
The New Cheating Economy - firebones
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Cheating-Economy/237587?key=O998qdDb93HBMW6pFSQu7k2-7whQ1v-5yYJBsWeIFOjez2UA5seF8Kbhc15aZAp_YzhPMC1XcHRJSWMwWHA1eVhSRnNXQ1FBcm5uVm9kbjVGbG5WWWNyRmdkOA
======
jmknoll
As I was reading through the section on the difficulty of catching cheaters, I
got to thinking whether the process of submitting a paper might be better done
through something like GitHub, where you then have a record of the person's
commits, whether that be new sources found, time spent researching, a section
written/edited. It then allows the professor to grade the process, not just
the result.

I mean, when I'm hiring software developers, and they send me a link to a site
that they made, i find that basically meaningless, because it doesn't tell me
how they work, when/where they decided to incorporate external resources, and
how they collaborate. It also doesn't guarantee that they actually made the
site.

A link to a github repo doesn't automatically solve all of those problems, but
it solves a lot of them, and it would be almost as much work to falsify well
as it would be to just do it correctly.

~~~
divbit
If you don't mind people seeing your occasional stupid ideas that don't pan
out, then yeah, it works fine: [https://github.com/divbit/phd-
thesis](https://github.com/divbit/phd-thesis)

edit: as an addendum to this, overleaf has built-in git integration, which I
found to be useful

------
rdtsc
I have seen the end of the line for this kind of corruption and it is not
pretty. Once it starts it spreads like a cancer.

After some years we'd have doctors, engineers, lawyers, banker, nurses, safety
inspectors, police officers who got into those positions by cheating. Then
because they did it, they don't mind hinting and advising their children to do
the same, and so on.

~~~
sevenless
We're ruled by politicians, bankers and corporations who lie, cheat, bribe,
tax-dodge, and break the law with impunity. Why shouldn't the rest of us?

~~~
idiot900
Because then we end up with a broken third world society.

------
alexmat
Seems like teachers aren't spending enough quality time going over the
assignments with students. When I was teaching a Java class last year at a
community college, I had students present their homework in front of the
class. It was very easy to figure out who was cheating and who wasn't.

~~~
analog31
Quality time costs money. A potential problem is that the majority of teachers
are adjuncts who are not full time employees, and who are likely to be working
multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. Not only does catching cheaters take
effort, but pursuing it to the point of disciplining a student can be a
nightmare for the teacher if their department doesn't support them.

When I taught an electrical engineering class, the prof with whom I shared a
syllabus and exams, made the exam problems look a lot like the homework
problems. The kids who (probably) cheated on their homework lessons paid for
it on the exams.

Perhaps likewise for the humanities courses. In my own experience, writing
essays and term papers for the regular course assignments was what got me so I
could write a decent essay quickly during a "blue book" exam. I don't know any
way other than sheer physical practice, to learn how to do that. You can't pay
someone else to practice for you.

~~~
booleandilemma
I knew an adjunct who, in the words of the department head, was fired for
being too harsh on cheaters.

~~~
flukus
Can't expel your income streams...

~~~
analog31
One issue is the fear that if the student decides to lawyer up, then the
adjunct will be completely outgunned, and there is no clear indication of the
extent of their liability. As a former adjunct, I certainly would not have
gone there. The department was probably making the same calculation. In
addition, as a temporary worker, an adjunct can easily be blackballed, so
their strategy is to be as docile as possible.

My mom is a retired high school teacher, and it's a completely different
story. Among the "perks" in her contract were legal representation and
liability coverage.

------
joe_the_user
Well, sadly this does seem like the logical result of college being a purely
commercial endeavor for all concerned.

Colleges are closer and closer to the situation where they don't care about
being anything but skill-certifiers, certainly they don't worry about becoming
places where learners begin maturing and taking their place in an enlightened
society.

In this environment, what will make the student respect the university's
requirements?

~~~
gengkev
The reason this type of cheating occurs is that a college degree has external
value. If the cheaters aren't even the ones doing the learning, I doubt that
the quality or nature of the college's education would affect their behavior.
So I don't think that colleges are really at fault here (besides not putting
enough effort into catching cheaters).

~~~
enraged_camel
>>The reason cheating occurs is that a college degree has value, and cheaters
would like to obtain that degree through money rather than effort.

I don't follow your logic at all. They earn that money through effort, so at
the end of the day it comes down to the same thing. The article specifically
gives the example of someone who has a full-time job plus a commitment to the
National Guard, and doesn't have any spare time for 15 credits worth of class
and its associated work.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_a full-time job plus a commitment to the National Guard, and doesn 't have
any spare time for 15 credits worth of class and its associated work._

Well, back in the good old days, people in similar situations took 3 credit
hours at a time. It took them almost forever to get their degrees, but at
least they obtained them honestly.

The world doesn't owe anyone a shortcut to an education. No matter how
inconvenient the honest path might be.

~~~
enraged_camel
Ah yes, back in the good old days, when college was super cheap, when everyone
with a college degree was guaranteed a job, and when wages were increasing
steadily so that they didn't need a college degree to get a pay increase.

Those good old days?

------
chipperyman573
Out of curiosity, is running a service this article mentions (BoostMyGrade,
etc) illegal?

I know _using_ one will get you expelled from a university, but does running
one breaking any laws? Assuming you follow all other e commerce laws

~~~
rdtsc
I imagine they cloak themseleves as a "tutoring service". They know exactly
what they are doing. It is a bit like when during Prohibition companies would
sell grape juice, yeast, and other ingredients needed to make wine and then
put a label on the kit saying "Just to let you know, it is illegal to mix the
contents of these ingredients, let them sit for X amount of days at T
temperature, and then consume the resulting product".

------
downandout
There's no excuse for cheating. But part of the problem here is that most
desirable jobs require degrees, yet vast portions of the time it takes to get
degrees are spent satisfying general education requirements. A huge part of
college is simply proving that you can follow instructions and do large
amounts of busy work.

------
znhll
A couple years ago as I was finishing my CS degree, I often wondered about
this. I knew lots of my classmates were cheating with stuff like this, or even
just buying whole zipped archives of past student's work to pass off as their
own.

Cheating of this nature is really is getting quite rampant, and you can
definitely notice it when you get to higher level CS classes and have to do
projects with other students who have basically just cheated, coasted, and
freeloaded of off other students for years. I had to do a capstone Software
Engineering class project with a student who could barely write anything past
a HelloWorld program in Java.

I wrote a very candid evaluation of that student and personally spoke to the
professor but nothing came of it. I'm sure he still passed the class, and
perhaps even cheated his way to graduation.

------
trevyn
Are there any good services like this, but for tutoring? I'd definitely pay to
have someone answer all my ridiculous questions as I work through material.
(Assume that I'm not able to get enough quality time with my real
instructor/TA.)

~~~
vinchuco
There probably is a market: graduate students. I am one.

I'd rather tutor 12+ motivated-to-learn people 1hr than an uninterested kid
with helicopter parents.

The only reason hours are the unit of measure for teaching/tutoring is for
practical purposes. But knowledge is not poured into minds through time as
much as by clever guidance. Like defusing a bomb, but the opposite.

------
cmurf
Some online courses make it easy to enable cheating with weak authentication.
For instance, rather than course specific login, if it were authenticated by
your real one and true prized Google account, would these students be so eager
to give up credentials? Of course merely changing to Google authenticated
accounts isn't enough, just get a throw away Google account for the cheater to
use. But there should be some chain of trust that enables authentic
authentication. What's going on here, aside from the cheating, is
inauthentication.

------
damaru
But on the other side of the medal, there are a lot of people who gets paid to
study no? If I was a poor student I'd try to get hired in one of these
business and start going to school while being paid.

------
Animats
One begins to understand where those totally unqualified people who show up
for job interviews come from.

------
Futurebot
Why has cheating become so pervasive? The book "The Cheating Culture" explores
this question at length. If you don't want to read the whole book, try this
short work by the author: [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/on-
campus-author...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/on-campus-
author-discusses-the-cheating-culture-with-
college.pdf?c=plag;idno=5240451.0001.004)

Excerpt:

"It’s also not surprising that winner‐take‐all competition would breed
cheating in another area ‐‐ in the classrooms of elite high schools and
colleges. These days, even the smart kids who already have everything going
for them often cheat to guarantee their success. When I was writing my book, I
spent some time looking into the cheating problem at Horace Mann, which is one
of the top prep schools in New York City.

Students there are from extremely well off families. In the grand scheme of
things, if you’re a student at Horace Mann, you’ve already won the game of
life. Paying $20,000 per year for their children to attend, parents of these
kids are loaded. And yet cheating is common at the school. Why are the most
privileged kids cheating?

There is no single reason why students cheat. But in this case, certainly one
reason is the intense desire to be a winner, to get the rewards at the top.
The Horace Mann kids are remarkably worldly.

They know what partners at big name investment firms make. They understand
just how just big the rewards are if you’re a winner and make it to the very
top of American society. Many feel entitled to those rewards. And these
students come to believe from early on that a key to being a winner – perhaps
the key – is a degree from a prestigious university, the ivy leagues. And some
of them will cut whatever corners are necessary to attain that goal.

Now, of course, the obsession with winning is not the only reason people
cheat. A lot of people aren’t out to strike it rich or become a big shot. They
just want to lead a comfortable and secure life. But increasingly, that is not
something one can take for granted, and more people are afraid of falling
behind, and not being able to lead that comfortable, secure life. This brings
me to a second reason people cheat, which is fear.

Things are tough out there. Jobs are less secure, and even the best white
collar jobs are now getting outsourced to China or India, disappearing just
like that. 45 million Americans lack health insurance, which makes us unique
among advanced nations. We just don’t look out for our fellow citizens like we
once did. And a lot of middle class Americans who should be feeling secure are
instead feeling anxious. And their kids are growing up around this anxiety. I
think there are a lot of young people who go through life, thinking “I better
not screw things up. One lost scholarship, one flunked exam, if I take one
wrong step, get one blot on my permanent record, I’ll end up living at home
for the rest of my life.”

When you make the rewards for being a winner and the concomitant punishments
for being a loser so large, don't be surprised when people start cheating en
masse.

~~~
notacoward
Very insightful. Cheating's most likely to be worth the expense and risk when
the marginal compensation for each iota of (perceived) performance is large,
so those at _or above_ that inflection point are likely to cheat the most. We
hear constantly how governments are corrupted by power and thus markets are
preferable; it helps to be reminded sometimes of how certain kinds of markets
are prone to their own forms of corruption.

------
nradov
More colleges should institute honor codes, and rigorously enforce them.

~~~
ManlyBread
Honor is dead.

------
thefastlane
"Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever
written."

off-topic, but wow: no college graduate should break out in a cold sweat over
a 19-page paper.

~~~
notacoward
I had the same reaction. It might not be reasonable to ask for something like
that overnight, but with a month or more of notice that seems like it should
be No Big Deal. That's less than a page a day, on average, so the actual
_writing_ is almost trivial. A page's worth of thought and research doesn't
seem like an unreasonable daily burden except maybe for something like a dense
mathematical proof.

