, organized fraud. I assume they don't need to advertise because it's likely to be a word-of-mouth thing.

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