It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.

For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.

The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.

I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.

I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.

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silver_silver 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My experience as a student has always been that most of the class will cheat given the chance. I remember in high school being one of maybe a dozen in a grade of over 200 who actually read the assigned novels. Everyone else used cliff/spark notes not just to familiarise themselves but also to plagiarise essays.

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cm2012 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For most people, college is a box to check off. And individual classes are even more so.

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Drupon 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer security, etc.

Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.

	▲	rbanffy 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago As long as this allows them to provide for themselves and their families, buying homes, and retiring the same way as someone who goes to college. Going to college should not be something people do to escape abject poverty, but something you want to do to enrich your life and make yourself a better person.
	▲	versteegen 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college Seems obvious now that this is the solution. Unfortunately, universities would never agree to downsize, not due to politics or any US-specific problems.

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danpalmer 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

College is a box to check off because we have lost the ability to support a workforce without college degrees (at least in the US, UK, AU, where I have some experience).

Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.

We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.

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phist_mcgee 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds like you're in AU, I will point out that trades are not looked down on at all in this country. In fact culturally we value chippies and sparkies higher than desk jockeys.

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danpalmer 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah this was a generalisation across the US/UK/AU. I come from the UK but now live in AU, and know the US a bit.

I think the looking down on trades is not quite as simple as I summarised it as, and I think AU does a lot better at all of the above than the US/UK, but I still see aspects of it. Tradies make good money in all 3 countries due to lack of supply, and yet there are still stereotypes of jobs like lawyers, doctors, (software engineers?) being better in some way.

It's a nuanced problem, but I don't get the impression that trades here are culturally valued higher than a lot of "white collar" work. Compared to ambiguous "desk jockeys" yes, but that's due to negative stereotypes about bullshit jobs, if you actually named a specific job I think you'd find different attitudes. Lawyers, accountants, sales/marketing, various engineering disciplines, IT, I think these are widely considered "better" jobs than trades, even though in most ways that's far from true.

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raddan 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a non-Australian I just have to know what “chippies” and “sparkies” are!

	▲	perilunar 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Chippy = carpenter (from wood chips) Sparky = electrician

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b112 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.

I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.

Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.