And just outright not doing your homework. I used to have Maxima do my homework for me, then I had Wolfram Alpha do it, then I started rolling my own homework solvers. Now I think of the time non-programmers spend on math homework, and it's just jarring. Statistics is especially scary without programming ability.
If you have online homework (e.g. coursecompass.com) and it's due in 25 minutes because you, like me, are a legendary procrastinator, you learn to cut a few corners.
Site-specific (coursecompass.com): you get an unlimited number of attempts to solve a problem, and there seem to be a finite number of variations on each problem, so combining a list of known answers (obtained by purposely failing a few attempts with some educated guessing (or just brute-force guessing in many cases), you can get a 100% average on your homework without ever actually having done any real work.
The idea behind homework is not that you deliver the right answers but that you learn something from it. As long as you're confident that you learn as much from the programming as you would from doing the homework there is probably no issue, but some day after doing a bunch of homework there are the final examinations, and you won't be using the 'solver' then.
I can learn anything I want for free. College is just for getting a degree.
And as for the finals with no solvers: In other countries, they make you stand in front of the proctor and clear the memory of your calculator. Not so here, at least not from what I've seen. If they tell you you're allowed a TI-83 and not a TI-86, then by god, you should wring the absolute maximum amount of utility from that TI-83 that you possibly can. Extensive notes, other operating systems, magical apps, whatever. I've thought that, if I did live in another country, I'd just write an app that displays the memory cleared screen without actually clearing the memory.
Really, school is just a backup plan to earn money if my entrepreneurial endeavors fail. I don't intend to throw away potential earnings because I was too stupid to take advantage of everything I possibly could.
I've found complete question/answer keys to exams on the internet that my teachers had ripped off of websites/out of teaching manuals. They were meant to be example exams, to be modified, but they were reproduced to us verbatim. I'd be stupid not to memorize something like that.
In some cases, my instructors were literally too stupid to allow me to succeed in their classes by honorable means. They had tests with wrong answers. In such situations, you have one choice: cheat or fail, because the answer can't be learned.
Case in point:
In an IP address, ____ defines how pages transfer on the Web.
a. FTP
b. http
c. TCP/IP
d. SMTP
The answer is B and the class was mandatory in community college. And that's a gentle example. There were some outrageous ones.
I become more misanthropic with every passing day :P
If you have online homework (e.g. coursecompass.com) and it's due in 25 minutes because you, like me, are a legendary procrastinator, you learn to cut a few corners.
Site-specific (coursecompass.com): you get an unlimited number of attempts to solve a problem, and there seem to be a finite number of variations on each problem, so combining a list of known answers (obtained by purposely failing a few attempts with some educated guessing (or just brute-force guessing in many cases), you can get a 100% average on your homework without ever actually having done any real work.
Ok, I'm done ranting about homework.