I spent a lot of my life outside the English-speaking world, and this was a small sideline for a while.
I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid.
Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade.
My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI.
It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will.
The article certainly signals that we're supposed to feel sympathy for the folks in Kenya. But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right? The next thing, we'll be asked to feel sympathy for moms who kill their kids.
> But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right?
In the same way a mom and pop pizza joint willingly serving someone who is trying to be on a strict healthy diet is helping people cheat, yes, but if McDonalds then rolled in and took away all their business, is there no room to feel sympathy for the loss of mom and pop's livelihood? It is not a binary situation.
That doesn't make sense. If you want to take the food angle then the other serves homework. If you want to take the fraud angle then the other facilitates dietary fraud.
To be fair your dietician/healthcare professional might also be disappointed, but you're ultimately right, just like with college nobody else cares. Of course, that was already implied from the onset. I find it intriguing that you've only just come to that realization.
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
There were always two types of people at college, those who want to learn things and those who want a certificate so they can get a better job. It was always pretty easy to distinguish the two.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
You're also 17 or 18 when you go. We were children. Alot of classes also end up sucking so you just power through it and get jaded about the whole experience.
Depends on how the hiring critera for the next stage go. If HR filters out everybody with less than a 3.5GPA right from the start then the C student who knows the stuff will never even get a chance, while the cheater will have the opportunity to bluff their way through the interview.
It’s just saying the same thing differently. The point was never to “power through” classes. It is just checking the same boxes with a different colored pen.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I loved one of my early math teachers that caught that out in his statistics. If you started to slip down the slope of "great exams and no homework" he'd reach out and give you an offer-in-compromise to change your grading to exams-only, with the compromise that you can only attain a maximum of a B grade to be fair to those that complete the exams and homework in the course.
I’m a bit baffled by how one could learn math without doing the homework. In my experience the homework is how you learn the math! So the exams would essentially already be testing whether you did the homework.
I was always very active during class, primarily because I would get bored and smartphones didn't exist yet so the only way I could entertain myself was raising my hand for the teacher all the time. I think because of this I was absorbing more than the average student. I probably would have absorbed even more if I had done the homework.
This is why I think I frustrated teachers; I was active in class and clearly willing and able to learn, and clearly based on the tests I was learning this well enough, but they would be kind of forced to give me shitty grades. To be clear, I do not blame the teachers for this at all, that's all on me. They were doing what they had to do.
I think it also helped that my both my parents, and especially my dad, are pretty big math geeks, so even when I was relatively young my dad would be showing me interesting math stuff even outside school.
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
In 99% of cases the stuff you learn in college is useless post college. You got lucky. You must have one of those jobs where every single class you ever took is relevant. That's a cool job, for example every engineer must've took physics, chemistry and history. You must using all three at your job. If you're a programmer then it's physics, chemistry, history AND programming. Holy shit you're amazeballs.
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
Sure a lot of what I learned is not relevant, but if you asked me to guess which parts would be relevant and which would not I would have guessed wrong.
"relevant to our jobs"? Speak for yourself and your own job.
Maybe you should just get a better job that lets you use your knowledge, unless you're not qualified because you cheated your way through college and never actually learned that knowledge, which you're now trying to retroactivally justify by projecting your bad decisions and cheating onto everyone else.
You can't justify your own cheating by presuming and accusing everyone else of cheating. It's like saying "boys will be boys" because you acted that way too, instead of raising your boy not to be a misogynistic bully. You're just showing yourself to be a cheater, and limiting yourself to jobs for cheaters, of which there are many of course (especially c-level and MBA positions), luckily for you.
You should go back and take some spelling and grammar courses, because "use-fullness" is not a real word, and "must've took" is not correct grammar.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
I didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.
Luckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code.
It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
What reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours.
It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.
I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
The idea that someone would reach out to you and actually expect that you would take something down because students were using it is absurd. It shows a lack of understanding of both how the internet works, and more so the idea that an action like this is really improving the outcome of the students. If the student outcome depends on you taking something OFF the internet, that is the problem.
A cool project would be to go online finding syllabus and assignments from random CS classes that were posted online and have an LLM do them and post them to GitHub repos.
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam.
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms.
I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.
It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
I had to much great stuff of my own to think about. Made great effort keeping their earthly matters out of my head. I could see how others changed into one of them which for many was an improvement.
Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore.
The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her.
In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that.
"Top engineering school" probably makes a big difference. I too went to a top STEM school (Caltech).
Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.
Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
helping faraway students studying engineering, medicine and computer science to finish their [degree]
What odd phrasing. Counterpoint: "Helping" them cheat actually harms them, by ensuring they get the degree without learning or demonstrating mastery of the subject. There's a good reason why students caught cheating are harshly punished.
They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
That's just the cost of utilizing the dating service known as college. Being able to spend recklessly and manage other people to do one's busywork is what appeals within that dating market. Nobody wants to date a broke loser, so to speak.
Maybe you don't technically need four years to find the "love of your life", but many people like to play the field, as they say, which takes time. People are, after all, there for four years because, on average, they want to be.
Difference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
That's a fair point, but I think real learning is still worthwhile, and employers have always had to vet candidates beyond just the credential by itself.
Schools have long relied on an honor system, unless you can get really close to a 1:1 ratio with the students so the instructor can properly evaluate each and every one. But, as a society, we've decided that's too expensive so people cheat and get away with it pretty easily.
Name something with an incentive to cheat that has completely nullified cheating. I won't wait because you can't really. People have cheated in everything there is to cheat in. Chess, college, interviews, shareholder meetings, congressional hearings, whatever the hell it is, someone has tried to game, subvert, cheat, and defeat.
Does this damn the world? Maybe, if you are obtuse.
Comments
I spent a lot of my life outside the English-speaking world, and this was a small sideline for a while.
I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid.
Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade.
My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI.
It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will.
A case of AI pulling the ladder.
The article certainly signals that we're supposed to feel sympathy for the folks in Kenya. But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right? The next thing, we'll be asked to feel sympathy for moms who kill their kids.
> But they are knowingly helping people cheat, right?
In the same way a mom and pop pizza joint willingly serving someone who is trying to be on a strict healthy diet is helping people cheat, yes, but if McDonalds then rolled in and took away all their business, is there no room to feel sympathy for the loss of mom and pop's livelihood? It is not a binary situation.
No it’s not the same thing because one serves food, and the other facilitated academic fraud.
That doesn't make sense. If you want to take the food angle then the other serves homework. If you want to take the fraud angle then the other facilitates dietary fraud.
With dietary fraud you’re only defrauding yourself.
To be fair your dietician/healthcare professional might also be disappointed, but you're ultimately right, just like with college nobody else cares. Of course, that was already implied from the onset. I find it intriguing that you've only just come to that realization.
the industry only exists because of cheating Americans, maybe fix your own shit first before passing judgement
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
There were always two types of people at college, those who want to learn things and those who want a certificate so they can get a better job. It was always pretty easy to distinguish the two.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You're also 17 or 18 when you go. We were children. Alot of classes also end up sucking so you just power through it and get jaded about the whole experience.
Powering through or doing the bare minimum and getting a C is surely better than cheating by outsourcing.
Depends on how the hiring critera for the next stage go. If HR filters out everybody with less than a 3.5GPA right from the start then the C student who knows the stuff will never even get a chance, while the cheater will have the opportunity to bluff their way through the interview.
Depends on your goal. If you can get a higher GPA by cheating and don’t plan on using the actual knowledge…
Better by what measure? Not by "get the best job after college" certainly.
That’s funny, I was 17 & 18 once too and managed to never cheat in any of my classes…
It’s just saying the same thing differently. The point was never to “power through” classes. It is just checking the same boxes with a different colored pen.
Fascinating to see this get upvoted for a bit, then the long tail is down.
Suspect a correlation with stance on the subject.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
I loved one of my early math teachers that caught that out in his statistics. If you started to slip down the slope of "great exams and no homework" he'd reach out and give you an offer-in-compromise to change your grading to exams-only, with the compromise that you can only attain a maximum of a B grade to be fair to those that complete the exams and homework in the course.
I took my B.
I’m a bit baffled by how one could learn math without doing the homework. In my experience the homework is how you learn the math! So the exams would essentially already be testing whether you did the homework.
I was always very active during class, primarily because I would get bored and smartphones didn't exist yet so the only way I could entertain myself was raising my hand for the teacher all the time. I think because of this I was absorbing more than the average student. I probably would have absorbed even more if I had done the homework.
This is why I think I frustrated teachers; I was active in class and clearly willing and able to learn, and clearly based on the tests I was learning this well enough, but they would be kind of forced to give me shitty grades. To be clear, I do not blame the teachers for this at all, that's all on me. They were doing what they had to do.
I think it also helped that my both my parents, and especially my dad, are pretty big math geeks, so even when I was relatively young my dad would be showing me interesting math stuff even outside school.
Tbh I kinda enjoyed writing essays in college if the topic was interesting.
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
I uhhh did that too when I needed money, I had a handler who gave me the stuff and paid me. ( Payment was pretty good)
He talked about the people getting their homework and bachelor's done.
Pretty much crushed my worldview. Cheating is, was and will be rampant.
Speaking of cheaters:
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
https://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/07/john-waters-on....
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
"Man drums publicity up for his fake essay business for people that are too lazy to even use AI"
Nice guys finish last.
Welcome to the back of the line. We have cookies, at least. :)
In 99% of cases the stuff you learn in college is useless post college. You got lucky. You must have one of those jobs where every single class you ever took is relevant. That's a cool job, for example every engineer must've took physics, chemistry and history. You must using all three at your job. If you're a programmer then it's physics, chemistry, history AND programming. Holy shit you're amazeballs.
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
Sure a lot of what I learned is not relevant, but if you asked me to guess which parts would be relevant and which would not I would have guessed wrong.
Some students enjoy learning for its own reward.
agreed, and I said this: "I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs."
"relevant to our jobs"? Speak for yourself and your own job.
Maybe you should just get a better job that lets you use your knowledge, unless you're not qualified because you cheated your way through college and never actually learned that knowledge, which you're now trying to retroactivally justify by projecting your bad decisions and cheating onto everyone else.
You can't justify your own cheating by presuming and accusing everyone else of cheating. It's like saying "boys will be boys" because you acted that way too, instead of raising your boy not to be a misogynistic bully. You're just showing yourself to be a cheater, and limiting yourself to jobs for cheaters, of which there are many of course (especially c-level and MBA positions), luckily for you.
You should go back and take some spelling and grammar courses, because "use-fullness" is not a real word, and "must've took" is not correct grammar.
You did the right thing, based on your financial and mental capabilities, and you are not "useful in your job".
Look at your boss, his job is "gainful to him". He likely cheated in college and learned to delegate work and lead people.
Useful to his boss.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
Why the donwvote? You cunts always mistake an analysis for an endorsement.
You always mistake downvoters for cunts.
Maybe they're just "donwvoting" your analysis or spelling...
I didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them.
Flattering, in a way.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.
Luckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code.
It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
Yes to your first paragraph. Library to your second.
And no, Internet access is not the same as reading in a library. Academia is the quiet place we learn to ask questions.
And meet people who are really good at asking questions.
What reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours.
It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.
I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
Our 2nd year CS maths course the answer sheets were all uploaded to the server with sequential numbers so it was trivial to grab them all.
The idea that someone would reach out to you and actually expect that you would take something down because students were using it is absurd. It shows a lack of understanding of both how the internet works, and more so the idea that an action like this is really improving the outcome of the students. If the student outcome depends on you taking something OFF the internet, that is the problem.
Honestly a bit shortsighted of the professor. Keeping your projects up was an easy way to catch people who copied.
A cool project would be to go online finding syllabus and assignments from random CS classes that were posted online and have an LLM do them and post them to GitHub repos.
Never went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did.
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
Right, and the context of this conversation was about the paid cheating industry not about the continuum.
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam.
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
that's what I did. I could usually pull out a C on the final exam. That is certainly something I would do differently now, as a non-teenager.
I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade
Have you heard of cheat sheets? Or looking at your neighbor during exam? Passing pieces of paper?
Many of my tests after a certain point were open book, or at least explicitly allowed a cheat sheet.
It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms.
I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.
It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
I had to much great stuff of my own to think about. Made great effort keeping their earthly matters out of my head. I could see how others changed into one of them which for many was an improvement.
Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore.
The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her.
In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that.
It apparently works across time!
I stopped short of flying out to do these for them but that is absolutely a thing too
Graduated with highest honors from a top engineering school and never once considered cheating
"Top engineering school" probably makes a big difference. I too went to a top STEM school (Caltech).
Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.
Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
Periodically there's some event that reveals how many people are cheating in some class, and it's never everyone.
Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.
I never cheated in university.
Before I went, I also made money selling essays/code to lazy students.
In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
There was a Pakistani cheating ring at my wife's school. The administrators knew about it but did nothing.
Oh doctors, as in med students, absolutely cheat. Don't think they're above that. There are cheating rings that administrators turn a blind eye to.
Guess I was a sucker because I didn't cheat.
Much was learned today.
https://archive.ph/JkdMp
What odd phrasing. Counterpoint: "Helping" them cheat actually harms them, by ensuring they get the degree without learning or demonstrating mastery of the subject. There's a good reason why students caught cheating are harshly punished.
They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
Something about large debts and widespread cheating makes me think we don't need so many students staying for 4 years.
Maybe more coop programs and less class time.
That's just the cost of utilizing the dating service known as college. Being able to spend recklessly and manage other people to do one's busywork is what appeals within that dating market. Nobody wants to date a broke loser, so to speak.
Maybe you don't technically need four years to find the "love of your life", but many people like to play the field, as they say, which takes time. People are, after all, there for four years because, on average, they want to be.
Difference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
When AI watermark detection is properly up and running, there may yet be a market here.
As long as the Kenyans don't try and use AI themselves.
Why would AI detection ever be any better in the future than it is today? All the money is on the other side of that arms race.
Because the major labs are stenographically marking their text outputs, similar to how image outputs are already wateremarked.
I kinda wonder if there was some secondary educational benefit for the workers doing this
So the unethical helping of unethical students is being subverted by unethical language models… What a world!
I guess I should not be surprised by people being sympathetic to this “business model.”
There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Would it be more ethical to donate GPUs to Kenyans who can then host their own Kimi instances and then resell the tokens at a higher price?
Kenyans probably have new opportunities in reinforcement learning these days if we are being honest
So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
Maybe not "in the clear" but somewhat more forgivable than Anthropic doing it.
It's the old parable of whether it's unethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children.
There's quite a difference between stealing a loaf of bread and making a career out of fraud to pay your way through college.
Of course, this type of fraud is legal for the one doing the work, so even on that front the comparison doesn't really work.
Beats scamming old people out of their retirement money, I guess, but not exactly a job that people will feel bad about disappearing.
Next up: Hard working romance scammers out of work after police shut down operations.
Some people were upset when Craigslist cleaned up their classifieds, in fact.
Amazon gave up on Mechanical Turk recently, too.[1]
If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/help
Chuckles, I'm in danger.
RIP CHEGG
The fact that cheating works is pretty damning for the utility of colleges.
The cheaters are supporting the students who choose to learn. In the past, this was the role of the rich kids who only needed a "gentleman's C"
If half of graduates get their degree from learning and half from cheating, the degree isn't really worth much.
That's a fair point, but I think real learning is still worthwhile, and employers have always had to vet candidates beyond just the credential by itself.
Schools have long relied on an honor system, unless you can get really close to a 1:1 ratio with the students so the instructor can properly evaluate each and every one. But, as a society, we've decided that's too expensive so people cheat and get away with it pretty easily.
Name something with an incentive to cheat that has completely nullified cheating. I won't wait because you can't really. People have cheated in everything there is to cheat in. Chess, college, interviews, shareholder meetings, congressional hearings, whatever the hell it is, someone has tried to game, subvert, cheat, and defeat.
Does this damn the world? Maybe, if you are obtuse.