I didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.
The idea that someone would reach out to you and actually expect that you would take something down because students were using it is absurd. It shows a lack of understanding of both how the internet works, and more so the idea that an action like this is really improving the outcome of the students. If the student outcome depends on you taking something OFF the internet, that is the problem.
What reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours.
It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.
I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
Luckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code.
It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
A cool project would be to go online finding syllabus and assignments from random CS classes that were posted online and have an LLM do them and post them to GitHub repos.
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
Difference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
>It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam.
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms.
I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.
It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
I didn’t realize how many people cheated in college until I got an email from my computer graphics professor a year after I graduated asking me to remove the projects I did for the class from GitHub because a substantial amount of his students were copying from them.
Flattering, in a way.
I had the exact same thing happen to me. Took CS107 at Stanford; cap stone project was a heap allocator. I ended up expanding it post course completion and published what I thought was a more clever approach. A few months later, I got a pretty stern email from our professor (shoutout to Julie Zelenski who was amazing) asking me to take it down :( Luckily i didn't get in trouble for this. kinda dumb on my part in retrospect.
The idea that someone would reach out to you and actually expect that you would take something down because students were using it is absurd. It shows a lack of understanding of both how the internet works, and more so the idea that an action like this is really improving the outcome of the students. If the student outcome depends on you taking something OFF the internet, that is the problem.
What reason would your professor have to have you take it down, at least past your due date? One could claim copyright on the project itself if you shared the files, or if you kept the original framework a course might provide, but the work you did is yours.
It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.
I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
Luckily you didn't get into trouble? It's the professor's responsibility to stop their students cheating, not yours! Heap allocators are hardly unique and the internet is full of source code.
It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
A cool project would be to go online finding syllabus and assignments from random CS classes that were posted online and have an LLM do them and post them to GitHub repos.
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
Tbh I kinda enjoyed writing essays in college if the topic was interesting.
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
You did the right thing, based on your financial and mental capabilities, and you are not "useful in your job".
Look at your boss, his job is "gainful to him". He likely cheated in college and learned to delegate work and lead people.
Useful to his boss.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
"Man drums publicity up for his fake essay business for people that are too lazy to even use AI"
Difference between then and now is back then you still had to clear an in person exam. Not a lot of room for cheating when you were on your own standing at a blackboard on front of the professor.
Never went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did.
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
>It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
You’re portraying a lot of these things as if they exist in a continuum along a fuzzy line from ‘not cheating’ to ‘cheating’, but the reality is it isn’t fuzzy at all. It’s cheating to submit work you didn’t do for assessment as if it is your own. That is cut and dried cheating.
None of these is cheating: Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Getting carried on a group project.
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
Periodically there's some event that reveals how many people are cheating in some class, and it's never everyone.
Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam.
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
that's what I did. I could usually pull out a C on the final exam. That is certainly something I would do differently now, as a non-teenager.
I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade
Have you heard of cheat sheets? Or looking at your neighbor during exam? Passing pieces of paper?
Many of my tests after a certain point were open book, or at least explicitly allowed a cheat sheet.
It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms.
I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.
It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
Graduated with highest honors from a top engineering school and never once considered cheating
> 's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats
Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
> In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful
Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.
In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
Guess I was a sucker because I didn't cheat.
Much was learned today.
[dead]
They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.
When AI watermark detection is properly up and running, there may yet be a market here.
As long as the Kenyans don't try and use AI themselves.
Why would AI detection ever be any better in the future than it is today? All the money is on the other side of that arms race.
The fact that cheating works is pretty damning for the utility of colleges.
RIP CHEGG
https://archive.ph/JkdMp
Amazon gave up on Mechanical Turk recently, too.[1]
If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/help
Chuckles, I'm in danger.
So the unethical helping of unethical students is being subverted by unethical language models… What a world!
I guess I should not be surprised by people being sympathetic to this “business model.”
There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Would it be more ethical to donate GPUs to Kenyans who can then host their own Kimi instances and then resell the tokens at a higher price?
So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?
Maybe not "in the clear" but somewhat more forgivable than Anthropic doing it.
It's the old parable of whether it's unethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children.
There's quite a difference between stealing a loaf of bread and making a career out of fraud to pay your way through college.
Of course, this type of fraud is legal for the one doing the work, so even on that front the comparison doesn't really work.
Beats scamming old people out of their retirement money, I guess, but not exactly a job that people will feel bad about disappearing.
Next up: Hard working romance scammers out of work after police shut down operations.
Some people were upset when Craigslist cleaned up their classifieds, in fact.