I went through an unconventional learning path - I didn't think I was ready for post-secondary straight out of highschool, so I worked first. After I felt I was ready, I went. Everyone told me I was crazy and I needed to go straight to post secondary, but as a result I was able to figure out what I wanted to do, and gain some discipline and perspective while I was at it. I did well in post-secondary school, far better than I ever could have dreamed of in highschool.

At College I couldn't believe the number of people straight out of highschool who slacked off and wasted their parents' money. I was involved in a student drive and I got to see it even more firsthand. Asking students about why they were interested - "my parents want me to go". "I don't know". Those were the most common answers.

People mature at different rates, and expecting everyone to be ready for College right as they enter adulthood is madness. Some people need some life experience, some people will never gain those skills and should take alternate life paths. To be clear, taking an alternate life path can be risky, and the one I took is not the one for everyone. I think we just need to take a critical look at what we're asking of late teenagers and young adults.

Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste and GPA matters quite a bit.

There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least from having a bad GPA.

I still want the main takeaway to be that we shouldn't necessarily always be pushing teenagers straight into College, and that something clearly needs to change.

For some visa application the criteria was to have graduated from college, and a printed paper saying “this student graduated in 20xx” was enough. No job cared to ask what school it was, how it’s ranked or what grades, as it was out of their social ranking and they wouldn’t be able to pin it in the hierarchy. It was a good school and I enjoyed the curriculum, but really nobody cares.

what. the. hell.

I hate that mindset with passion.

Folks, just skew the odds.

Basically that there's some "chain" of dependencies, impossible to overcome when it comes to career

like previously quoted statement for me sounds like

good gpa -> good first job -> fast path to high tc jobs

mediocre gpa -> mediocre job -> a lot of other not fancy jobs -> high tc job after a lot of years

What I'm saying is that "And your first job determines your second one" is not true (except edge cases like govt jobs).

You can start your career at the most unknown company in country and still manage to jump to the top companies

>or what "skew the odds" means in this context?

Just because the odds are not favoring you, it's still doable

Time to build up a competitive resume so you get an interview despite a lower GPA, and time to study so that when you do get the interview you leave a better impression to make up for the poor GPA.

I don't even remember my GPA because I've seen it maybe twice - once when I received diploma and second time when I've been going thru my documents and just wanted to check out of curiosity

It's so flawed metrics that I'd never even consider it as reasonable when interviewing people

Also had several jobs I wanted that required a certain GPA even 5-10 years into my career.

To someone who values college as almost exclusively for its educational value, maybe that doesn't matter. But to many, especially HR, the degree is valuable for its signaling capability and watering that down has real and lasting consequences.

I still don't appreciate the value of a good education. You could have replaced mine with pre-recorded Stanford lectures, set coursework, work placements, and Saturday morning coffee with a senior engineer to go over the week with our laptops out. It would have been 10% of the cost or less and it would have taught me more.

The ability to use critical thinking does not come from a college education.

Were it possible; employers might screen candidates on the results of a test of critical thinking, as opposed to a degree. However, this has been illegal since Griggs vs. Duke.

how does this follow from not cheating. if you care about not wasting money, you would do everything, including even cheating, to pass.

they don't even know what they really want to do with their lives

or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.

If you care about not wasting money, why risk everything you've spent and not even gain the education that you've purchased while you're at it?

>or maybe they do know and just see 4 years of college as a waste of time to get there.

If they truly already have the skills they need to skip to their life of choice - why cheat? If they don't have this capability, their feeling that they should just be able to skip over education is wrong.

I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.

I pay a fuckton of money of classes that I'm forced to take on subjects that I learned in the freshman year of my highschool that I really do not care about (and aren't related to my major) and yet I'm supposed to feel incredibly enthralled showing up to class everyday and doing the assignments? No, I'm just going to cheat to save time and effort. I don't care about the subject at all, I just care about the GPA that I get at the end of the semester.

And employers check your GPA now. I often hear (usually from older people who have been in the industry before computerized background checks) that you can just lie on your resume and bullshit your way in, but that doesn't fly anymore as an entry level. They just type in your credentials into a database and have your info, and universities are part of that database. It's true that after your first job no one looks at your GPA, but how are you going to get that first job if your GPA isn't actually good to begin with?

I am sad for you. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. But there are endless ways to make money, pick something you actually like.

I've counseled many kids: Draw two circles, one around what you like, the other around what makes money. Do the things in the intersection.

Except I never thought about money until I graduated. "Holy hell!" I realized. "They want to pay me a ton of money for this? I'd do it for free!"

Fortunately I was smart enough not to say that last part out loud.

Happy to see that other's found this too :) This was my experience with CS—I always loved it and I am, to this day, still surprised that they pay me so much because I used to do this exact same stuff at home for fun. I feel like I got exceptionally lucky that my passion just so happens to be something exceptionally profitable because I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.

Can you imagine flying a P-51? I splurged and bought a 30 minute ride in the back seat. Sigh. Holy Crap! Pure heaven! I was smiling for the next week.

*Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I learned about nonlinear differential equations, where Laplace transforms don't help.

I was replying to a college student. Someone going to college does have the option of which major.

I am also referring to people in America. I understand that Americans have a lot more opportunities than people in other countries.

And the worst part is that you're doing this to yourself. You won't have anyone else to blame for it.

I think people aren't baffled by you choosing a high-paying career, but by you not having anything that's both high-paying and interesting. Why electrical engineering and not CS or nuclear or something? Is there nothing at all that both interests you and pays well?

And I know it's a sentiment that isn't unique to me, since a lot of my friends from similar backgrounds share this feeling. You choose the major that you can tolerate and also pays well.

Why are you solely responsible for this?

I see this a lot in computer science / SWE too. I realize you don't have the life experience to answer these questions well so maybe they're just rhetorical: do you think you will be successful when you get a job laying out PCBs and designing schematics? What will your competence level be given that you cheated your way through the relevant schooling? How long until you burn out?

Part of the reason colleges force you to take a lot of courses irrelevant to your major is so the students like you have a slightly higher chance of finding something they ARE passionate about.

Yup...this is not the 80s or the 90s. Employers got burned enough times, and now check that shit closely..lot's of screening.

I'm currently in undergrad for electrical engineering, and I do not give a single fuck about the classes I'm in. I have no passion for electrical engineering - I don't wake up excited to make schematics or lay out a PCB. I do it because it's a good job and I want money, and I know that I need to get a good GPA to get a good job. I don't really care about how I got that GPA or if I learned anything from college, I just want money.

Agree..ppl just want that certificate which acts as a ticket to the middle class lifestyle. they don't care about knowledge for its own sake. Those who care more go on to get a masters or doctorate.

During college, I focused on learning a ton from the few courses that I found interesting (and where I learned new material), and I passed the rest with a B- average. As a result, I got to work with several professors on research and as a TA, and that totally overshadowed my low-3's GPA in the job market. "Research courses" with no requirements other than work I found interesting let me pad my GPA. I graduated in the bottom 30% of the class having done two years of research and taught a course (as the instructor, not a TA). I left for a position with the highest salary of anyone in my class, and I had a company literally begging for me to interview after I turned them down for asking about my GPA.

These are opportunities which you cannot get if you do not engage honestly with the material you are learning. Professors usually know when you are cheating, and professors talk - they may know that you are a cheater the moment you step foot in their classroom. They don't want to report it, though, because it's a lot of work to gather evidence and go through the process.

Some professors of required courses are happy to help you if you are honestly not very engaged with the material in their course. Some have egos that are too big for that, but a lot of them don't. They understand that the course is required, so you're going to get a B or a C if you don't cheat and you want to focus on other things. All they want is for you to learn something from them, and you will still learn a thing or two by doing half their homework honestly.

The back door in the job market is a lot bigger than the front door - a lot of people get jobs from referrals rather than the traditional application process, and most of the really great jobs are found that way. Cheating at school almost completely shuts the back door in the entry level job market, since your professors and fellow students will know you are doing it. Don't underestimate what you're giving up.

I totally understand the pressure, and the idea that these choices are a means to an end. And this isn't meant to sound condescending so please don't take it that way, but please PLEASE do not take this attitude into industry. Especially into a safety-critical industry. Believe it or not, it's more prevalent than you may think and humans are always good at rationalizing taking the easy way out.

I know the knee-jerk reaction will be "yeah, I won't do it when it matters" but these types of choices tend to become habits, and as the saying goes, habits become one's character and character becomes one's fate.

For context, these were a safety-critical systems. A lot of times when something went wrong on a research effort, people can cover their tracks by calling it an "anomaly" and avoid further digging to press forward. But a lot of the "anomalies" can be traced back to avoiding requirements or equivalently lying about test outcomes, most of the time due to schedule pressure or just a simple lack of expertise. And because many safety issues are low probability events, people can get lulled into complacency where this behavior becomes normal since it's still rare for something bad to happen.

Another example further down in the discussion was VW's cheating of emission tests by changing their vehicles operation when it was connected to a test stand.

I wonder what you think will happen after you get that job?

(Either go in a different direction now, or else you might as well start learning how to keep your head above water in your EE career now.)

edit: I should add: I posted the comment you’re replying to and in regard to this:

> …are people who have never had the experience of being a "bad student"

Nah… I’ve been a bad student — just based on averages, likely worse than you. My only “special” skill is that after multiple crushing failures I realized, “hey.. maybe I should think more than zero steps ahead” when considering my many pressing life problems. In retrospect, I’ve found it’s like a superpower because it seems like almost no one bothers to do it, so you can get ahead in almost any circumstance.

I say that having also been the cheater who hated the material and got the grade. Why did I do that? Parents wanted me in a "good career," same as everyone else. They saw a script and they kept pushing in that direction. So I convinced myself into it, at least for a while. It was phony baloney given that in my actual career the majority of my money has been made by crypto speculation and miscellaneous random opportunities, not anything that ever needed a credential. Fortunately I pushed myself onto a path that actually worked for me along the way and graduated right when I was actually starting to appreciate the coursework. Some people make it all the way through medical or law school and then immediately quit the field.

My advice is this, basically - don't try to win at your career, just try to survive; winning is a temporary thing that you can get by pushing harder for a short period, but surviving is a matter of doing everything at a viable level, forever. If you really think this is the best shot you have under the circumstances to achieve a decent life for everyone concerned, then sure, by all means. But aim to exit towards something that actually fits you as soon as possible, even if it's a "simple" move like going from IC into management.

I'm not sure how many young people made the choice to study what they study in college by themselves. But if you did, ask yourself if you are willing to make the sacrifice.

How on earth would an electrical engineering degree help you get a good job?

As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.

Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.

I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.

Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email.

My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.

I was trained as a mechanical engineer. Yet I write compilers. And yeah, a lot of things I learned from ME have made it into the seemingly utterly different compilers. I see a lot of mistakes SE's make because they are completely unaware of other fields.

Do you mind elaborating on this or providing a link if you've discussed this before?

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html

And one about its influence on compilers:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386323

These bad professors would take forever to grade, if not that then they would do what you describe and give us irrelevant information and odd spiels about whatever thing was bugging them in the politics world, or maybe even something their dog or cat did the week before that totally delayed them getting us our grades or assignments. I remember in my statistics course the guy spilled coffee all over our written mid terms! How careless.

I, not much unlike yourself would try and find any easy way to get ahead of the curve. Now, a common theme among these bad professors is definitely giving irrelevant information, being lazy, or even completely disorganized to no hope. With all these mistakes, they end up making huge mistakes in their own syllabus. You have no idea how many terrible things these people would do in their own work!

A neat little thing I found that nearly all bad professors do is list the exact material they would cover throughout the course, maybe not always week by week but an overview of the material we would touch on. How silly of them.

That's not even the kicker, these bad professors would even list the exact place where they took things from. Hilarious indeed. It was usually under some strange section called 'Required Course Materials' or 'Recommended for Review'. These suckers couldn't be any worse at their job, practically giving us the answers.

When I figured this out, I started going all in with the cheating. After getting the syllabus I would get this thing and read it from the beginning to the end, trying to cover as much material going topic by topic to be covered in the schedule. I could finish the course in practically 2 weeks, didn't even have to wait for these lectures that were pretty much a waste of time after going through it. By the 3rd bi-weekly lecture, I would have learned the entire course. Those fools never knew what hit them either, I would ace their assignments and finish exams before anyone else. I would even stop showing up to class with how adept I was at cheating. No one even suspected that I was cheating.

I would try and get others to follow my path. They would always ask how I did it, how did I, who really wasn't all that special, or smart, get so many A's. Even in spite of the quality of instruction.

The answer was always the same - read the textbook!

By the way, I don’t think you really cheated (in an academic integrity sense), you thoroughly read the course material to get these grades. You deserve to get these grades since you already know how to study on your own.

You literally just studied and worked ahead. That is not cheating...

Obviously it’s going to be irrelevant to compilers or something, but not to heuristic approaches or anything with some quantifiable (and actively quantified) nondeterminism.

Should you enable the optimizer change by default, or not? Or do you still need to collect more data? How much more data? What data - more runs or more different code samples? How confident do you want to be, and how confident can you be?

These are questions you will face in your real day to day work, and a few statistics courses will be incredibly helpful to you in answering them.

(It has nothing to do with "in the context of computer science").

For example, in mechanical engineering, I know how to make reliable systems out of unreliable parts. Software engineering is still focused on a hopeless quest to make software perfect. How to do it assuming unreliability has been slowly seeping into software engineering the hard way, bit by bit, over my entire career.

One example: running the brake software on the same computer that is connected wirelessly to the internet.

What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.

> What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.

I regularly discuss this with people who are convinced they can make such a system secure.

For another example, I frequently advocate on HN for embedded systems to have physical write-enable switches for reprogramming the system memory. This makes it a physical impossibility for malware to infect that memory. Nobody agrees with me. They all think they can write bulletproof code.

I can't buy disk drives with physical write-enable switches, either, not since the 1990s. This is necessary so if you try to restore from a backup drive, you can't make a mistake and overwrite the backup, and the ransomware on your system cannot write to it. This is a regression in the industry.

And yet nobody on HN thinks this is a good idea, because it's inconvenient. Or they'll suggest a software switch, which of course is inherently corruptible.

BTW, the aviation industry gets this right. The stabilizer trim has a physical cutoff switch on all their airplanes, including the 737MAX. Unfortunately, in the 3 incidents of MCAS runaway, only one use the switch properly (and you never hear about that incident). The second never used the switch at all, and the third crew decided to disable the trim system when the airplane was in a non-recoverable dive without using trim. (The electric trim switches also are physical and override the software.)

The MLE job market is booming.

For a programming job that requires knowledge of chemistry, it's easier to find a chemist who can program. Likewise physics, math, statistics, electronics, etc.

Writing is how you promote yourself through articles, presentations, etc.

I've been a TA, and I've talked to some students who cheated or considered cheating.

The answer is simple: there is no premeditated reasoning behind cheating. Students don't actively make a decision that "I'm just gonna apply to a university and cheat". That's not what happens in their minds.

They do think they can get through uni on their own when they first started. Then, they make bad decisions, usually small ones, like skipping a class, or something, but it grows into a habit, even an addiction. Before they know it, half of the course is over, and they learned nothing. When the exam comes, it is too late. There is no time to decide to "get everything out of it anymore". So, they cheat, instead of swallowing the bad grade (which they should).

I think that’s the central point.

- It’s not _their_ money, it’s their parents’ either “hard earned” money, but they’re too inexperienced to understand its meaning, or “not so hard earned” money and they’re just going through it like their parents do.

- the goal is also money on the other end of the pipe. The statistics that get repeated is how much more you earn with a college degree vs without one. There’s no catchy clickbait title about how _learning more_ makes your life better. It only makes sense for them to go for the fastest route to having a degree, if possession is the only thing that has been pitched to them.

For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when they could really work that road race with a red painted Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.

It also showed in that Enzo didn't give much of a crap about interior quality or amenities. He had to be forced into adding A/C. All he cared about was the performance of the cars. He also was (in)famous for refusing to sell Ferraris to people he thought were not appropriate. Ferrari will never sell one to Justin Bieber again :-)

In an American university, I've seen people being quite motivated to cheat because their financial aid was depending on a GPA. Nobody might have cared about the GPA later, but when you have thousands of dollars a year on the line, and your first midterm didn't look good...

So sure, most people in an American university, in most circumstances, shouldn't even be considering cheating as an option. But systems and circumstances can be different for others. The fact that this students were using Whatsapp already tells you that maybe their circumstances were different, and they really might be in circumstances where the incentives to cheat are strong.

Then the blocked out part becomes neglected so it turns kind of on/off in nature. It now gives you either super great or awful information.

So as a result, it's not that you don't see the big picture. It's that your inadvertent feedback loop converted high level thinking into a huge scary monster of high-level disasters that will seemingly result if you aren't as clever as can be.

This also explains the cleverness in the face of everything else. Caught? Email back and be clever. Etc. Don't ever stop being clever, caught or no. It is your only (seeming) chance.

But did you also catch the high level thinking student who was feeling stuck and potentially screwed, in their honesty? They realize the system might just as easily punish them. They are also lucky the professor had a considerate perspective rather than a blanket-projection attitude that many have. They are also lucky they weren't randomly selected by the cleverness cabal...

(Also notice that really good professors make for reliable bridges between high and low level perspectives, with expectations of the former but also multi-dimensional empathy for those living the low-level system. This professor is indeed a very clever person on their own. So for them this is situation is probably less likely to result in massive disillusionment as it would for pure high-level folks.)

Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters. From my observations, only the students who were committed to understanding the material went on to have superb careers, with maybe a few exceptions. The rest ended up in dead-end mostly-mindless work, or dropped out of STEM-related fields all together.

I have a concern for the future of our society when the majority of an entire generation seems committed to cheating, though.

> Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters.

Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned in that course. I also cheated a little in american history and poli sci.

I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career.

Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of college, in terms of social experience, credentials, professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.

I disagree. They are undermining the value of the qualification other have earned.

For STEM, sure. This guy is a psych professor though. I suspect that most of their jobs will have absolutely nothing to do with this class. Obviously being truly successful instead of cheating will help in their careers, but I doubt anything they learn in this class would.

The COVID pandemic makes me worried about this even more. It's gotten really bad, I can't imagine how bad it's going to get when the generations it affected reach college. Maybe I'm overestimating it (if you cheated through HS, you might not go to college), but there were already clear trends that are definitely going to be exacerbated.

First, to be clear. DO NOT CHEAT.

Ok. Grades DO matter. When I graduated, there were several companies that wouldn't interview me because I didn't have the grades. I had a 3.2 ish. That meant I had to get a job slightly outside of my degree - which impacted my entire career (12 years amd counting).

Also, you can't lie about your grades - they will ask for your transcripts. The job I got out of college asked for mine after 6 months

This seems so strange to me. I have a BA in Philosophy, but professionally I work in software development.

I got my first job 15 years ago by just showing them the code I wrote for my side project, since I didn't have a degree in the field of any professional experience. Every job since then has been because I was recruited by previous co-workers.

My college degree was never an issue, and certainly not my grades. Many of my coworkers are surprised when I tell them I have no degree, but it is always just a "huh" and then move on.

I am now a director and have hired a lot of people, and unless they have zero professional experience, I pretty much never look at their degree when I am evaluating candidates. I have worked at very large companies, and have never had an issue trying to hire people without a degree.

I am sure there are places where it would matter, but I just can't imagine asking for proof of a degree, let alone grades.

It took me a long time to give up on my dream of being an EE - but I like what I do now. Also, to your point, I ignore college credentials and I don't look at GPA.

Starting 15 years ago was different than starting now.

In some cases you're paying for second rate material, so this holds little sway. Why worry about squandering the learning opportunity when the best learning resource is free on the internet. I'll try to save time in the class and reapply that time to better learning resources (my morals won't let me do this by cheating, but I understand why some do).

My current classes are light on technical merit and heavy on APA style citation requirements. This during a time where many very powerful people can't reliably compose a coherent Tweet (2 sentences max). The bottom half of educational institutions aren't providing real learning opportunity. I will get my piece of paper though.

I bet if someone compared cheaters to students who were working and their wages went into tuition, there'd not be a strong correlation.

Nobody ever asked my GPA after I graduated. My diploma is somewhere in the basement, I've never displayed it and nobody ever asked about it. I attended graduation only to please my parents, who came out for the occasion. I didn't want to buy the class ring, so my dad gave it to me as a gift.

I didn't care about the diploma. I only cared about the education. If I only wanted a diploma, I'd have gone to a much easier university.

If we want to students to behave this way, we're going to have to change how professors behave too. Mentorship and teaching are two different things, and what you're describing sounds more like the relation one seeks in a mentor, not a teacher.

They're also probably not paying for it out of pocket - either they've taken out loans that they haven't really considered the long term impact of, or their parents are covering some/all of it.

Now for sure it could potentially be that the students just don't have enough foresight, being younger and having less experience with life on this planet with other human beings. But again, what if we're not so quick to blame them?

The best thing I can come up with using this line of thinking is that a lot of the stuff that students are forced to study just isn't essential...i.e. it's not actually mandatory for life. Now life is very diverse and there's very little that is actually mandatory. But there are still a lot of things that are pretty important. What if the structure of our education system was more customizable, so students would have a clearer ability to choose their own adventure? Or as another commenter here alluded to, what if our system was more customizable about when you choose to get particular bits of education?

Students aren't always passionate about the required subjects for their degree , potentially because these subjects won't always have a direct correlation in meeting job requirements or improving job performance, and even the students who are passionate may never get the education they desire (picture a lousy lecturer on tenure who's forced to give lectures as part of the job).

Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who comes from a long history of generational poverty who was able to scrape by enough money to save up for a degree so that they can get a 6 figure job at Morgan Stanley (or the like) as a business analyst. The job will probably only require them to put some numbers into spreadsheets and make graphs. The qualifications to do that will require them to get a degree made more expensive through gen-ed requirements and a whole lot of classes they don't need.

Now in that situation would you forfeit your goal for the threat of passing a difficult, irrelevant science class requirement when a better alternative exists that will also free up time to spend more on the classes that will actually be relevant to the job? Even if you wouldn't, it shouldn't be hard to imagine why someone would.

Well its about pretending to be something you are not, people are all about this.

Cheating is really a habit and to a certain extent a lifestyle and not an event. Cheating continues all life, couldn't get promoted? people hop jobs, land a promotion/hike and then pretend they made progress. People wear expensive clothing to hide fat bellies, spend on vacations to take photographs to send out a message to their friends and family they are rich. People pretend to be a lot of things they are not- pretend to be healthy, wealthy, prosperous. If they actually cant be something they'd rather pretend to be.

Cheating exists as a natural consequence of people pretending to be something they are not, its one of the most primal sort of lies a person says to themselves. This is so easy to do, and so easy to convince yourself to be like this- you do this for a while, it will come to you naturally.

>>You’re paying so much money for these courses — probably a ridiculous amount, so much you may never recoup — … so at least get everything out of it you can. Otherwise, why sign up in the first place?

Same thing with buying expensive gym memberships just to go post selfies, or buying books and not reading them.

>>Let me tell you: essentially no one cares what grade you got in your courses.

Precisely, pretty one no one cares about anything at all so you might as well make genuine progress by putting in the work. In these days when no one remembers their parent's date of birth, who bothers themselves remembering anything about the other person at all.

In short stop lying, more importantly stop lying to yourself. Make genuine progress.

Do not get high on the very dope you are selling.

[1] If a short term solution keeps working, is it really short term?

If you cheat your way through life, what do you do when you’re 40 and no longer cute & full of potential? You don’t trust anybody and nobody trusts you.

Bryan Caplan's book concerns precisely this subject: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...

> if you’re cool with cheating, after school is over, just lie when anyone asks your gpa

Tons of employers require transcripts, especially for new grads.

The other theory is that school is an arbitrary experience designed to separate out high skilled from low skilled workers into a separating equilibrium (or, replace skilled with wealthy and you're probably closer to the truth).

The weight between these fluctuates over time, and increasingly there are better & cheaper resources for (1) outside the traditional classroom setting.

My undergrad college tuition was 100% free via a state scholarship program.

Scholarship funding was dependent on maintaining a certain GPA, so I could see why some might be tempted to cheat. Most of my friends lost their scholarships due to GPA.

(For the record, I never cheated in college. I withdrew twice, for a variety of reasons, and never went back.)

http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

There's also an article around here somewhere on signaling theory that I don't have on hand.

And then, culturally, we don't tell you that you need actual skills to get an actual job out of school. We do tell you that you need a degree. And even if you believe a degree is necessary but not sufficient, it may not be at all clear to you that the skills you need are the same as what you're learning in school.

I never cheated, probably because my strongest skill is learning raw material on my. But I get the perspective. You're paying for a degree and would like to actually receive what you're paying for.

The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is.

Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…

Graduate programs are also GPA-gated. So best get those grades up if you want your license to science (i.e., a Ph.D.).