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427 points JumpCrisscross | 10 comments | | HN request time: 0.748s | source | bottom
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skhunted ◴[] No.41904004[source]
I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating.

The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

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1. nostrademons ◴[] No.41904511[source]
The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't.

...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

/dystopia

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2. skhunted ◴[] No.41904759[source]
….and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

I like the phrasing you used.

3. eropple ◴[] No.41904771[source]
> advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars)

Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are.

How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.

replies(1): >>41911016 #
4. ericjmorey ◴[] No.41904796[source]
Math has little to nothing to do with how people are cheated in those fields.
replies(1): >>41911000 #
5. Suppafly ◴[] No.41905796[source]
The people who actually learned the math work in STEM careers, not fancied up sales careers.
replies(1): >>41906118 #
6. hedvig23 ◴[] No.41906118[source]
Yes and if STEM industry is Silicon Valley then that is just advertising ultimately or if not ads, something much more immoral, data collection for social control. Which is advertising's intention as well so I guess all the same work
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7. schlauerfox ◴[] No.41908503[source]
sociopathy isn't intelligence. Power is what enables these abuses.
8. Suppafly ◴[] No.41909062{3}[source]
Not really, that's computer engineering and programming to support the advertising businesses.
9. nostrademons ◴[] No.41911000[source]
Math lets you do it reliably at scale. The basic principles of how to cheat people have way more to do with psychology and information asymmetry than math. But math lets you process orders of magnitude more data so that you have more information and better models of peoples' psychology than they do themselves.
10. nostrademons ◴[] No.41911016[source]
I don't disagree, but was more referring to the swindler side than the rube, and compared to a good ML model we are all dumb.