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.
Agreed, a good guesser would allocate his cheating more accurately by pinpointing the classes that are actually useless, IF his goal was just to learn what is needed.
"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.
Comments
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.
Agreed, a good guesser would allocate his cheating more accurately by pinpointing the classes that are actually useless, IF his goal was just to learn what is needed.
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're reacting like this because everything I said is 100% true and applies to you.
Then tell me what my job is, and what I learned in college? You seem to be sure you know.
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...