I would think that students who collaborate on schoolwork or studying are very institutionally fluent and aren't really at risk of the institution stepping over them and calling them cheaters.

I see the college cheating industry as a trade between wealthier cooler kids and the smarter disadvantaged kids, which I suppose is also life in most places, China or US.

The point of school (American school, at least) isnt to learn, its to get a good grade. When the goal is a number, than 'cheating' is simply trying to achieve the goal.

If the goal was to actually learn, the "cheating" that you see in schools would become "collaboration" - much like in a workplace with quotas and ridiculous metrics, people will cheat the system - in a workplace who values output quality first, you end up with collaboration between employees to reach that goal...

The problem is - 90% of us went through the school indoctrination of "the grade is the goal" ... and carry a lot of that mentality out into the work force.. and at worse, many of them start companies and align their business goals for their employees with that same standard..

I think we all remember that kid in school (or college) that joined a group and coasted to grade. I know those people where I work, too. They know little and contribute nothing. We do not serve them by letting them get out of school without the knowledge they need.

So I agree that grade-centric education is poor, but can also not reject either rote learning or evaluation as being an important goal.

Aka Goodhart's Law[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

These are all goals which are harmonious to societal health.

This so that said someone can be slotted into place in the company production line.

I disagree. Plenty of times through school I heard complaints of "When will I need this in the real world!" and numerous comments online complaining about education (particularly arts and social science curricula in university) not preparing people for jobs.

Plenty of things I learned in primary school, high school and in my Engineering degree are not applicable to my day job but did make me a more educated person.

It's funny to witness the education system get simultaneously criticised for not preparing people for the workforce and also only preparing people for the workforce.

It doesn't matter. There must be something that can be taught to you and later used to grade you. Whether it's maths or arts or history of the good deeds of Comrade Stalin, it doesn't matter. What matters is the series of filters, at the end of which is entering the job market. Even the parents don't care what you're being taught - only that you are good at it, so that you can go to better higher-level schools, and get a better diploma at the end. Only few parents and teachers with ideals give a shit about the actual content of the education material...

As for job usefulness, 90% of stuff you'll have to learn on the job anyway.

Of course. Education is about laying the foundation, giving you a bounty of contexts with which you can make faster associations and more quickly learn what you need for the job.

Both of these are correct - and they corroborate my point. The skills taught, they don't prepare you for a real world job - they teach you to stay in line, as few questions, and do what you're told. Thats what you need to be tought to work in a factory or plow a field... or stand behind a cash register.

They don't prepare you for "good" jobs... they prepare you for menial jobs. If everyone came out of high school with real knowledge and real skills, nobody would run the cash register at the gas station for minimum wage...

--Anyone who's experienced it

Cheating and collaboration are not the same. If you've ever taken an advanced math/cs/STEM class you've collaborated often on problem sets, they are often too hard to do alone. But you shouldn't have cheated.

But how do you then assess whether each individual in the group learned that important concept, or if they just all agreed with the one (and only) student who actually learned/knew it?

http://montessoriguide.org/assessment/

Seems to produce good results:

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...

Its akin to evaluating how someone would do something in the middle of the jungle without tools or support. Sure, you will be able to know who does better in that setting, but what conclusion can you bring of that?

Or the surgical team where everyone "collaborated" on basic anatomy.

You are comparing people that dont know to people that know with that allegory. In a collaborative setting you would be able to see what people build, teach each other, and learn.

A team with 5 people that know 20% calculus can produce much better results than a team where 1 person knows 100%. And sometimes they wouldnt be able to produce a result at all.

Welllll you could conclude that they are in a prime position to create a YouTube channel with 178 million views /s

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA/abo...

Collaboration can only occur when each party has something meaningful to contribute.

But you still have to distinguish those who are not effective at all, contributing nothing, but who are still putting their name on the project.

To use the sibling example, there's a difference between a surgeon who draws on other specialists in the operation, vs someone that knows nothing about surgery.

You dont need an individual assessment to do that. The real work world is exemplary on that. People without degrees very often outrank and outperform people with degrees, either through curiosity or through other skills that make him a more important key member.

In real life if someone is regarded as unproductive by his co-workers is not re-tested individually for validation.

Why, for example, do curriculum developers create (or choose to adopt from textbook publishers) scenarios where if one person fails, everybody in the group suffers? That's not why we collaborate. In fact, that's the opposite of why we collaborate. We don't do it to create multiple points of failure.

It's also a problem with the way we assess and the fact that we almost exclusively conduct summative assessments on these types of projects with high-stakes consequences rather than formative assessments that allow the experience to be used to foster understanding.

I'm a parent (and an education journalist). I see a lot of this. My daughter has had to do the entire work for several "collaborative" projects to maintain her GPA just because the other students wouldn't do the work or wouldn't do it well. That's a common complaint.

Two ideas for getting around that:

1. For the types of assignments where a small group produces a single outcome and shares responsibility for it, assess formatively. If the group does poorly, the teacher sits down with them and gives them supplemental instruction. And, in talking to the students, that teacher can also discover where the weaker students are and focus on them. That way you get assessment with zero high-stakes consequences, and you help advance learning rather than ending it with a letter grade.

2. Assign projects where each student has a job and is evaluated singularly for that job but is allowed to work collaboratively with other students (and the teacher) to complete it. There are all kinds of ways to encourage collaboration in those cases without resorting to punishing others for one person's failure in the end product of a collaborative assignment.

As others have said, there's also the question of assessment itself. Why assess for a grade or points or what have you? There's a movement to do away with grades and test scores. It's working fairly well, but it requires serious dedication from the teacher to ensure that students are learning. Large-scale, that's difficult. We don't have 4 million+ teachers who would be willing to do that extra work.

In my experience at least the weaker contributors to the groups success, even those that just coasted, were still very honest when asked to assess their contribution and the contribution of others.

Now, I'm well aware that studying things you can already do is not the best way but this was what happened.