It’s interesting to note that as a professional SW Engineer, when I go online to look up how to write a bubble sort routine in C++ it is considered research, but if I were a student tasked with writing a bubble sort routine in C++, it would be called cheating.

Perhaps the real answer here is to sue Google for making it possible for people to cheat 🙂

As a student going into my last year of undergrad and actively persuing graduate school for communication research the internet has been the key component in allowing me to research and write successfully. My classwork and exams are all application based, there is no regurgetation of ideas or information. I can research a communication theory for hours online, but if I do not understand what it attempts to explain I will fail the exam miserably. More instructors need to find ways to make their students apply the knowledge they recieve in class to real world situations; not only does this allow them to learn more while taking the course but better prepare them for life and work after college.

Hey, why not change the name of this site to Gen-Y-Pandering.com, since that’s the most prominent and consistent theme?

Software Piracy? Commercial developers are too rich anyway! Music “sharing”? If I am able to do it, it must be alright! Cheating? Hey, they aren’t doing enough to prevent it, so it’s their fault!

When you steal from one, it’s plagerism. When you steal from lots of people, it’s research.

And for tests etc… why don’t you make tests that require thinking, independant reasoning, and logic. hell, open book isn’t going to help the idiots schools pump out these days. The day of my highschool graduation it took my class a hour and a half to alphabetize itself for the procession.

Here is a helpful hint to all college students.

If you professor asks you to turn in an electronically copy of your paper, the professor is going to check and make sure you work is legit. SO, in order to make sure you do not get kicked out of the class, or worse the school, make sure you know how to take advantage of the system properly (Cheat).

You will need to break up the paragraphs and change the wording, about one of every seven words to be safe, mispeelings count. This will be enough to disguise your paper as original work. And for all the NEWBS out there, do not site the source you ripped your paper from, that is a dead give away.

Now you can choose to use the internet as a replacement for memorization, or you can choose to use the internet to augment memorization. Either you can let your capacity to memorize diminish and offset the loss by learning how to Google well, or you can memorize just as much AND learn to Google well. I know that I’m always forgetting math formulas and quotes and having to spend time finding them online. If I had them memorized I’d save time and be able to do more in-depth research.

So I think the whole “memorization vs. thinking for yourself” is a false dichotomy. Yeah – you need to be able to think for youself, but the more pertinent facts you’ve got memorized, the more efficient both your thinking and your searching for additional information is going to become.

I think in American schools now we’ve got this aversion to memorization but also this tacit understanding that there really isn’t much learning if you don’t memorize anything. So we kind of have a muddled mix of minimal memorization but we spend so much time memorizing badly that we don’t have time for demanding “think for yourself” tests.

I’d rather see memorization embraced as stage 1 of learning. You’d have tests purely on your capacity to regurgitate relevant information. Each question is right or wrong, there’s no interpretation.

THEN, and only then, you’d be set loose on creative/think for yourself problems. Those problems would be open book, open web, whatever. They’d be interpretative, and the results would not be “right/wrong” but “effective/ineffective”. It’d be about solutions.

This is, aftera all, a model for the real world. In the real world the more you know, the greater your starting advantage. (Hence – we memorize) But if all you can do is memorize – you haven’t really achieved anything.

Maybe we need to examine our approach to education–instead of going right into college after high school, let people go work for 5 or 6 years, and then go to school—they would get so much more out of it, and cheating would be non-existent.

I’m in the same boat. No matter how much school you have, you don’t really know what you want to do until you start doing it. That’s when you WANT to learn, but no longer have the time to do so.

As a student going into college i have seen the effects of learning something someone has put in front of you. Even with my learning disability i can repeat the process and the work, The problems comes when i need to change one of the variables no matter what kind of variable. I learn better when physically shown and not read to myself from a book. if i see the different variables enough times i can start taking control of what will result from what change. I.E. If you teach me that the mat problem was setup in a standard way and done only one way. i rember it and apply it to what i rember it looking and sounding like. If you gave me the same problem in a different format then i dont reconize the pattern and it looks like a totally different problem. Even if you only change the (-) sign with the word (minus) and turn the problem around it would throw me off. In my opinion getting the answer to the problem shows you the result. The next time you look at the problem you have the answer. I do not think there is a test that can be given that does not either repeat the problem you have learned down to the answer or change the problem up to look different to where it cannot be reconized in comparison to what you have learned. If the problem was put in a real life situation then you have reason, physical evidence, and personal involvement in the product.

If everybody cheated there would be nobody left to learn from, and our knowledgebase would dwindle away to nothing. Just overpaid graduates with empty diplomas. Oh wait…

I know a guy named Ken who plays poker…I don’t suppose you are him…

I agree with both sides of this. I don’t think it’s good for parents and faculty to accept rationalization for dishonest behavior. People are dishonest enough without having their excuses accepted at every turn. BUT I also agree that our school system is a disaster area, and this is probably a major area why. In high school I was a C student. Not because I’m dumb, but because I was bored out of my mind. I’m so smart that this whole “school” thing wasn’t worth my time. I took a grand total of 4 pages of notes, in all 4 years of high school. I studied for a test only twice. I never turned in any homework. Yet I passed with bordering on a B average, because I aced every single test. I remember sitting in Advanced Algebra, not having a clue what to do on a test. I worked out every solution from the basic principles I did remember, and hints from other questions on the test. Even I was shocked to find that I got a B+ on that test, as I knew nothing about the subject that the test was supposed to cover, I derived it all in my head, during the test.

Real intelligence, to me, has always been about the ability to learn new skills and grasp complex relationships, not about memorizing dumb facts, and that is what our education system has become. Part of the problem, I think, is that it has become redundant. I studied the Civil War 3 times before college, and then again in college. Everybody had to, and yet you can walk around the streets and find perfectly well educated people who can’t answer any civil war trivia, beyond maybe “Abraham Lincoln”. The redundancy isn’t helping us remember the facts anyway! So I say, eliminate it, and get back to cultivating minds to do the complex mental work of tommorow, challenging them with art, and music, and sciences, at a much earlier age, when kids still find almost everything fascinating. Doing that at a young age also encourages the brain to continue it’s faster development pace for a longer sprint before it settles into adulthood.

It’s a very accepted fact that a child’s brain learns better the earlier it starts on something, and now we are finding that there are certain ages where the brain specializes in learning a certain skill. We need to take advantage of that, and allow kids to explore hobbies and careers at a younger age, when their brains have the chance to master those skills at a more instinctive level. It’s no big mystery that the worlds best athletes started before they were 5. Same with all the best Musicians. So I have to wonder why we keep going on with an education system that doesn’t allow students to truly diversify until they are almost 20. No wonder we’ve got a country full of unmotivated, unskilled college students, who are bouncing around from 3-4 different majors before they graduate. They are finding what they are good at, and can do as a career. College is way to late to start allowing that kind of exploration. I can’t imagine how many people we’ve lost already by that point. What if we allowed kids to explore careers at any stage of their education, so that they can look into a career, and see if they like it when the first inspiration strikes, instead of waiting for college? If that “slacker” had realized in Junior High that he LIKED particle Physics, he might have found his motviation, gotten his butt in gear, and turned into the next Einstein. Instead, he struggled through high school, decided that he hated school, and went to work at starbucks.

I was almost a perfect example. I almost gave up on being able to write code for a video game company, because I had to teach myself, very frustratingly, until I got to college. I came very close to giving up, and eventually, I did, in college, because I had spent all of high school memorizing crap, and went into college completely unprepared to do real thinking. It was very discouraging, and could have been avoided if Grade school was structured differently. I got lucky, because I got a fortunate job offer doing basic programming. A few years on the job, taught me what the point of college really was…learning to teach yourself.

At first, the act of actually having to study something in order to understand it was literally painful to me, because I was so used to the world of high school, where it was all facts I could memorize in two seconds. I found that I would get completely discouraged if it took me more than 2 minutes to learn something, because that was what high school had taught me – that I was so smart I should be able to learn anything there is without effort! The realization that this is not the case was very painful for me, but now that I have overcome it, I’ve become one of the superstar engineers at DivX. Now I get offers from Gaming companies all the time, and turn them down, because I like it at DivX. I would define that as true success, to be turning down jobs you once dreamed of, because you’re just that happy with where you are. I will most likely go into games when I do decide to move on, but I now know that I can take my time and pick the right situation. The point is, I consider myself a success, careerwise, at least, and have now proven myself as a very capable engineer. Yet I couldn’t make it through college. It had nothing to do with being dumb or unmotivated, but with grade school being too generic and focused, without ever offering any real challenge.

I have had several take home finals. Everybody’s first reaction when they get one is “Yay! this will be easy!” but everybody learns pretty quick that the take home test is a lot harder for those who are used to just memorizing facts. It doesn’t take long for those same people to start dreading the take home test. I think it’s both an excellent example of why the current system doesn’t work, and how we could be doing better. It is, in effect, that “cheat proof” test that was mentioned. The fact of the matter is, I’ve never seen an engineer that doesn’t reference a book on occasion. In fact, good engineers seem to have huge stacks of books, and most are still growing. The real world of intelligent work isn’t about knowing, it’s about learning.

I didn’t get that until after college, when I actually had to apply what I knew, and found that it involved teaching myself more things, things that weren’t ever in the college curriculum. I don’t know ANYBODY that understood that before they started their career – And THAT is the problem with our school system. We need a school system that drills home the idea “we are teaching you to teach yourselves”, from the very earliest stages, instead of having that as the afterthough of people reflecting on college when it’s over. I swear, everyone I know, myself included, was oblivious to the real point of college, until after it was over. My guess is, that’s probably a little too late.

To the students, read the article and realize you are rationalizing your cheating. You are giving yourselves away by your use of rational to explain WHY you used the WWW to get your information/answers. Yes, you too Lisa, drop the “white dress” and admit that you too are cheating, no matter what you call it.

It is important to know where to find the answers, but most important to know what the question is actually asking. There is a HUGE difference in giving the answer and understanding the question.

I know my spelling sucks, my grammer is poor and my sentence structure probably makes some people’s skin crawl, but I did NOT cheat and copy this posting.

Web programming is not a new art, and those that get into use others code to work off of. Why reinvent the wheel if you do not have to.

The problem is you never learn how things really work. Then when you need to create something ‘new’ and there’s nothing from which to copy, you’re screwed.

I’ve seen this time and again in various newsgroups, forums and mailing lists — some body posts “Help, I need to get this done right away, but I haven’t a clue so please give me the complete code to do x.”.

Not to mention all the buggy, crap-code that’s out there created by people who copy something off the net and “finagle” it (hack) till they can get it to work.

There is no sense of Morals and Integrity in the country these days. No one wants to work anymore. Just give me my stock-options so that I can retire before 30.