In her first review after a few weeks on the job, her manager says that she takes too long to do her work; they just need her to take what the client says verbatim, fact check it, and then slap it in a document. She was treating her work like an academic assignment and putting in the effort to craft something unique, when they really just need a fact checking typist.
8 years in higher ed, published study on cancer drugs, thousands of mice died, millions of dollars spent on the lab... all so she can transcribe some text and then validate it against the studies.
Academia is the worst job training program ever.
Academia was never meant to be a jobs training program. The fact that many students treat it as such is not really the fault of the institutions.
No, this isn't true at all. People don't complete PhD's because they looked at their options and thought that one was the best. They do it because other people told them they should, and they just never thought about it.
Pet peeve of mine. Academia is not a training program for jobs. The role of academia is not to produce business-perfect-candidates.
If business wants trained workers, they should train them. Cutting costs by not training them, then blaming universities for not producing trained workers is disingenuous at best.
But no, because the way students (and parents) think about it is "go to college so you can get a good job". And many, many employers require a degree or they won't look at the candidate. In the real world, academia is functioning as a job training program.
Or at least as a gateway to the good jobs. But if it's going to be a gateway, but not do any training... that's pretty inefficient.
As someone who taught a college, that's a flawed statement. Let me propose this to you. You teach Calculus 1000 and there is an end of term exam. Your normal end of term exam is one where everyone sits in the same room, proctors are looking for cheats, things checked, etc. Instead this year you tell your students that this year it will be a take home exam with the following rules: 1) they have 2 hours to do it during the team home peroid; 2) no cheating by the honor system.
Do you think the rate of cheating will be the same? I mean by your logic, it should be.
Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
We're discussing this in relation in relation to COVID, so no large gathering. This means no open book in person exams, I'm specifically talking about take home exams.
> Another professor devised an exam that used your student ID as a variable of the first question, and subsequent questions used the previous answers as inputs. Impossible to cheat.
Really easy to do so in a take home exam.
I think the larger point is that it is fairly easy in any subject to design a test that is very hard to cheat on. It is much harder to find the resources in modern education to grade that test since each submission is likely unique.
Tests that are easy to grade (like multiple choice), tend to be tests that are easy to cheat....
It's true that you usually can't cheat your way through such an exam provided you actually write the answer yourself, but in a take-home situation you can always ask someone else to solve it for you.
For things such as proofs, it might give you a problem for which the theorem is needed, then ask you to solve the problem, indicate which theorem you used, and then prove the theorem.
Please tell me how you would structure such an exam without a proctoring system as described.
Of course if you have 50 students per instructor this is not going to work...
Computer science: Solve a complex problem in code. Include a git history. Be ready to defend your program design if I get suspicious.
Econ: Long answer question: Pick 5 concepts that we learned about that you think are most important. Explain them as you would to a ten year old.
You can always just pay someone to do it for you.
I mean, we're obviously upset about false positives, and we should be. But I'm presuming that some people are caught who were cheating, and without the software they would have cheated and not been caught.
We can suggest that with an honor code in place, maybe some of those cheating students would have not cheated, because... I mean, if they were willing to cheat with software in place, I'm not sure why would have been deterred by an honor code.
I think in about 98-99% of cases, people who claim an honor code prevents cheating are deluding themselves. Yeah, if you don't have any way of catching cheaters, then you can pretend you have a 0% cheating rate. But it's pretend.
P.S. I'm not speaking for my employer at all.
Where would they get reliable training data?
There's a pile of money to be spent on this stuff, and virtually zero accountability. What's that a recipe for?
The flipside is that when you do catch a cheating case, you completely throw the book at them. It's legitimately easier to cheat under an honor system, if that's what you're wanting to do... so my assumption is that if we catch you at it, it's likely part of a pattern, and if we catch you multiple times the pattern is irreformable. It is not uncommon at honor-code institutions to expel students on the second offence (sometimes even on the first).
I do think that cheating is less prevalent at my institution (and my previous institution) than it is in the larger university population.
We may hate the software on ethical grounds, or because it degrades the exam-experience on many levels, or because its use can be considered abusive, but obviously it has an effect in the intended direction.
I'm not sure I follow why this is bad. I think academic rigor and being a decent scholar, as well as being able to parse and produce research are good things (and in my mind, those are the corner stones of being an academic). Did misunderstand you?
FWIW, in germany (and likely other european countries) we have a two tier system for higher education, consisting of universities and "applied universities", with the latter focusing on applied skills and the former focusing on research, which in think is sensible.
The problem I see is that what you talk about as academic rigor isn't what is taught and evaluated in many of the programs and classes that I've seen or been a part of. A lot of these exams and assessments don't particularly evaluate you on your ability to research and understand knowledge. If I know for example that my physics professor uses a bank of questions then it is much more incentivized for me to memorize that bank of questions vs. understanding the content and working the problems myself. Whereas in say a Discrete Math or Algorithm based class, the final exam/grade is based on a proof you have to write yourself, that encourages (or rather at times forces) you to learn and research like you said.
I also think the issue, and this may just be me looking at from my own experience, a lot of people don't want to be scholars, as you put it. They went to a University based on the unfortunate expectation for some jobs that say you need that diploma as your entry ticket.
While it isn't codified, we effectively have this in the US as well.
Most of the "brand name" universities, plus the flagship state universities, conduct research and grant various doctoral degrees.
Then we have the middle-tier colleges (state and private) that grant masters (often only professional degrees like nursing, MBAs, etc).
And thousands of Baccalaureate-only and 2-year community colleges.
Also, in the US, "university" generally indicates a post-graduate degree granting institution. And "college" usually refers to a 2-year and Baccalaureate-only school. But, also not codified and there are notable exceptions (ex: The College of William & Mary is a top-notch full university who's name pre-dates the convention).
For example, there may be a "College of Engineering" and a "College of Arts and Science" that are part of one university.
It's possible to have a stand-alone college that isn't in a university. A good example is Berklee College of Music, which is narrowly focused on music.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018...
But, you are correct that subject schools within a larger uni are often called College of Such and Such.
People that want to cheat or game the system will find ways, it isn't hard to do. In undergrad we setup a copy of the code checking software that our department used so that we could share code without it getting flagged as copies. I'm sure there are ways to game these systems too if you are motivated enough.
One of the issues is also just academia being so hyper-focused on thinking everyone is there to become an academic which is not the case for the vast majority of people. So these exams and the guidelines for student evaluation is grounded in that expectation instead of the reality.