Said an unnamed 2021 graduate, quoted in "Remote learning led to rampant cheating at NYC’s Stuyvesant High School" (NY Post). Stuyvesant is a phenomenally elite public high school, with admission based on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.
Also quoted, an unnamed sophomore: "A lot of people didn’t actually learn as much last year because of how easy it was to cheat on things, which is sort of sad. Remote learning changed the playing field. It was closer to [an] honor system, so I felt that most people were more likely to push the rules a bit."
It's another cost of the lockdown. If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating. And you degrade your morality. If the community sets things up to maximize cheating, it's a systematic degradation of morality in the young people — in this case, the most academically promising young people.
Here they are, America, your new elite.
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Side note since remote cheating different that classroom cheating:
Some of my teachers treated people caught cheating differently depending on whether they made cheating helps by themselves, or just copied someone else's. The reasoning was that putting effort in preparing cheat-sheets was in fact learning. Other teacher (Physics) let everybody use cheat-sheets, books, notes because according to her it didn't matter. Who doesn't understand the material, won't be able to know how to use cheat-sheets anyway. She was, however, picking test exercises in such a way that they required some fresh thinking and didn't fit 100% into standard stuff.
If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating. And you degrade your morality. If the community sets things up to maximize cheating, it's a systematic degradation of morality
Wasn't This, the Whole Point of Covid? I mean, wasn't It? If not, what the heck Was the point?
"Here they are, America, your new elite."
America? No, just the subset of those that were for the draconian measures in response to COVID. And you are in that subset Althouse.
We’ve long lived with an educational system obsessed with class rank and GPA so that students are punished for stretching themselves and taking risks, rewarded for playing it safe and focussing on the easy. Cheating is the next natural step—not merely are students rewarded for cheating but, because the rewards are in limited supply, the honest students are punished for their honesty.
Pearl clutching about "cheating" presumes high school students actually learn things.
Honestly, besides a sorting mechanism for intelligence and perseverance, does high school teach much?
Do most people remember anything from history class? From algebra or calc? Nope.
Same with college. See Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652
The kids learned something - adapt to the circumstances you find yourself in.
Some people are destined for administrative positions in public education.
As an adjunct professor all my exams were open book, open note, and open laptop. Every single one. I regarded it as my challenge to make exam questions that challenged the students to apply information from different lectures and different chapters of the textbook to solve a practical problem.
If the Bed/Stuy teachers couldn’t see that and do some real work to make up exams, then why are they teaching at an elite school?
Online teaching requires a different kind of assessments than classroom teaching. The assessments are more meaningful than a multiple guess or short answer test. They require more effort on the part of the teacher to create them and to grade them. One of the things classroom teachers were able to do during the pandemic was to convince people online learning is bad, and that worked to secure their jobs for another decade or so. In today's environment the skill to know how to research the answer is more valuable than factual recall.
"Here they are, America, your new elite."
Pretty much the same as the current "elite" -- devious liars, cheaters, self-important, not as smart as they think they are, greedy, and in the case of youth like these ... apprentice grifters.
"Here they are, America, your new elite."
Pretty much the same as the current "elite" -- devious liars, cheaters, self-important, not as smart as they think they are, greedy, and in the case of youth like these ... apprentice grifters.
Here they are, America, your new elite.
@Althouse, what bothers me about the entire tone of this post is that your are blaming the students. This is misplaced anger. All of my contempt is reserved for the teachers and school administrators. Plus the people, for instance like Madisonians, who kowtow to the teachers and their unions.
John Borell said...Pearl clutching about "cheating" presumes high school students actually learn things.
I like Instapundit as much as the next guy, but you need to expand your horizons (or at least be reasonable about the limits of what you're reading). Students learn plenty. And these aren't your average students, The kids at Stuyvesant are the best and the brightest. Motivated by themselves and pushed by their parents.
I recall there was a time when, if you were caught cheating, there was shame involved, both for you and your parents. From what I can see with acquaintances with high school and college children, the only shame now is in getting caught. It seems now that the cleverer the cheating scheme, the prouder the parent. For those who believe that cheating on meaningless tests in high school is no big deal, please understand that cheating, like many vices and virtues, is a habit. Hope your surgeon, pilot, structural engineer did not develop that habit please.
I always find it pretty unsurprising how almost all of the wringing of hands is about the elite these days. While the inner city government schools are literally not teaching students how to read. Tucker just had a segment describing Baltimore. It was atrocious how illiterate generations of inner black kids are there. But we really don’t give much of a crap about them, just the elite kids cheating on their zoom tests.
We haven’t seen anything yet with respect to the upcoming criminality of black America and that is really going to be something.
We told you there would be consequences to the lockdowns that would be worse than the virus...
"just win, baby" - Al Davis
Ten years ago I ran a training for college students. All bright kids. One exercise used findings from the Society Of Human Resource Management regarding what personal qualities employers want in new hires. Gave the students a list of 10 possible answers and asked them to pick and rank the top five. In the SHRM survey, Integrity ranked #3. Out of 15 students, only one had it anywhere in their top five.
In discussion it was clear those kids thought the end justifies almost any means.
Stuyvesant has this aura of an exceptional prep school for the city's uber intelligent kids, but when I was in grade school a family friend who worked in admissions for an upstate NY Div I school told me something interesting: You know how college admissions officers assure students and parents they will know about the quality of curriculum at your small town high school? Well, whatever special tools schools have to determine that information said my crappy little suburban upstate NY high school was ranked tops in NY state ahead of a handful of elite public schools like Stuyvesant. I thought he was just being a homer but we did have a disproportionate number of kids attend ivies, especially considering half my graduating class went on to military or vo-tec...
I've always suspected Stuyvesant is attractive to elite schools only because it's a source for kids to fill minority quotas.
...which is also why Stuyvesant kids keep their high school listed on their resumes...
meanwhile, in Baltimore High School 77% read at (or BELOW) an elementary school level
and less than 2% are reading at their grade level... However, 61% graduate
how? Because!
Baltimore City Schools has a "one fail" policy, which states, “students cannot be retained a second time prior to ninth grade.” That means students go to the next grade no matter how little work is completed.
You Know Why don't you? Of COURSE you do!!!
At Patterson High School the total minority enrollment is 92%, and 100% of students are economically disadvantaged.
Who Cares About poor black kids? NO ONE!!!
THIS is the systemic racism. There is a political party responsible for this; guess which one?
In discussion it was clear those kids thought the end justifies almost any means.
Grading on the curve cultivates this attitude...
I understand the reaction to students cheating, but to a degree they learned more than just how to "cheat". Seems like much of my graduate school education consisted of how to "look up" the right answer.
For that matter, that's what we did in my best work on the job. We were determined to do something none of us knew how to do, so my research background, allowing me to literally search the internet and go thru hundreds of white papers and dissertations, was essential. For that matter, it required a lot of computer code. I'm a mediocre programmer at best, but I went to the internet to learn the syntax of a new language and went back time and time again to learn how to do specific tasks or get past specific problems. I was leading a team of serious coding professionals. They were all doing the same thing.
I admit a critical skill was knowing how to weed through everything to find what was relevant, and how to frame the work so that we were constantly checking and testing everything we did (as well as knowing how to respect copyrights and other people's intellectual property), but a staggering percentage of the results came from us not re-inventing what we needed to do.
My wife is a high school math teacher who bemoans how students use calculators or go to the internet to get answer to math problems. I see her point. You do need to understand what's being done and be aware of the underlying assumptions of many problems. But, in the real world, we pay people for delivering results, not doing work. Knowing how to use this incredible "external memory" we all have access to may be a more important skill than most of what previous generations learned in school.
"Do most people remember anything from history class? From algebra or calc?"
I made a good living applying what I learned in algebra and calculus in public high school. We shouldn't extrapolate too far from personal experience.
High school and first to second year college students routinely cheat without guilt. Teachers alternate paper tests from seat to seat and row to row (often printing them in different colors) to ensure that they don't copy answers from their neighbors. Teachers assign all students to write analyses of an obscure topic they don't know, such as the Great Fire of London, to weed out content from known plagiarism resources (e.g., Cliff's Notes, Wikipedia).
Cheating youth is the norm, and it follows from children being necessarily 100% dependent on gifts from their parents and caregivers early in life. They truly don't know better until they are taught the problems and consequences. Schools used to slowly introduce independence, success, and failure. But, hurt feelings. But, competition. But, uneven outcomes by race and gender.
So now, failure must now be learned later with much more severe consequences. This will either self-correct soon, or the next 5 years will be a lot worse than the last 5 years.
Here they are, America, your new elite.
Yep. The future politicians, leaders of industry, journalists, lawyers, and grant-dependent researchers, all pre-groomed with the skills they'll need to succeed in their future fields.
Forward into the past.
If you cheat, your cheat yourself. Better to not cheat, get a "C" and know where you need to improve than to Cheat, get and "A" and remain ignorant.
Do I have to be the one to point this out? Well, I will, even at the risk of being labeled "rayciss!!!"
IIRC, Stuyvesant student body is heavily asian. This means that cheating is much more likely to be a problem. I work at a college that has graduate programs that have become nearly 100% Chinese over the past decade. Cheating has become a serious problem in those programs. How do I know? The amount of time spent on discussion of cheating at meetings. Changes in exam procedures to deal with cheating.
The bottom line is that what we (Americans, westerners, etc.) consider cheating is not even considered a problem by many if not most Chinese. Here's an article from about 9 years ago. Parents rioted when officials in one province of China tried to stop cheating on the university entrance exam.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html
Proud to say Brooklyn Tech remained in person throughout besides the relatively brief mandatory lockdown early in the pandemic—a credit to the principal and staff at that amazing school. There remains pressure from some Astro turf groups to offer a remote option (groups funded by and otherwise aligned with teacher unions), but so far, it’s all in person. Stuy has the higher SHSAT cutoff score, highest of all the specializeds, but Tech has been the best school of them, best high school in the city, these last few years.
The specialized schools remain the gem of the NYC school system, beyond the control of our mayor and chancellor and as a result rare schools that continue their long tradition of excellence. They are probably the best public high schools in the country after SanFran and VA have debased their own similar schools. As may be apparent, I am a parent of a current Tech student. The title is stupid, but this is the least bad piece I’ve ever read on these schools in the corporate press.
" If the community sets things up to maximize cheating, it's a systematic degradation of morality..."
Now consider how the "For the People Act" sets thing up to maximize cheating:
-Gutted voter ID laws (a sworn attestation is enough)
-Unlimited same day registration-it does not look like these are provisional ballots
-Ballot harvesting
-Hard to clean up voter rolls
-"No fault" absentee ballots
-"Opt out" voter registration
This acts practically invites cheating. Even if no one cheats, the system itself is still suspect.
People with Phd's are idiots. They live in bubbles and have almost zero real life experiences.
I have been required to take multiple tests to get industry certifications.
They are either open book, or very long. The open book test teaches you that knowing the answer off the top of head is not a way to operate. Knowing where and how to access the answer is much more valuable. The long tests knows no one will finish. Weights the questions and figures the number of questions answered and the number answered correctly.
My point is, our capitalistic system has addressed this issue. But the smartest people in education are so ignorant, they never considered there might be a process that has been used for decades to handle the problem
BTW Stuy is approaching 80% Asian. This article is thinly veiled anti-Asian bigotry, whatever else it is.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Understand these schools are under permanent threat of legislative fuckery in Albany to debase their entrance criteria, so it’s impossible not to see the Post’s little shit piece in that context. Disappointing to see them slander the school.
Bitter Clinger said:
I work at a college that has graduate programs that have become nearly 100% Chinese over the past decade.
There is a big shift going on in higher ed, STEM fields, and at least some other highly-paid fields. I don't know what it means for the future, but it is a pretty big trend. You don't read much about it, it is rarely talked about, and public discourse remains focused on the same-old same-old.
No doubt these kids represent an elite of some sort,, having achieved elite scores on what is in effect an IQ test, but the kids at these schools are vastly from the working and immigrant classes. They have a high proportion, majority in most of them, of kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunch. These are not the fancy prep schools where the monied elite send their kids. These are the strivers and children of strivers, the East and South Asian immigrants, Eastern European, West African and Caribbean predominantly.
I work at a college that has graduate programs that have become nearly 100% Chinese over the past decade.
The former Jewish enclave of Scarsdale and similar near suburbs to which earlier generations of successful immigrants escaped are becoming very Asian too. This cheating stuff may have some truth behind it—grinder strivers will intelligently identify and use every angle—but it’s often sour grapes. Careful.
Stuyvesant High School is mere blocks from where I worked in lower Manhattan. Every school day morning, as I exited the subway to head up to street level, I had to wade through hordes of young students. They were obviously Stuyvesant students, as the majority of them were Asian.
Outside of the Chinatowns, the delis around Stuy, Tech and Scuence have the city’s very best assortment of ramens and other Asian snacks and candies.
Learning how to effectively cheat is education...is not the hot take I was expecting, but should have.
But, in the real world, we pay people for delivering results, not doing work.
@Strick, you put your finger on one problem that I had to deal with as a hiring manager. Way too many college hires thought that I cared how many hours they worked; as a person whose salary, bonuses, and promotion potential depended on successful completion of the projects I led, I cared about getting the right answer, and I didn’t care how hard they worked to get it.
They are paying substitute teachers $140 dollars a day in the Huntsville school district. This seems exorbitant.
My wife went through the paperwork to do a day or two a week for extra money and I took over the home schooling.
She was so depressed after 4 or 5 days she couldn't do it anymore.
For example:
Nobody in the second grade class could do 0+8=___.
So she walked them through 0+3=3.
Even with 0+3=3 on the board nobody in the 2nd grade class could do 0+8=___.
"Honestly, besides a sorting mechanism for intelligence and perseverance, does high school teach much?"
That "sorting mechanism" sounds pretty valuable to me, both for the kid and society. Ideally, a kid's performance in HS would serve to point them in the direction of either more rigorous academic pursuits or some other career path. Even if the kid doesn't ultimately retain a lot of the substantive information presented in HS, the school's role in showing that the kid is capable of mastering such material is a very good thing.
Who the fuck cares? It isn't like standards haven't collapsed everywhere.
"Here they are, America, your new elite."
You say that as if the people will gasp. But no: progs like it that way.
Honest competition limits "diversity." Enforcing rules is raaacissst. Preventing fraud hampers grift.
Consider the billions wasted on fraud in the Covid programs. Who cares?
The new elite is being properly trained.
I've always suspected Stuyvesant is attractive to elite schools only because it's a source for kids to fill minority quotas.
As others have pointed out, there are very few favored minorities (i.e. blacks and Hispanics) at Stuyvesant. Mainly Asian, with the remainder Jewish. Getting in is entirely test-based.
For example, here's a story reporting that 8 of 749 students admitted in 2021 were black.
https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2021/04/30/only-8-black-students-are-admitted-to-stuyvesant-high-school/
In his memoir, Richard Feynman tells about the year he taught physics in Brazil and realized that all of his students, smart though they may be, had memorized all the material so that they could answer well on the tests, but they hadn't learned anything by applying the physics they'd memorized to the real world.
It's retardation to translate a single story with sketchy facts into a we are doomed conclusion. I suppose you have to trigger your deplorables patrons somehow. Be sure to exit through the Bezos gift shop, Mommy needs new shoes.
tim maguire said...I like Instapundit as much as the next guy, but you need to expand your horizons (or at least be reasonable about the limits of what you're reading). Students learn plenty. And these aren't your average students, The kids at Stuyvesant are the best and the brightest. Motivated by themselves and pushed by their parents.
Thanks for presuming what horizons I need to expand on. I read Kaplan's book after hearing him interviewed on EconTalk. I agree with much of what he argues.
Are these "best and the brightest" the same students crying at Georgetown Law?
Students learn plenty...like how to play the game to get the piece of paper they need to access jobs they want. They learn to socialize, maybe to think, maybe things they want to learn about later.
What they do not learn in high school are facts that stick with them. It's delusional to think otherwise.
Honor system only works amongst the honorable, the current generation has very little experience with the word
Conrad...
I agree the "sorting mechanism" is valuable. I'm just skeptical the "learning" in high school or college is anything more than an endurance test to sort out which students can put forth the required effort day in and day out for eight years.
The outcome from the process? Mostly good office drones.
High school and college are terrible at figuring out who can take risks, finding entrepreneurs, etc. If you want a good mid-level manager, grab a top college student. But don't count on them to start small businesses, innovate, etc.f
A commenter upthread pointed out that one must change exams when they move online. That is absolutely correct. I've always used closed notes, closed book rules (no cheat sheets, no calculators, no computers) for in-person exams. My goal is to evaluate whether the students have learned the high-level concepts and frameworks that I hope they will remember in 5-10+ years. Such exam questions are trivial if one can access notes, internet, etc.
So how to do that when exams moved online? Make the exam looonnngg! I now allow students to use the book, their notes, pretty much anything they want, except conferring with another person. The exams are so long that anyone who needs to refer to materials will not finish.
Many people, when given an opportunity, will take the path that gets them the goal they want, not take the path that if fair. Rich people will give their kids tutoring to help them compete. Is that cheating when compared to students who don't have the resources? Rich people can get their kids into Harvard without the grades. Is that cheating? A boy can compete in women's sports. Is that cheating? You get special consideration if you check certain boxes in the racial quiz of every application. Is that Cheating (even if you are a minority but have none of the disadvantages?)
"There is a big shift going on in higher ed, STEM fields..."
I've been out of school(Engineering)a loooooong time. Even then the grad programs were heavily Mideastern or Asian. Research reports might have the primary name like Kelly (the old guy). But the worker bees/Mohammed or Kim.
FWIW I held a Professional Engineer's license from 1980 until I retired. The process required two eight hour tests and 4 or more years working for other PE's. the tests were open book. I took several to the test, but did not crack any of them. I suspect if you forgot a constant in a formula the book would have been useful. But if you didn't already know the material you were pretty well screwed.
I forgot to add in my previous post that most online exams platforms offer a number of ways to make it more difficult for students to cheat by comparing answers with each other while the exam is ongoing. First, you require students to log into Zoom and stay in view of the camera while taking the exam. Then each student gets a slightly different exam. Multiple choice questions are selected from a pool of questions and delivered in random order (so that when two students get the same question it is not e.g., #5 for both). The choices in the MC question are also pulled from a pool and in random order. Essay questions can also be drawn from a pool (and they are harder to cheat on anyway). Also, questions can be developed such that a minor change in wording (is vs is not) or one number different can completely change the answer.
It is a PITA to have to do this, but that's how it is. If a professor/teacher does not use the available tools to reduce cheating, he is either ignoring the the cheating or endorsing it. In either case, he has little basis for complaining about cheating.
In December 2019, Internet entrepreneur Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay, 'The Lesson to Unlearn' about how the incentives of schooling is to get good grades, not real learning. Sure, some learning happens, but parents, teachers and colleges all want the good grades and care little for retention a week or month after the test. So good students learn to hack the test or teacher. Not cheating, just learning what they need to reproduced on the test and holding on to that until after the test. After all, if you learn about a topic beyond what's presented in class, should you find the time with the next class coming up, you'll likely not give the expected answer needed to get the good grade in most classes.
Paul Graham ended with the observation that the world has changed with opportunities outside the bureaucracies that value good grades and credentials for those who "insist on knowing" as Ezra Pound said of real education. ("Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.")
=============
"You might actually like to win by hacking bad tests. Presumably some people do. But I bet most people who find themselves doing this kind of work don't like it. They just take it for granted that this is how the world works, unless you want to drop out and be some kind of hippie artisan.
"I suspect many people implicitly assume that working in a field with bad tests is the price of making lots of money. But that, I can tell you, is false. It used to be true. In the mid-twentieth century, when the economy was composed of oligopolies, the only way to the top was by playing their game. But it's not true now. There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they used to be. When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an "executive." Now you can make lots of money by making cool things.
Hacking bad tests is becoming less important as the link between work and authority erodes."
And here I thought morality was taught at home.
It is in mine.
"What they do not learn in high school are facts that stick with them."
Oh yeah? How about, "Columbus sailed the deep blue sea in 14 hundred ninety-three".
"If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating."
Exactly. They're just preparing the next generation of Democratic Party poll workers...
"In today's environment the skill to know how to research the answer is more valuable than factual recall."
The problem with this is that identifying a correct or even a reasonable answer requires recall of certain facts which are used to judge the quality of the found information. If you don't have a basic grasp of simple mathematical processes (recalled facts), the code answer you find on the internet could very well be incorrect and you would never know it.
The development over time of a knowledge base of recallable facts constitutes the basis of what we call "expertise". It is this accumulation of recallable facts from long experience that helps create a recognizable expert in a field. I am an expert in my field in no small part due to being able to recall certain facts on command, and then go to the available sources out in the interwebz and use those recalled facts to research the problem at hand and find a workable idea or even maybe a solution.
In a nutshell, facts (usually) come first. (Yes, I hedged, because there are no immutable laws of knowledge.)
Bitter Clinger said...
The exams are so long that anyone who needs to refer to materials will not finish.
Brilliant idea. Am stealing this
There is no proof of "widespread" cheating!
For insight into what goes on in the rarefied elite private schools, including prestigious old ones with very high academic standards, check this out.
tldr: a couple years, a blue ribbon panel and a newly sanitized mascot and logo. I’ll take the sneaky Asian cheaters as my childrens’ peers over this bullshit.
For example, here's a story reporting that 8 of 749 students admitted in 2021 were black.
Yes, but to expand my point...as someone else mentioned the school is probably 80% asian, so in one class, say, about 150 non-asian, poor, working, lower upper class students. Some of them are white - how many? and how many of those white students are 'disadvantaged'? A few? Most?
So you may see a very small pool of academically elite, minority and/or disadvantaged students but to an Ivy college admissions committee they see a unicorn farm...
...and they really need unicorns...
Remote voting led to rampant fraud.
Remote working leads to all kinds of shit you'd never get away with in the workplace.
What kind of retard ever expected anything else? Certainly not the teachers and administrators of this school. But being disingenuous in the service of one's self-interest has become a popular way of looting the public purse these days.
Ah yes whereas the old elite -- robber barons, financiers bouncing between making rules at the SEC and making money on wall street based on the rules, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Charlie Rangel, Richard Nixon, Oliver North, Richard Daley, college admissions boards preferancing legacies, defense contractors, Boeing management, the people who wrote 7000 iterations of the tax code to prefence the wealthy, Bill Gates, Bernie Madoff, leaders of the NY state legislature for 30 years, Enron leaders, Elizabeth Holmes, ok this could go on forever but I can't -- were pure!
America has cheating baked in, especially among high achievers. As a culture, we're individualistic, expansionist, focused on making money, and not overly worried about rules. These are characteristics that helped turn us into the global powerhouse we are -- along with others, like
Meanwhile, everyone cheats at some point. Even before remote school, if you can believe it!! Some decide that they like it and want to do it more, others that it's not their way. Seldom are these decisions driven by risk of being caught, especially as we age, because there are many ways to cheat without getting caught and morality turns internal over time.
I agree with several of the commentators that this is some get off my lawn type nostalgia for a time that did not exist, and actually quite the opposite. It used to be way way worse, especially before souch information was available.
Let the kids play on your lawn Ann!
When everything was closed due to COVID, the MATHCOUNTS middle school math competition series was held online. One could only laugh. Obviously there was and will be rampant cheating with anything you move from a proctored environment to a home computer. I don't think this is a Stuyvesant-specific problem.
"Every school day morning, as I exited the subway to head up to street level, I had to wade through hordes of young students."
You slept in the subway?
I always took you as more of a park bench kind of guy.
Sounds like a tough school if you have to do your own cheating.
In Atlanta the teachers do the cheating for you.
This entire story comes from students anonymously accusing all those other students (the bad ones) of cheating. You could have written the same article at any time in the past. Remote learning is, in this case, just a hook for the article.
There are a lot of accusations here without any factual, documented basis. Don't the children deserve a little basic respect?
If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating. And you degrade your morality
Yep.
And if you don't cheat, while everyone else is cheating, you get a rally sh!tty grade.
So your best bet is to try to learn, but be sure to cheat
Michael said...
Bitter Clinger said...
The exams are so long that anyone who needs to refer to materials will not finish.
Brilliant idea. Am stealing this
It's actually pretty standard. You give an open note, open book test where there's enough questions that if you have to do more than occasionally look up a formula, you run out of time.
My O Chem classes let you have a, self made, "cheat sheet" of whatever reactions you wanted to bring in with you. It meant they could test you on how to use the information, rather than merely how to regurgitate it.
For that matter, at Google job interviews they encourage you to ask "what's the name of the function that does X?" Because knowing that the function exists is important. Knowing its name is something you can look up
there would be so fewer haunting ghosts for these children if these exams had simply been declared open-book and graded accordingly
Greg The Class Traitor said...
If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating. And you degrade your morality
Yep.
And if you don't cheat, while everyone else is cheating, you get a rally sh!tty grade.
So your best bet is to try to learn, but be sure to cheat
--------
now do elections and honor system
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