I work where they hosted CPA exams the last 3 years in Vancouver. I see no way of cheating easily. It was pretty crazy the set up. They are very serious about preventing cheating.
I'm not sure if CPA is curved globally or not. The designation I'm referring to is, and it's openly discussed that countries like China and India have completely different exam writing conditions, and cheating is done in the open. I've seen candidates having prior years exams, which they memorize as some questions get recycled. If it sounds targeted, that's not my intent, just the reality of what I've seen and heard over the years.
Edit: How it's relevant to Canada: candidates here receiving past exams from friends abroad. Global curve, meaning only 1 or 2 versions of the exam worldwide. Given timezones, also have a window where parts of the world have written, and candidates in Canada haven't.
Some of these exams have pretty intense preparation times. CPA I imagine is in the 100s of hours. So compared to that, definitely still the easy route.
When I wrote my Core 2 exam, we were delayed by over an hour. I wrote at the convention centre in Vancouver and we were still outside of the exam room with access to our phones when Ontario stopped writing. I remember thinking at the time that there was nothing to stop us from messaging our Ontario colleagues to ask what was on the exam (not that I did that).
In my job role I'm responsible for hiring a few dozen co-op students every year, and in my observation Covid has utterly destroyed the integrity of university marking systems. I now have candidates routinely coming in with nearly perfect GPAs who can't answer the most basic questions on topics that were covered in courses they supposedly aced. It's not good.
> I now have candidates routinely coming in with nearly perfect GPAs who can't answer the most basic questions on topics that were covered in courses they supposedly aced.
I guess I am not the only one noticing this trend.
It's because while everyone is sitting behind a screen they are all looking shit up and discussing in discords, I was considering reporting them to program coordinator but didn't because A) I'm no snitch and B) it would've been like 85% of my program and C) in the real world you are allowed to look things up you don't know of, and it is preferred that you do exactly that because no one in the entire country has the entire building code for Ontario memorized
That being said, it's despicable, and it feels like such absolute fucking shit seeing people you know aren't bright getting 15-25% better marks than you because you have integrity and they don't
I think the profs are explicitly aware of it either way, because a lot of them in 2nd year just made everything open book
I agree with that as well yes
But also this shift in teaching isn't anything new
I have 1 prof, for engineering classes (twice now, thank god) and he has been so great, he uses props and real world examples to help teach. I passed his class quite respectively with no cheating
My previous prof, that I failed under and luckily had to take the class again under new prof that I now have again this semester, he would literally just talk ad nauseum and never really provide examples and I couldn't understand or associate shit despite working in the industry for 5 fucking years
Exactly, there is a reason countries that have a memorization focused education system are always behind countries that have problem solving focused education.
Making all exams open book doesn't help when your students are hiring other people to answer the questions for them.
There's no change to how you go about writing tests which can solve this problem. You simply can't prevent cheating without controlling the physical environment that the exams are being written in.
A secondary purpose to education is stratification. If everyone is just googling you dont get the person who can search, understand, encode, retain, and recall well. Everyone acts like that process is pointless but its not. If you have to look more up than the person that remembers more you're less efficient and you cant weave greater understanding and develop novel solutions and generate new ideas because you have to go look it up again.
It wasn't for nothing.
>doing better than you because you have integrity and they don’t
Sounds like you learned the biggest lesson in life: people who cheat often do get ahead.
Most universities would love for some evidence of this. It impacts the institutional reputation when students come out of the program basically useless because they cheated their way through. The dubious ethics don't stop when they leave school. .
It's been this way since I went to college in 2008. We had a mentally disabled kid that they passed through my program even though he was incapable of doing any lab work or assignments without a TA basically doing them for him. How does that inspire any confidence in my degree.
Would echo this as well. We ask basic knowledge questions to candidates with degrees and designations in the field, and an alarming amount have no idea.
Has those questions always been asked though. The gauntlet of testing didn't exist 15 years ago like it does now. Lots of places try to act like they're Google when they're a small 6 person start up.
I had to do a test one time for a job interview, and the last question was "how many cuts can you get with xx length of aluminum to fit this frame", and I gave my answer. Then the guy said "Ha, got you huh? Because rods come in 8ft long sections and you have 40ft, you're mathematically correct, but you'd waste material if you did it this way". Sir, you didn't say they came in 8ft sections, only that you had 40ft. How else am I supposed to do the math? Lmfao
Needless to say, I passed on the follow up call and cited "family issues", because the other interviewer was actually nice and even he seemed put off by the guy trying to flex his "superior knowledge". Lol
Yeah, but the current status quo is that everybody expects you to have a degree under your belt, almost no matter what kind of a job you're applying for, and not the opposite.
A degree does demonstrate skill and experience. The idea that because some people are cheating doesn’t mean that all degrees are suddenly worthless.
It’s a silly presumption.
Had a paralegal start at my wife's work, she couldn't even follow basic directions like organizing receipts by date and category let alone be trusted to complete legal writing.
It's perplexing. On the one hand the meme that GenZ has it so hard and how boomers don't understand how difficult it is to get a good job these days is popular.
On the other hand, literally everybody I know who does any sort of hiring tells the same story: graduates today are shit-tier compared to what they were ~20 years ago.
I'm GenX and I've seen the world changing for a while. It's changed a lot since the boomers' day, that's for sure. But god damn are people fucking idiots these days.
It might be survivorship bias. The partners and managers at my firm love to say how they where better than the new hires when they started. But then they ignore they are litterly the 1% of the staff left behind after the 99% were "coached out".
Trades also.. kids can't manage simple math or do any kind of problem solving. Constantly have to keep them off thier phones and keep them focused on the job. The ones that supposedly have certifications lack common knowledge I know is in the course materials (I took it 20 years ago)
Schools allowing the kids to use phones in class really isn't helping, they now think it's just fine to send texts all day . If schools really want to prep kids for the workforce, maybe ban cellphone use in class.
I used to look forward to hiring a new young guy and sharing my knowledge and experience with them, and then seeing them grow into a great professional. It was satisfying, but last 4-5 years it's very hard to find anyone I would even want to invest the time to train
Seems like a pretty big generalization, maybe consider the pay? Way less young Canadians are available which means the good candidates get snapped up fast. 90% of candidate quality problems come from the fact that anyone smart enough to do a good job isn't taking a 50k/y position just so they can rent some crap apartment.
After spending multiple hours teaching GenXers how to use our new hiring software.....gonna hard disagree that Z is the only generation with idiots.
I have a similar experience. I teach a 3rd year molecular biology lab and have since before the pandemic. Most of the post-COVID era students don't understand the most basic of concepts that are required to be put into practice in a lab setting (which you can't fake).
Honestly it was getting bad before COVID.
Based on my experiencing hiring interns and grads, I can say with complete certainty that the UofT has had a growing cheating problem for the past five years. Students with perfect GPAs but unable to answer any relevant questions.
And this isn't politically correct but it's overwhelmingly from international students. The probability of a student or graduate having a near perfect GPA and being unable to demonstrate any of the knowledge they should have with those marks is an order of magnitude higher if their high school was outside of Canada.
There's a very simple answer that a lot of students aren't going to like: eliminate assignments and remote examination. Your grade comes 100% from in-person tests and exams, written in a physically controlled environment (like a proctored exam hall).
This is the way universities used to work. 60-70% of your mark from the final exam, 30% from the midterm and 0%-10% from assignments used to be the norm. People educated in that environment figured out particle physics and landed men on the moon.
Wow no kidding
However I found...theories difficult to remember (even if I did well in tests)
Practical or work knowledge gained... is much easier to remember/long term
Is this what you mean?
I certainly find practical/work experience easier to remember as well, and I appreciate that co-op candidates aren't going to give me perfect answers, but I'm not exactly grilling these candidates with hard questions. I'm mostly hiring students from software engineering and computer science programs for software development work. To give a concrete example, I have many students come in with a nearly perfect mark in their object oriented programming course, who then can't answer simple questions like "what's the relationship between a class and object?", or "what is inheritance, and why is it used?". There's always been the occasional candidate with high marks and terrible interview performance, but the rate at which I'm seeing those candidates has increased substantially compared to 5 years ago.
I had to interview some coops this past year too, also comp sci, same experience. We wanted some basic DB querying and these candidates had a DB course. Couldn't explain what a JOIN was. Couldn't write a very basic SELECT, or even pseudo code it if they didn't know exact syntax.
Wow, I didn’t do SWE, but took a few GIS courses which had a database component 4+ years ago, and even I could ramble my way through what those mean in regards to SQL
Yeah if someone has a perfect gpa, that often means they cheated instead of struggling through the work.
Cheating is rampant at my school (ubc computer science) with zero consequences
Last time I hired, I found so much copy/paste of information the applicant felt was relevant to the position but wasn't even coherent. They didn't even know enough about the subject to know what they were copy/pasting into their resume was rubbish.
isn't this an issue with your HR where your system searches for a shit ton of keywords and now the applicanbts know the keyword?
Its a game that you rigged in the first place.
I agree it’s worse, but there were some top scoring kids in my classes 15 years ago in the same boat. Some people just regurgitate without understanding.
I'd argue that nursing is different because you have multiple practicums. You learn SO MUCH actually working.
Send *most* professions to school for 6 years without a practicum, or send them to work for 6 months and at the end they'd have the same knowledge.
Dont forget highschools.
Son brought home his report card and the class average for his math class was 98 because they all use some sort of scan app that gives you the answers and the work.
>the class average for his math class was 98
Shouldn't that have triggered some sort of scandal and mass grade nullification? Also I wager all the top universities are noting and penalizing schools with out of wack grades.
I heard some universities are weighting grades differently and will start looking at other things.
I worked with a handful of highschool kids at a timmies and I am worried for them. They are doing take home unit tests and like op, averaging 90+ in physics and math. One student avg 96 in stats and couldn't explain normal distrubtion or z scores to me.
>due to most students failing due to a lack of English comprehension.
I genuinely don't understand how international students are not required to be absolutely fluent in english or french before coming to school here.
You can get fake degrees & diplomas over there for a fraction of the cost, with government signees stamped & approved in corrupt regions to secure advancement in a company. By over there, I mean most of Eurasia. Its a huge problem and one of the main reasons we make people re-certify in our schools. Not that our schools don't have fakes as well, but getting a western countries degree/diploma is more costly.
Parents bribe shady "English schools" in places like China and India to give scores that will qualify them for Canadian schools (or will send in a ringer to take it for them)..
best friends wife works at admissions at the local university and says it's a huge problem and they have started to blackball certain schools and won't admit anyone from them. Problem is once they know they are blackballed, they close, regain accreditation and open under a new name months later and this goes on and on
I honestly wonder if this is what being a Roman in the 4th century was like. Things being still okay, but seeing all the decline starting around you and seeing no signs that it's going to reverse.
Had a similar thing happen in my computer systems technology course where we learned about group policies. So many didn't know because the teacher didn't explain it well at all. It got curved and I ended up with 108% on the test because I only got 1 question wrong.
In my MBA I had a class with 50% midterm and 50% final to determine the grade, and would be curved to 70.
Operations midterm comes and it's 30 multiple choice questions. Lots of math questions like queue optimizations, expected times in multi DC systems etc. I finish it in 45 minutes of a 3 hour midterm, apparently second person to leave was at 90 minutes.
Now we were 50% international students, and this was in 2012 so no laptops, just pen paper. After curve I got a 113%. And then 117% on the final. 2 other people got over 110 on both.
I'm applying to unis right now and this is completely true. Competitive schools are catching on to everyone. Guidance warned us that Waterloo was known to do this, they even have their own blacklist of high schools and they even compute their own adjustment factors. I asked them for the list and to my relief I couldn't find my high school there.
I'm lucky if a Timmies employee can even give me correct change. I gave a 5 for something that cost 2, and got 4 change. When corrected, they the proceeded to tell me how the machine is never wrong. Attempting to confer that "maybe you made a mistake" didn't seem worth it.
Depends on if the teachers care enough to do anything. Some teachers absolutely do, others have died inside long long ago. In some cases your class is the problem class and the teacher will pass you all just so they never have to see you again.
The problem is proving that. For most 7-12 math questions, showing your work is going to be pretty much identical. Unlike an essay where the proof is that the answers are the same.
Yea some universities have had "adjustment factors" in place for a few years. I know specifically Waterloo engineering takes into account the high school you went to and adjusts your average depending on how previous students from that high school faired in university.
Waterloo engineering has done that for decades. I'm regularly surprised that other programs haven't picked that up. It's a bit of a cudgel, though, as it assumes every student at a school should have their grade adjusted the same way.
Easy to punish someone, hard to punish everyone. Really if the whole class is cheating then its kind of the school/teachers fault.
I had an exam where for most of the questions the correct answer was a slightly different shade than the other questions. It was on the computer and only like half the class could see it since it was browser dependent or something. So like 100 people had way higher scores than expected and others had expected scores. After they figured it out well after the tests were given there wasnt much they could do
This fucks over people competing to get into top universities because now they just look at extra-curriculars instead. Why tf should high school kids need to stress out about running a robotics club to get into university?
As a working class university student, It worries me that extra curriculars as increasing important in admissions. Students from poorer households either don't have the money to do extracurriculars, or don't have the time since they need to work to save up for post secondary education.
Yeah there's a huge disparity between outcomes just from having parents with resources to support you with tutoring, let you volunteer in your free time, etc. Even basic stuff like having professionals for parents who can guide you to make more intelligent decisions in what education to apply for and what careers to pursue.
Very very few university programs look at extracurriculars in Canada. My kid is at Mcgill. They take your top 5 grades for admission. A few business schools might look and I think Waterloo does for cs but in general, it's grades only. (and always has been, I went to SFU in the 90s and it was grades only for admission)
"Cheating at Canadian post-secondary institutions has been trending up since the pandemic began, and experts predict the emergence of easy-to-use artificial intelligence technology will only make the situation worse."
One of my profs just mentioned this when he was explaining our research papers. It was honestly the first time I've heard of AI writing papers... Kinda terrifying...
Stick with MC, T/F and short answer tests. Perhaps even a small in class essay using intranet access only.
For research and thesis related
I would interview the students after paper reviewed
Folks who genuinely wrote it themselves should be able to expand on the idea of a sentence or section. Or rebuttal etc.
Ya, I'm in my 4th year so pretty much all my classes are research, presentation and paper based. I would have absolutely no problem with a Prof wanting to speak about the papers after they review them to show further proof that I actually wrote them.
And you would be able to passionately discuss it! That the prof would need to kick you out due to time constraint.... jk
Its those that cant answer....sit there.. like they saw a ghost.... major red flag
Not gonna lie though... I'm a smart-ass so I would probably memorize the speech from the Billy Madison debate scene and ramble that lol.
Edit to add - I'm an old AF 4th year lol.
This was my soft solution to the problem. My students must all present their papers and answer my questions. I'm fortunate that for my most part i mostly teach PhD and senior level research classes, meaning they are small enough for me to implement stuff like this to mitigate the possibility of using this stuff but for people teaching mid or large undergrad classes with papers, good luck woof.
Any masters/PhD requires a questioning by your advisor and team on your paper.
I’ve been in some that are fairly easy and some that are colonoscopies without warning.
>masters/PhD requires
writing papers that are submitted for peer review and presented publicly in poster sessions or talks. Not a perfect system, but less BS than undergrad.
Are exams exclusively done online these days? Pretty sure if they went back to paper and pen a lot of these issues would be solved. Do the test in person
My profs are pretty clever around this.
They ask lots of theory questions and more proofs which I know people struggle way more to try to cheat on, and instead of brute calculations they ask us to analyze a system, and explain why something doesn’t work.
Like the integral of 1/x is ln(x) + c but we have to analyze two different proofs and mention what is wrong with one of them even though they came to the same answer
Literally, in my college course, a Korean girl got caught cheating, and not only did they not kick her like it says in the paper agreement we had to sign at the beginning of the year, but in a couple of the classes that she got 3 or 4 marks below failing, the prof was made to by the dean to bump her marks up to 50%, i heard it got worse the next few years when the class sizes went up and more international students got into the program. I'm thinking its because they bring in so much money... it pretty dirty. I've known a few profs to quit over things they were told to do with international student grades and their cheating. Not that it's only international students that cheat, but they have higher monetary stakes and come from countries that you don't want to disappoint the parents.
At my uni we call the chinese kids 'the hivemind' because they submit identical papers and work as giant groups.
Same with the Indian kids too, although they don't quite get it. Had a prof friend receive one paper, then another paper which was literally just a photograph of the first. No joking at all.
Education means almost nothing anymore, at least where I work (marketing company). My bosses know there's no integrity in post-secondary institutions anymore, it's a place where you can cheat your way to graduation. It has no more credibility than getting some free certification online.
I mean that literally. One of our Google Ads managers never went to post-secondary, just has some online certifications including Google Ads certification and was able to demonstrate his knowledge in the interview process. Been with us for almost 2 years now.
I'm an analytical chemist and transcripts are now required in many job applications now. It's pretty obvious the difference between a 60s chemist and a 80/90s chemist
If you think you can cheat in medical school, you’re probably not familiar with how the curricula are structured. Not only is it a cardinal sin (you’ll get kicked out & blacklisted across the country) but it’s also near impossible to do. You can’t cheat on an OSCE exam because the person grading you is in the room watching your patient interaction.
Maybe it’s time to bring back provincial or possibly national level testing for high schools graduation. Shared exams between colleges and universities would also help.
In the 1970’s all Quebec students took their math, English, French, etc secondary iV and V exams at the exact same time. The non language tests were uniform regardless of language. The teachers had no previous visibility to the tests. It was drawn from the curriculum provided to them the previous year.
No mark primping by schools to make parents happy.
Cheating has always exisited but it more let people just to get by to get a degree or just pass.
However we getting students who reach top grades through cheating now. Like someone who be a C student 10 years ago is getting 80-90 now.
This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs and this will lead to a reduction of quality of professionalism, service and work in overall society.
> This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs
Only if those interviewing for those positions aren't doing their jobs properly.
Education & certifications are one thing.. but experience and ability to think on your feet, answer questions, etc. are important too. At all the interviews I have ever gone to I was asked probing questions about my skillset and supposed knowledge, so that it could be to some degree verified. Yeah, my resume says I went to such and such school and this has been verified. But what do I actually *know*?
If you're simply hiring candidates based on what's written on their resume and nothing else, then you're not doing your job and yeah, you'll end up with incompetent people in your organization, whether students cheat or not.
While I agree with this setiment...
I have seen people who couldnt enter university.... have only HS or college diplomas....and blow university grads out the water... in terms of productivity and work ethic
So not saying cheating pays... but I dont think top Uni grads = necessarily turn into good workers/workforce
Some are brilliant that can wing a test. But are lazy as f%#^
That's because now so many employers require some kind of degree now that people who really shouldn't be going to university now feel obligated to. Like it used to be university was for the truly excellent but now it's just an expectation since a high school diploma is about as useful as toilet paper. A lot of employers these days have gotten really lazy with their hiring and just list off what they think are credentials that can guarantee a good employee so they don't have to put effort into interviewing people or looking deeply into resumes. It's why you see business degrees required to be like an assistant manager at Staples or something, because promoting and training a cashier to do it takes more time and effort.
> This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs
Entry level maybe, beyond that experience plays a factor and AI doesn't give you experience.
In person standardized tests are genuinely the only thing that keep grade inflation in check, and doesn't allow people to succeed by cheating. I know there are flaws with test assessment, but almost anything else can be cheated. Especially tests lazily recycled from last years questions.
I'm a high school/university math and stats tutor and I can definitely tell you that since covid started I get monthly requests to literally write exams for people. They message me on my kijiji advertisement and will not even try to hide their cheating. They will just straight up ask me. I notified the statistics department at the U of Manitoba because it was getting out of hand.
Several provinces have also removed any standardized testing since of course the experience of standardized testing is so stressful for the children lol. The one general ballmark that gave a fairly accurate picture of potential was removed, so the effect of cheating is even worse. Then on top of the cheaters, about 30% of students now get exam accommodations. I don't think it's unreasonable to be in the minority by simply following the rules, getting a normal amount of time, and not cheating. Imagine trying to compete with these pricks?
The consequence to society is unbelievable. We are going to see more and more of our more of the most competitive academic spots go to people that cheated, and misrepresented their abilities. These are people that will go on to become lawyers that will help determine outcomes in millions or billions of dollars, or peoples freedom, it will include doctors that may kill patients, and it will include engineers that will make errors that will result in injury or death. On top of all of that, the students who are actually at the top will now have B-C averages brought down by a curve that's impossible to compete with, and will never have the opportunity to become one of these professionals.
Eh not quite. I can’t speak for engineering, but cheating in law and (especially) medicine is inconceivable. You can’t pass courses without a practical component that requires a demonstration of competencies.
Is it cheating to use wayback machine to snag old exams from the econ prof that had around 600 possible multiple choice questions, and would pick 200 at random every year? If yes, every engineer I knew that took econ 111 and 112 as their cross discipline electives cheated.
We definitely cheated on the commerce course we took though. We all took it as a correspondence course (even though we were all on campus, that way we didn't have to worry about attendance). And then for the online assignments we'd just all do them cooperatively in our computer lab.
We also had a big study group in first year programming in my residence, and I'm pretty sure everyone there had the same bug in one of the test cases, because I forgot to add a negative somewhere, and everyone just followed what I was doing when I was teaching them.
So I went through law school and the licensing exam process for lawyers. I'd agree that cheating is rather hard to do given that virtually all of the assessments are open book but there were still cases in which folks were collaborating with one another without permission as they were allowed to do their exams at home without virtual proctoring.
Just to add my personal anecdote. I only had one online exam in law school, and it ended up being my all time lowest mark, in an area that I currently practice in and generally know very well. I talked to someone that would become a medal winner from my school, and it was also her lowest mark. There was also several rumors about cheating occurring, although I'm not sure what exactly they did (maybe just a group chat to share ideas? I just know that curve gave me my only C in law school)
I can't speak for engineering and medicine, but I'm a lawyer and can speak to law. Cheating may not be that prolific, but accommodated exams are, and the effect is the same. However, cheating can certainly get you into law school, which rejects the vast majority of applicants, so there is an advantage to getting in. You can also cheat with paper/seminar classes, which are more common in 2nd/3rd year, and constitute about 30% of law classes.
I know a couple lawyers that graduated near the top of the class, but used accommodated exams, and they both articled at national firms and then did not continue as associates. I am not sure if they were not given offers, or if they were just burnt out, but it's not doing anyone any favors by giving these people elevated scores.
Nah, they're just cheating themselves... they may steal competitive academic spots, but the moment they need to demonstrate practical skills, it's the end of the line for them.
Just look at [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/10a9vzl/cheated_through_my_entire_computer_science_degree/) yesterday from a student who cheated their way through uni. They can't get a job now because they can't do basic stuff from their program.
Good points. I just mentioned in another thread recently that two lawyers I know that got accommodated exams and got hired at top firms, none of them lasted beyond their articling period.
my favourite line in the article:
>Some professors have been talking about bringing back oral exams so students can't chat, Stark said.
Bring back hand written exams and make each essay assignment come with an oral defence. It should be about as simple as having the TA marking the paper highlight three lines while marking so the prof can hold the person writing to the fire briefly
I wouldn't mind handwriting, although it is slower.
The oral defense thing would gut me. I'm great at researching and analyzing but if you put me on the spot and ask questions--my mind goes completely blank.
I think it's a lot more of an issue for the first and second year students where a lot of the work is just being able to apply the fundamental basics. In computer science you could definitely just google example code for your problem, slightly change it, and submit... But once you get to the 3rd and 4th year courses, good luck being able to understand the more complex concepts if you never properly understood the starting blocks and math taught in the entry level classes.
In most of my later courses, \~70-80% of the grade rides on the midterm and final anyways which are proctored and in person. AI is still easy enough to detect at least, but the real issue in my experience are students (mostly international but definitelly not all) who share old copies of finals and pay other people from fiverr or wherever to write assignments for them.
In the first months of the pandemic, I was hired for a freelance writing website. When I logged in, I was sent to a page of writing jobs. The vast majority were students posting their essay assignments to be completed by one of us freelance writers.
I scrolled through the list and most of these assignments were from PhD level programs or Masters. A few high school and undergrad assignments, but I was shocked at how high level these assignments were.
If you’re in a PhD program and paying a freelance writer to complete your assignment - from scratch - I have nothing but disdain for you. I didn’t bother logging in to work another day.
Honestly most of the people going for master's programs seem to be foreigners trying to immigrate to canada. That's my impression at least. Often isn't worth it as a domestic student to go into academia.
Lol when 80% of university students are Indian international students desperate to pass to get a PR card I'm not surprised. Scamming and cheating is a big problem in Indian culture
This has been a problem forever. I graduated from UBC a while ago and it was ongoing then. In STEM, it was mainly because international students were not capable of writing in English at the level required to get A's. ChatGPT will make cheating even more rampant.
I think a part of this is the problem of school culture: It's more focused on large tests and results than it is on understanding and learning. You don't get an average grade built on long-term performance, but instead are stuck with something that is worth a ton of your grade.
I mean, academic careers writing paper are writing the papers to describe experiments a real person had to conduct. The paper writing is just a part of the job and it would probably be appreciated to have some of it automated. You still need the correct citations and have to tell the program what to write though.
It’s already like this at most universities. They DON’T think they are gonna get caught, so a policy like that is moot. More efforts should be directed at making it harder to cheat in the first place, such as in-person tests, better monitoring, etc.
Well instead of actually trying to make tests/exams harder to cheat on, they've mostly relied on just recording your screen (and sometimes you) while you take the exam, which is... nothing more than a minor inconvenience to cheating. Soooo I am shocked! 🙃
Academic dishonesty does so much damage to post-secondary education as to render it useless. It's terrible enough that universities have all become largely degree mills thanks to admins commodifying the university experience and to corporations pushing hard on demand for degree-bearing people, thus forcing consumer demand for a product that a) does not deliver the desired result for the corporate masters and b) incentivizes unethical behaviour as a means to an end.
It won't stop there.
These students will slowly seep into the workforce. We will have people in all industries, all levels, and positions of trust and authority with a deep-seated corruption of ethics.
Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem if colleges and universities used testing methods that couldn’t be easily solved by a computer. If an essay can be instantly generated by AI, it’s not a very useful skill. But we all know the schools will double down on their existing ways instead of teaching students how to use these exciting new tools.
Welcome to America's slide into mediocrity and ineptitude.
Same reasons as Canada faces now except the U.S. failed across the board to fix the problems.
On the flip side maybe the question should be how useful is homework. Current methods assume repetition is an effective way to use memory models to improve knowledge. I strongly disagree with this (mostly because it in not my learning method). The mechanics of why is far more important than how, yet we only typically see homework with how.
For most of my tutor experience, either why they are doing something isn't taught or the teacher didn't know either. I see this as an opportunity for both teachers and students to focus more on why. It always seems like they ask students to write a sentence before they learned what the letters mean.
For example, when tutoring a subject I get my students to use service like Wolfram Alpha (which has been around for a long time) to compare different methods and to answer questions like why would you use this solution method or to find a different way of asking the same problem.
What did people expect? Lock students behind their computer for 2 years and expect them to learn well? Why would they? Their college experience is spent in the living room with their teacher reading their power point presentation on their computer screen. I sure as hell couldn't care while I was in that position, and how could I? I was lucky enough that I had one normal semester in 2019 to teach me what college was actually like and how I should study.
I'm not excusing using AI to cheat, however everyone and their mom were checking notes during exams for COVID. And this should have been expected before making a stupid decision that didn't think of the future ramifications
I feel like everyone in here is forgetting that 80%+ of your grade in uni is from in person, proctored exams and midterms. Even if you do cheat on the take home stuff, it’s a relatively small portion of your mark and you still need to learn the material for the exams and midterm.
the company i work for has completely stopped hiring new grads because they have all been useless for the last 2 years. completely lacking any critical thinking or the ability to teach themselves something new
people forget that post secondary is meant to teach you how to learn, if you go into the workforce expecting to have everything spoon fed to you like in school, youre gonna have a bad time
Companies can just claim there is a critical shortage of workers and lobby the government for increased skilled immigration. Who cares about the new grads?
(/s but only kinda)
Unreachably high real estate prices/tuition/cost of living inflation has largely put the middle class out of scope for these (non rich) kids. They've been cheated out of their future, and are responding in kind.
In one of the first interviews about the new AI everyone’s talking about a professor said, “We’ll have to find a new way to grade students, maybe go back to one-on-one oral exams.” Of course that would mean hiring a lot of TAs…
Good. We spend good money on our assembly line educations for teachers to hand us over priced books, give us lectures that could’ve been made a video, and say get to work.
Everyone in a profession that’s used ChatGBT knows that you need to have an understanding of the inputs to understand the context of its output. You’re not going to be defending yourself in court or making medical prognosis at the level of doctors or lawyers anytime soon.
ChatGBT has highlighted how bad education has become. It’s a repetitive authoritarian establishment that provides no context and creates great test takers. Instead of teaching kids how to use AI to learn they want to ban it entirely, handicapping then when they actually do need to use it in their profession.
High school too, thankfully most students that chest aren't very smart at this level, like giving me an English essay on the novel Shoeless Joe that's actually about the person Shoeless Joe, or one about Field of Dreams. Maybe AI will make it harder to catch, but most teachers can tell when a student's work is not their own
Universities have very much not kept up with the times. Complexity of what’s taught and assessed must keep up with available knowledge and tools. This began with banning calculators, but frankly pretending ubiquitous tools don’t exist can’t go on indefinitely. If universities continue down this path they will simply fade into irrelevancy.
Unfortunately it's everywhere. Even post University, it's rampant in professional designation exams as well.
Do you have any more info on this? I'd love to know. I did my CPA years ago and it would have been impossible to cheat.
I work where they hosted CPA exams the last 3 years in Vancouver. I see no way of cheating easily. It was pretty crazy the set up. They are very serious about preventing cheating.
I'm not sure if CPA is curved globally or not. The designation I'm referring to is, and it's openly discussed that countries like China and India have completely different exam writing conditions, and cheating is done in the open. I've seen candidates having prior years exams, which they memorize as some questions get recycled. If it sounds targeted, that's not my intent, just the reality of what I've seen and heard over the years. Edit: How it's relevant to Canada: candidates here receiving past exams from friends abroad. Global curve, meaning only 1 or 2 versions of the exam worldwide. Given timezones, also have a window where parts of the world have written, and candidates in Canada haven't.
Wow. that is some serious dedication to cheating. Literally abusing timezones to get away with it.
Some of these exams have pretty intense preparation times. CPA I imagine is in the 100s of hours. So compared to that, definitely still the easy route.
Now the cheating happens because of flaws in the testing software leading to delays in test start times.
When I wrote my Core 2 exam, we were delayed by over an hour. I wrote at the convention centre in Vancouver and we were still outside of the exam room with access to our phones when Ontario stopped writing. I remember thinking at the time that there was nothing to stop us from messaging our Ontario colleagues to ask what was on the exam (not that I did that).
This is exactly what happened with the CFE a few years ago.
In my job role I'm responsible for hiring a few dozen co-op students every year, and in my observation Covid has utterly destroyed the integrity of university marking systems. I now have candidates routinely coming in with nearly perfect GPAs who can't answer the most basic questions on topics that were covered in courses they supposedly aced. It's not good.
> I now have candidates routinely coming in with nearly perfect GPAs who can't answer the most basic questions on topics that were covered in courses they supposedly aced. I guess I am not the only one noticing this trend.
It's because while everyone is sitting behind a screen they are all looking shit up and discussing in discords, I was considering reporting them to program coordinator but didn't because A) I'm no snitch and B) it would've been like 85% of my program and C) in the real world you are allowed to look things up you don't know of, and it is preferred that you do exactly that because no one in the entire country has the entire building code for Ontario memorized That being said, it's despicable, and it feels like such absolute fucking shit seeing people you know aren't bright getting 15-25% better marks than you because you have integrity and they don't I think the profs are explicitly aware of it either way, because a lot of them in 2nd year just made everything open book
>made everything open book That goes beyond this specific issue to a wider change in teaching theory.
I agree with that as well yes But also this shift in teaching isn't anything new I have 1 prof, for engineering classes (twice now, thank god) and he has been so great, he uses props and real world examples to help teach. I passed his class quite respectively with no cheating My previous prof, that I failed under and luckily had to take the class again under new prof that I now have again this semester, he would literally just talk ad nauseum and never really provide examples and I couldn't understand or associate shit despite working in the industry for 5 fucking years
Exactly, there is a reason countries that have a memorization focused education system are always behind countries that have problem solving focused education.
Making all exams open book doesn't help when your students are hiring other people to answer the questions for them. There's no change to how you go about writing tests which can solve this problem. You simply can't prevent cheating without controlling the physical environment that the exams are being written in.
A secondary purpose to education is stratification. If everyone is just googling you dont get the person who can search, understand, encode, retain, and recall well. Everyone acts like that process is pointless but its not. If you have to look more up than the person that remembers more you're less efficient and you cant weave greater understanding and develop novel solutions and generate new ideas because you have to go look it up again. It wasn't for nothing.
Wow, is it okay for me to say that I love you for taking the time to write this out?
Ill allow it.
>doing better than you because you have integrity and they don’t Sounds like you learned the biggest lesson in life: people who cheat often do get ahead.
Oh I knew that, doesn't make it not suck though
Most universities would love for some evidence of this. It impacts the institutional reputation when students come out of the program basically useless because they cheated their way through. The dubious ethics don't stop when they leave school. .
It's been this way since I went to college in 2008. We had a mentally disabled kid that they passed through my program even though he was incapable of doing any lab work or assignments without a TA basically doing them for him. How does that inspire any confidence in my degree.
Would echo this as well. We ask basic knowledge questions to candidates with degrees and designations in the field, and an alarming amount have no idea.
Has those questions always been asked though. The gauntlet of testing didn't exist 15 years ago like it does now. Lots of places try to act like they're Google when they're a small 6 person start up.
I had to do a test one time for a job interview, and the last question was "how many cuts can you get with xx length of aluminum to fit this frame", and I gave my answer. Then the guy said "Ha, got you huh? Because rods come in 8ft long sections and you have 40ft, you're mathematically correct, but you'd waste material if you did it this way". Sir, you didn't say they came in 8ft sections, only that you had 40ft. How else am I supposed to do the math? Lmfao Needless to say, I passed on the follow up call and cited "family issues", because the other interviewer was actually nice and even he seemed put off by the guy trying to flex his "superior knowledge". Lol
Will this lead to companies caring less about what degree you have and more what skills and experience you possess?
Lord I hope so. Even as a holder of a degree myself the amount of jobs that really don't need a degree but demand one anyway is too damn high.
Shift in mindset is already starting https://hbr.org/2022/11/linkedin-ceo-ryan-roslansky-skills-not-degrees-matter-most-in-hiring
This could devalue degrees from certain schools if they don’t crack down on cheating.
This has already started happening. When everyone and their dog has a degree, they suddenly stop meaning anything.
Yeah, but the current status quo is that everybody expects you to have a degree under your belt, almost no matter what kind of a job you're applying for, and not the opposite.
A degree does demonstrate skill and experience. The idea that because some people are cheating doesn’t mean that all degrees are suddenly worthless. It’s a silly presumption.
Had a paralegal start at my wife's work, she couldn't even follow basic directions like organizing receipts by date and category let alone be trusted to complete legal writing.
It's perplexing. On the one hand the meme that GenZ has it so hard and how boomers don't understand how difficult it is to get a good job these days is popular. On the other hand, literally everybody I know who does any sort of hiring tells the same story: graduates today are shit-tier compared to what they were ~20 years ago. I'm GenX and I've seen the world changing for a while. It's changed a lot since the boomers' day, that's for sure. But god damn are people fucking idiots these days.
It might be survivorship bias. The partners and managers at my firm love to say how they where better than the new hires when they started. But then they ignore they are litterly the 1% of the staff left behind after the 99% were "coached out".
Trades also.. kids can't manage simple math or do any kind of problem solving. Constantly have to keep them off thier phones and keep them focused on the job. The ones that supposedly have certifications lack common knowledge I know is in the course materials (I took it 20 years ago) Schools allowing the kids to use phones in class really isn't helping, they now think it's just fine to send texts all day . If schools really want to prep kids for the workforce, maybe ban cellphone use in class. I used to look forward to hiring a new young guy and sharing my knowledge and experience with them, and then seeing them grow into a great professional. It was satisfying, but last 4-5 years it's very hard to find anyone I would even want to invest the time to train
Seems like a pretty big generalization, maybe consider the pay? Way less young Canadians are available which means the good candidates get snapped up fast. 90% of candidate quality problems come from the fact that anyone smart enough to do a good job isn't taking a 50k/y position just so they can rent some crap apartment. After spending multiple hours teaching GenXers how to use our new hiring software.....gonna hard disagree that Z is the only generation with idiots.
In my field (pharmacy), the students are solid. Better than the older pharmacists
I have a similar experience. I teach a 3rd year molecular biology lab and have since before the pandemic. Most of the post-COVID era students don't understand the most basic of concepts that are required to be put into practice in a lab setting (which you can't fake).
Honestly it was getting bad before COVID. Based on my experiencing hiring interns and grads, I can say with complete certainty that the UofT has had a growing cheating problem for the past five years. Students with perfect GPAs but unable to answer any relevant questions. And this isn't politically correct but it's overwhelmingly from international students. The probability of a student or graduate having a near perfect GPA and being unable to demonstrate any of the knowledge they should have with those marks is an order of magnitude higher if their high school was outside of Canada.
Universities will definitely need to rethink how they give assignments and essays. ChatGPT is making everything so much worse
There's a very simple answer that a lot of students aren't going to like: eliminate assignments and remote examination. Your grade comes 100% from in-person tests and exams, written in a physically controlled environment (like a proctored exam hall). This is the way universities used to work. 60-70% of your mark from the final exam, 30% from the midterm and 0%-10% from assignments used to be the norm. People educated in that environment figured out particle physics and landed men on the moon.
Wow no kidding However I found...theories difficult to remember (even if I did well in tests) Practical or work knowledge gained... is much easier to remember/long term Is this what you mean?
I certainly find practical/work experience easier to remember as well, and I appreciate that co-op candidates aren't going to give me perfect answers, but I'm not exactly grilling these candidates with hard questions. I'm mostly hiring students from software engineering and computer science programs for software development work. To give a concrete example, I have many students come in with a nearly perfect mark in their object oriented programming course, who then can't answer simple questions like "what's the relationship between a class and object?", or "what is inheritance, and why is it used?". There's always been the occasional candidate with high marks and terrible interview performance, but the rate at which I'm seeing those candidates has increased substantially compared to 5 years ago.
I had to interview some coops this past year too, also comp sci, same experience. We wanted some basic DB querying and these candidates had a DB course. Couldn't explain what a JOIN was. Couldn't write a very basic SELECT, or even pseudo code it if they didn't know exact syntax.
As someone who did a certificate in analytics and could not in my life get an interview, this is very sad to hear LOL
That’s insane. They genuinely know NOTHING about DB them.
Wow, I didn’t do SWE, but took a few GIS courses which had a database component 4+ years ago, and even I could ramble my way through what those mean in regards to SQL
Yeah if someone has a perfect gpa, that often means they cheated instead of struggling through the work. Cheating is rampant at my school (ubc computer science) with zero consequences
Last time I hired, I found so much copy/paste of information the applicant felt was relevant to the position but wasn't even coherent. They didn't even know enough about the subject to know what they were copy/pasting into their resume was rubbish.
Pretty sure everyone does that to get past the computer filter that scans your resume for keywords and such.
isn't this an issue with your HR where your system searches for a shit ton of keywords and now the applicanbts know the keyword? Its a game that you rigged in the first place.
I agree it’s worse, but there were some top scoring kids in my classes 15 years ago in the same boat. Some people just regurgitate without understanding.
Imagine this but nursing lololol
It's scary because people's lives are at stake when nurses don't know what they're doing.
I'd argue that nursing is different because you have multiple practicums. You learn SO MUCH actually working. Send *most* professions to school for 6 years without a practicum, or send them to work for 6 months and at the end they'd have the same knowledge.
What industry are you in?
Sounds like oral exams should become part of the norm
Dont forget highschools. Son brought home his report card and the class average for his math class was 98 because they all use some sort of scan app that gives you the answers and the work.
>the class average for his math class was 98 Shouldn't that have triggered some sort of scandal and mass grade nullification? Also I wager all the top universities are noting and penalizing schools with out of wack grades.
I heard some universities are weighting grades differently and will start looking at other things. I worked with a handful of highschool kids at a timmies and I am worried for them. They are doing take home unit tests and like op, averaging 90+ in physics and math. One student avg 96 in stats and couldn't explain normal distrubtion or z scores to me.
I just had flashbacks about z scores... How dare you! I thought I had moved on from them!
LOL I feel the same about stats
I got a 93 on a test but they retroactively graded the class on a curve due to most students failing due to a lack of English comprehension.
>due to most students failing due to a lack of English comprehension. I genuinely don't understand how international students are not required to be absolutely fluent in english or french before coming to school here.
They cheat on the english fluency tests too. Apparently people are super desperate to come to canada? Idk why.
You can get fake degrees & diplomas over there for a fraction of the cost, with government signees stamped & approved in corrupt regions to secure advancement in a company. By over there, I mean most of Eurasia. Its a huge problem and one of the main reasons we make people re-certify in our schools. Not that our schools don't have fakes as well, but getting a western countries degree/diploma is more costly.
Parents bribe shady "English schools" in places like China and India to give scores that will qualify them for Canadian schools (or will send in a ringer to take it for them).. best friends wife works at admissions at the local university and says it's a huge problem and they have started to blackball certain schools and won't admit anyone from them. Problem is once they know they are blackballed, they close, regain accreditation and open under a new name months later and this goes on and on
My$terious. Look at how many parts of the country are simultaneously collapsing.
I honestly wonder if this is what being a Roman in the 4th century was like. Things being still okay, but seeing all the decline starting around you and seeing no signs that it's going to reverse.
Had a similar thing happen in my computer systems technology course where we learned about group policies. So many didn't know because the teacher didn't explain it well at all. It got curved and I ended up with 108% on the test because I only got 1 question wrong.
In my MBA I had a class with 50% midterm and 50% final to determine the grade, and would be curved to 70. Operations midterm comes and it's 30 multiple choice questions. Lots of math questions like queue optimizations, expected times in multi DC systems etc. I finish it in 45 minutes of a 3 hour midterm, apparently second person to leave was at 90 minutes. Now we were 50% international students, and this was in 2012 so no laptops, just pen paper. After curve I got a 113%. And then 117% on the final. 2 other people got over 110 on both.
I'm applying to unis right now and this is completely true. Competitive schools are catching on to everyone. Guidance warned us that Waterloo was known to do this, they even have their own blacklist of high schools and they even compute their own adjustment factors. I asked them for the list and to my relief I couldn't find my high school there.
That's wild. I'd imagine it to be somewhat unfair to students who are actually earning their graces.
I'm lucky if a Timmies employee can even give me correct change. I gave a 5 for something that cost 2, and got 4 change. When corrected, they the proceeded to tell me how the machine is never wrong. Attempting to confer that "maybe you made a mistake" didn't seem worth it.
Lol I worked at a subway and they had the machine spit out small change while we manual gave out bills. Simple but very effective concept.
Those kids are in for a rude awakening later on in life...
Sounds like the testing programmers near to endure during the interview process will be the norm to weed out these folks.
May I ask you what part of the country you’re in? I’m a high school teacher in Calgary and that sounds insane to me.
Eastern Ontario. Have heard some stories from Toronto as well.
Depends on if the teachers care enough to do anything. Some teachers absolutely do, others have died inside long long ago. In some cases your class is the problem class and the teacher will pass you all just so they never have to see you again.
The problem is proving that. For most 7-12 math questions, showing your work is going to be pretty much identical. Unlike an essay where the proof is that the answers are the same.
How dare you try to take away young Johnny's 98 after he got 30's all year and can't chew gum and think at the same time !
Yea some universities have had "adjustment factors" in place for a few years. I know specifically Waterloo engineering takes into account the high school you went to and adjusts your average depending on how previous students from that high school faired in university.
Waterloo engineering has done that for decades. I'm regularly surprised that other programs haven't picked that up. It's a bit of a cudgel, though, as it assumes every student at a school should have their grade adjusted the same way.
Yep, AFAIK Waterloo was the only one when I was in grade 12 in 2017
It did. Along with parents (ourselves included) calling the school. They are "investigating".
Easy to punish someone, hard to punish everyone. Really if the whole class is cheating then its kind of the school/teachers fault. I had an exam where for most of the questions the correct answer was a slightly different shade than the other questions. It was on the computer and only like half the class could see it since it was browser dependent or something. So like 100 people had way higher scores than expected and others had expected scores. After they figured it out well after the tests were given there wasnt much they could do
Yea, but wouldn't regular student tests weed this out?
Exams will. Regular tests apparently they can still have phones with them lol
We had to keep phones in our lockers...if we had them at all.
This fucks over people competing to get into top universities because now they just look at extra-curriculars instead. Why tf should high school kids need to stress out about running a robotics club to get into university?
As a working class university student, It worries me that extra curriculars as increasing important in admissions. Students from poorer households either don't have the money to do extracurriculars, or don't have the time since they need to work to save up for post secondary education.
Yeah there's a huge disparity between outcomes just from having parents with resources to support you with tutoring, let you volunteer in your free time, etc. Even basic stuff like having professionals for parents who can guide you to make more intelligent decisions in what education to apply for and what careers to pursue.
Very very few university programs look at extracurriculars in Canada. My kid is at Mcgill. They take your top 5 grades for admission. A few business schools might look and I think Waterloo does for cs but in general, it's grades only. (and always has been, I went to SFU in the 90s and it was grades only for admission)
I know of Photo math which gives the work and answers
Just go back to handwritten assignments. Easy.
Or timed in-person evaluations. It's pretty easy to disable access to AI on university controlled computers.
"Cheating at Canadian post-secondary institutions has been trending up since the pandemic began, and experts predict the emergence of easy-to-use artificial intelligence technology will only make the situation worse."
Worse for the students. There is chatGPT and other detection services that teachers can use to see if the student used AI.
One of my profs just mentioned this when he was explaining our research papers. It was honestly the first time I've heard of AI writing papers... Kinda terrifying...
Stick with MC, T/F and short answer tests. Perhaps even a small in class essay using intranet access only. For research and thesis related I would interview the students after paper reviewed Folks who genuinely wrote it themselves should be able to expand on the idea of a sentence or section. Or rebuttal etc.
Ya, I'm in my 4th year so pretty much all my classes are research, presentation and paper based. I would have absolutely no problem with a Prof wanting to speak about the papers after they review them to show further proof that I actually wrote them.
And you would be able to passionately discuss it! That the prof would need to kick you out due to time constraint.... jk Its those that cant answer....sit there.. like they saw a ghost.... major red flag
Not gonna lie though... I'm a smart-ass so I would probably memorize the speech from the Billy Madison debate scene and ramble that lol. Edit to add - I'm an old AF 4th year lol.
Old or not... you are near the finish line. Goodluck
This was my soft solution to the problem. My students must all present their papers and answer my questions. I'm fortunate that for my most part i mostly teach PhD and senior level research classes, meaning they are small enough for me to implement stuff like this to mitigate the possibility of using this stuff but for people teaching mid or large undergrad classes with papers, good luck woof.
>I would interview the students after paper reviewed This is how thesis defense works anyway. It's grueling.
Any masters/PhD requires a questioning by your advisor and team on your paper. I’ve been in some that are fairly easy and some that are colonoscopies without warning.
>masters/PhD requires writing papers that are submitted for peer review and presented publicly in poster sessions or talks. Not a perfect system, but less BS than undergrad.
Are exams exclusively done online these days? Pretty sure if they went back to paper and pen a lot of these issues would be solved. Do the test in person
My profs are pretty clever around this. They ask lots of theory questions and more proofs which I know people struggle way more to try to cheat on, and instead of brute calculations they ask us to analyze a system, and explain why something doesn’t work. Like the integral of 1/x is ln(x) + c but we have to analyze two different proofs and mention what is wrong with one of them even though they came to the same answer
Lmao it's been rampant for a long long time, especially with the international students
Yeah, but they don't care, unless you're paying only domestic fees.
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Literally, in my college course, a Korean girl got caught cheating, and not only did they not kick her like it says in the paper agreement we had to sign at the beginning of the year, but in a couple of the classes that she got 3 or 4 marks below failing, the prof was made to by the dean to bump her marks up to 50%, i heard it got worse the next few years when the class sizes went up and more international students got into the program. I'm thinking its because they bring in so much money... it pretty dirty. I've known a few profs to quit over things they were told to do with international student grades and their cheating. Not that it's only international students that cheat, but they have higher monetary stakes and come from countries that you don't want to disappoint the parents.
It’s been rampant since forever, my community college had a pretty robust list of items not permitted in exam rooms.
At my uni we call the chinese kids 'the hivemind' because they submit identical papers and work as giant groups. Same with the Indian kids too, although they don't quite get it. Had a prof friend receive one paper, then another paper which was literally just a photograph of the first. No joking at all.
I know you said you weren't joking but LMAO WTF
I was a TA and two groups submitted the same paper. Didn’t even change the names or anything lol.
If they are foreign students, disqualify and deport.
Education means almost nothing anymore, at least where I work (marketing company). My bosses know there's no integrity in post-secondary institutions anymore, it's a place where you can cheat your way to graduation. It has no more credibility than getting some free certification online. I mean that literally. One of our Google Ads managers never went to post-secondary, just has some online certifications including Google Ads certification and was able to demonstrate his knowledge in the interview process. Been with us for almost 2 years now.
I'm an analytical chemist and transcripts are now required in many job applications now. It's pretty obvious the difference between a 60s chemist and a 80/90s chemist
Future doctors, some of the ones we have are so bad now I wonder if AI hasn’t been around for years
If you think you can cheat in medical school, you’re probably not familiar with how the curricula are structured. Not only is it a cardinal sin (you’ll get kicked out & blacklisted across the country) but it’s also near impossible to do. You can’t cheat on an OSCE exam because the person grading you is in the room watching your patient interaction.
Maybe it’s time to bring back provincial or possibly national level testing for high schools graduation. Shared exams between colleges and universities would also help.
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It’s not worth 50% anymore. They have been decreasing the value for years. My brothers diploma exam was only worth 30%
Wouldnt that cause a higher possibility to cheat? Since people take test on different days etc
In the 1970’s all Quebec students took their math, English, French, etc secondary iV and V exams at the exact same time. The non language tests were uniform regardless of language. The teachers had no previous visibility to the tests. It was drawn from the curriculum provided to them the previous year. No mark primping by schools to make parents happy.
I’m Alberta the exams are taken at the same time, deferrals have a different exam.
Cheating has always exisited but it more let people just to get by to get a degree or just pass. However we getting students who reach top grades through cheating now. Like someone who be a C student 10 years ago is getting 80-90 now. This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs and this will lead to a reduction of quality of professionalism, service and work in overall society.
> This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs Only if those interviewing for those positions aren't doing their jobs properly. Education & certifications are one thing.. but experience and ability to think on your feet, answer questions, etc. are important too. At all the interviews I have ever gone to I was asked probing questions about my skillset and supposed knowledge, so that it could be to some degree verified. Yeah, my resume says I went to such and such school and this has been verified. But what do I actually *know*? If you're simply hiring candidates based on what's written on their resume and nothing else, then you're not doing your job and yeah, you'll end up with incompetent people in your organization, whether students cheat or not.
While I agree with this setiment... I have seen people who couldnt enter university.... have only HS or college diplomas....and blow university grads out the water... in terms of productivity and work ethic So not saying cheating pays... but I dont think top Uni grads = necessarily turn into good workers/workforce Some are brilliant that can wing a test. But are lazy as f%#^
That's because now so many employers require some kind of degree now that people who really shouldn't be going to university now feel obligated to. Like it used to be university was for the truly excellent but now it's just an expectation since a high school diploma is about as useful as toilet paper. A lot of employers these days have gotten really lazy with their hiring and just list off what they think are credentials that can guarantee a good employee so they don't have to put effort into interviewing people or looking deeply into resumes. It's why you see business degrees required to be like an assistant manager at Staples or something, because promoting and training a cashier to do it takes more time and effort.
> This is bad as you gonna end up with incompotent people in top jobs Entry level maybe, beyond that experience plays a factor and AI doesn't give you experience.
In person standardized tests are genuinely the only thing that keep grade inflation in check, and doesn't allow people to succeed by cheating. I know there are flaws with test assessment, but almost anything else can be cheated. Especially tests lazily recycled from last years questions.
How would incompetent people get top jobs ? Maybe theyget a job after graduating, but if they’re incompetent they would be weeded out pretty quick...
I graduated as an RN last year. God bless the registration exam (NCLEX) because the cheaters I knew are getting wrecked by it.
I'm a high school/university math and stats tutor and I can definitely tell you that since covid started I get monthly requests to literally write exams for people. They message me on my kijiji advertisement and will not even try to hide their cheating. They will just straight up ask me. I notified the statistics department at the U of Manitoba because it was getting out of hand.
Several provinces have also removed any standardized testing since of course the experience of standardized testing is so stressful for the children lol. The one general ballmark that gave a fairly accurate picture of potential was removed, so the effect of cheating is even worse. Then on top of the cheaters, about 30% of students now get exam accommodations. I don't think it's unreasonable to be in the minority by simply following the rules, getting a normal amount of time, and not cheating. Imagine trying to compete with these pricks? The consequence to society is unbelievable. We are going to see more and more of our more of the most competitive academic spots go to people that cheated, and misrepresented their abilities. These are people that will go on to become lawyers that will help determine outcomes in millions or billions of dollars, or peoples freedom, it will include doctors that may kill patients, and it will include engineers that will make errors that will result in injury or death. On top of all of that, the students who are actually at the top will now have B-C averages brought down by a curve that's impossible to compete with, and will never have the opportunity to become one of these professionals.
Eh not quite. I can’t speak for engineering, but cheating in law and (especially) medicine is inconceivable. You can’t pass courses without a practical component that requires a demonstration of competencies.
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Is it cheating to use wayback machine to snag old exams from the econ prof that had around 600 possible multiple choice questions, and would pick 200 at random every year? If yes, every engineer I knew that took econ 111 and 112 as their cross discipline electives cheated. We definitely cheated on the commerce course we took though. We all took it as a correspondence course (even though we were all on campus, that way we didn't have to worry about attendance). And then for the online assignments we'd just all do them cooperatively in our computer lab. We also had a big study group in first year programming in my residence, and I'm pretty sure everyone there had the same bug in one of the test cases, because I forgot to add a negative somewhere, and everyone just followed what I was doing when I was teaching them.
So I went through law school and the licensing exam process for lawyers. I'd agree that cheating is rather hard to do given that virtually all of the assessments are open book but there were still cases in which folks were collaborating with one another without permission as they were allowed to do their exams at home without virtual proctoring.
Just to add my personal anecdote. I only had one online exam in law school, and it ended up being my all time lowest mark, in an area that I currently practice in and generally know very well. I talked to someone that would become a medal winner from my school, and it was also her lowest mark. There was also several rumors about cheating occurring, although I'm not sure what exactly they did (maybe just a group chat to share ideas? I just know that curve gave me my only C in law school)
I can't speak for engineering and medicine, but I'm a lawyer and can speak to law. Cheating may not be that prolific, but accommodated exams are, and the effect is the same. However, cheating can certainly get you into law school, which rejects the vast majority of applicants, so there is an advantage to getting in. You can also cheat with paper/seminar classes, which are more common in 2nd/3rd year, and constitute about 30% of law classes. I know a couple lawyers that graduated near the top of the class, but used accommodated exams, and they both articled at national firms and then did not continue as associates. I am not sure if they were not given offers, or if they were just burnt out, but it's not doing anyone any favors by giving these people elevated scores.
Nah, they're just cheating themselves... they may steal competitive academic spots, but the moment they need to demonstrate practical skills, it's the end of the line for them. Just look at [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/10a9vzl/cheated_through_my_entire_computer_science_degree/) yesterday from a student who cheated their way through uni. They can't get a job now because they can't do basic stuff from their program.
Good points. I just mentioned in another thread recently that two lawyers I know that got accommodated exams and got hired at top firms, none of them lasted beyond their articling period.
Was anyone else in university during the late 90's with their own PC?
Woe to the workplaces that value certs over merit.
my favourite line in the article: >Some professors have been talking about bringing back oral exams so students can't chat, Stark said. Bring back hand written exams and make each essay assignment come with an oral defence. It should be about as simple as having the TA marking the paper highlight three lines while marking so the prof can hold the person writing to the fire briefly
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I wouldn't mind handwriting, although it is slower. The oral defense thing would gut me. I'm great at researching and analyzing but if you put me on the spot and ask questions--my mind goes completely blank.
My professor last semester did an oral exam as the class final. I loved it. You really got to see who really knew the material and who didn't
I think it's a lot more of an issue for the first and second year students where a lot of the work is just being able to apply the fundamental basics. In computer science you could definitely just google example code for your problem, slightly change it, and submit... But once you get to the 3rd and 4th year courses, good luck being able to understand the more complex concepts if you never properly understood the starting blocks and math taught in the entry level classes. In most of my later courses, \~70-80% of the grade rides on the midterm and final anyways which are proctored and in person. AI is still easy enough to detect at least, but the real issue in my experience are students (mostly international but definitelly not all) who share old copies of finals and pay other people from fiverr or wherever to write assignments for them.
In the first months of the pandemic, I was hired for a freelance writing website. When I logged in, I was sent to a page of writing jobs. The vast majority were students posting their essay assignments to be completed by one of us freelance writers. I scrolled through the list and most of these assignments were from PhD level programs or Masters. A few high school and undergrad assignments, but I was shocked at how high level these assignments were. If you’re in a PhD program and paying a freelance writer to complete your assignment - from scratch - I have nothing but disdain for you. I didn’t bother logging in to work another day.
Honestly most of the people going for master's programs seem to be foreigners trying to immigrate to canada. That's my impression at least. Often isn't worth it as a domestic student to go into academia.
From this and many other experiences, I tend to view academia a lot more cynically. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right
Lol when 80% of university students are Indian international students desperate to pass to get a PR card I'm not surprised. Scamming and cheating is a big problem in Indian culture
UBC has an entire underground economy of international student cheating rings. Obviously canadian students cheat too but it's not even the same level.
This has been a problem forever. I graduated from UBC a while ago and it was ongoing then. In STEM, it was mainly because international students were not capable of writing in English at the level required to get A's. ChatGPT will make cheating even more rampant.
I think a part of this is the problem of school culture: It's more focused on large tests and results than it is on understanding and learning. You don't get an average grade built on long-term performance, but instead are stuck with something that is worth a ton of your grade.
You really have to wonder what your career longevity will be if AI can write your papers for you. No wonder students are cheating.
I mean, academic careers writing paper are writing the papers to describe experiments a real person had to conduct. The paper writing is just a part of the job and it would probably be appreciated to have some of it automated. You still need the correct citations and have to tell the program what to write though.
Seriously, if this was possible when I was in school I’d be tempted to try it out lol
Automatic expulsion if caught. No refund on tuition.
It’s already like this at most universities. They DON’T think they are gonna get caught, so a policy like that is moot. More efforts should be directed at making it harder to cheat in the first place, such as in-person tests, better monitoring, etc.
Well instead of actually trying to make tests/exams harder to cheat on, they've mostly relied on just recording your screen (and sometimes you) while you take the exam, which is... nothing more than a minor inconvenience to cheating. Soooo I am shocked! 🙃
Academic dishonesty does so much damage to post-secondary education as to render it useless. It's terrible enough that universities have all become largely degree mills thanks to admins commodifying the university experience and to corporations pushing hard on demand for degree-bearing people, thus forcing consumer demand for a product that a) does not deliver the desired result for the corporate masters and b) incentivizes unethical behaviour as a means to an end.
It won't stop there. These students will slowly seep into the workforce. We will have people in all industries, all levels, and positions of trust and authority with a deep-seated corruption of ethics.
AI cheating is going to take the last little bit of value most degrees have left away.
Maybe this wouldn’t be a problem if colleges and universities used testing methods that couldn’t be easily solved by a computer. If an essay can be instantly generated by AI, it’s not a very useful skill. But we all know the schools will double down on their existing ways instead of teaching students how to use these exciting new tools.
Welcome to America's slide into mediocrity and ineptitude. Same reasons as Canada faces now except the U.S. failed across the board to fix the problems.
On the flip side maybe the question should be how useful is homework. Current methods assume repetition is an effective way to use memory models to improve knowledge. I strongly disagree with this (mostly because it in not my learning method). The mechanics of why is far more important than how, yet we only typically see homework with how. For most of my tutor experience, either why they are doing something isn't taught or the teacher didn't know either. I see this as an opportunity for both teachers and students to focus more on why. It always seems like they ask students to write a sentence before they learned what the letters mean. For example, when tutoring a subject I get my students to use service like Wolfram Alpha (which has been around for a long time) to compare different methods and to answer questions like why would you use this solution method or to find a different way of asking the same problem.
What did people expect? Lock students behind their computer for 2 years and expect them to learn well? Why would they? Their college experience is spent in the living room with their teacher reading their power point presentation on their computer screen. I sure as hell couldn't care while I was in that position, and how could I? I was lucky enough that I had one normal semester in 2019 to teach me what college was actually like and how I should study. I'm not excusing using AI to cheat, however everyone and their mom were checking notes during exams for COVID. And this should have been expected before making a stupid decision that didn't think of the future ramifications
I feel like everyone in here is forgetting that 80%+ of your grade in uni is from in person, proctored exams and midterms. Even if you do cheat on the take home stuff, it’s a relatively small portion of your mark and you still need to learn the material for the exams and midterm.
the company i work for has completely stopped hiring new grads because they have all been useless for the last 2 years. completely lacking any critical thinking or the ability to teach themselves something new people forget that post secondary is meant to teach you how to learn, if you go into the workforce expecting to have everything spoon fed to you like in school, youre gonna have a bad time
So I see this as another can of worms How do these grads gain job experience.... if employers stop hiring new grads like your company?
Companies can just claim there is a critical shortage of workers and lobby the government for increased skilled immigration. Who cares about the new grads? (/s but only kinda)
Good for them. Work smarter not harder.
Unreachably high real estate prices/tuition/cost of living inflation has largely put the middle class out of scope for these (non rich) kids. They've been cheated out of their future, and are responding in kind.
Yea, and I bet the numbers are directly tied to the insane increase in international “students”
In one of the first interviews about the new AI everyone’s talking about a professor said, “We’ll have to find a new way to grade students, maybe go back to one-on-one oral exams.” Of course that would mean hiring a lot of TAs…
Pretty noticeable in the work place if they are complete morons….
Can all but guarantee many in the Universities know about this but are willfully blind as they are with many issues.
Students at all levels of schooling have been using ChatGPT to write their papers for them for at least a couple of months now.
As I wrote a couple years ago, [ Let Your Students Cheat on Exams](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511970.2019.1705450) !
Good, it’s stupidly overwrought gatekeeping bullshit.
Could? Oh it will.
Good. We spend good money on our assembly line educations for teachers to hand us over priced books, give us lectures that could’ve been made a video, and say get to work. Everyone in a profession that’s used ChatGBT knows that you need to have an understanding of the inputs to understand the context of its output. You’re not going to be defending yourself in court or making medical prognosis at the level of doctors or lawyers anytime soon. ChatGBT has highlighted how bad education has become. It’s a repetitive authoritarian establishment that provides no context and creates great test takers. Instead of teaching kids how to use AI to learn they want to ban it entirely, handicapping then when they actually do need to use it in their profession.
High school too, thankfully most students that chest aren't very smart at this level, like giving me an English essay on the novel Shoeless Joe that's actually about the person Shoeless Joe, or one about Field of Dreams. Maybe AI will make it harder to catch, but most teachers can tell when a student's work is not their own
Universities have very much not kept up with the times. Complexity of what’s taught and assessed must keep up with available knowledge and tools. This began with banning calculators, but frankly pretending ubiquitous tools don’t exist can’t go on indefinitely. If universities continue down this path they will simply fade into irrelevancy.
Do paper exam and problem solve you'll know right away who knows and who doesn't know the subject