> Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.

Yes, except ...

University courses are always going to have a mixture of people with different motives. One of those motives is going to be a desire to go into research, while another is going to be earning credentials to prove they have an understanding of their field before they embark upon their career. Then there are the people who take the courses with a pure desire to learn how things either in a structured environment or to learn along with like-minded people, without pursuing it as a career path. That runs the gamut from needing university credentials, to the credentials being nice to have, to not needing the credentials at all. Yet, in each case, the desire to learn is genuine.

Then there are the people who are cheating the system by treating the university as a credential mill, the means to an end, where the end has little to do with furthering their understanding. Some of them are upfront about this. I remember one of my high school peers saying they chose their discipline based upon how much money they would earn and how well they would perform. Some choose to deceive themselves about this, largely by griping about how poor instruction is or how irrelevant the course material is while putting little effort into the courses. Whichever way you look at it, these people are problematic when they step over the line by cheating. They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.

There are genuine advantages to learning in a university environment. For some it is structure. For some it is being able to work with their peers. For some, it is having access to professionals in their chosen field. All of these can contribute to understanding, if the learner chooses to do so. I have known very few professors who would turn away someone who was genuinely interested in learning. For the most part, they were more inclined to side with the students who would benefit from learning in a university environment, but were struggling to keep up with the demands of those who would not!

> Then there are the people who are cheating the system by treating the university as a credential mill, the means to an end, where the end has little to do with furthering their understanding.

Is this really an issue? I eventually feel into that bucket. Went to university for EE since I figured I could teach myself CS easily, whereas learning EE without a lab would be harder. I quickly realized I hate a very large portion of EE (anything outside semiconductors) and for most of my courses I did the bare minimum to get an A with minimal understanding.

> They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.

I really don't see how that makes me a passive leech. I agree that cheating is actively harmful to the peers that don't cheat, but someone that doesn't engage is a net gain to the others in my book. By not attending any optional tutorials/office hours it gives other peers more focus time with the professor/TA.

The most trivial example, the requirement for assessment will put a load onto the course staff. While a correct answer presented in the conventional way is a typically easy to assess, an incorrect answer or an answer presented in a non-conventional way is much more difficult to assess.

The people I worked with typically wanted to see students succeed. It went well beyond the mechanics of delivering instruction and assessing work. They considered what they were doing and put time into modifying their practices when students did not appear to be engaged. For a handful of students, it would be successful. In the vast majority of students, it would flop since the disinterested ones were rarely receptive. Some cases may have been similar to yours, where it sounds like you were focusing on other subjects. Some students appeared to be, ahem, more interested in the non-academic merits of university life. It is difficult to tell what the breakdown is since those students were always the most distant. But either way those passive students were a drain. They simply weren't as much of a drain as the cheaters.

Most of what people learn is from the day-to-day, not what they are actually studying. What does that tell you? Instead of ad hominem for 'non-academic merits of university life' perhaps they are not in fact being instructed properly. This makes sense because graduate school is such a grind for personal research instead of actually educating other people.

Teachers need to design their programs around actual learning principles like: Deep Processing, Chunking, Building Associations, Dual Coding, Deliberate Practice.

IMO even CS degrees are worth much these days. I know too many CS graduates that can't grasp the basics, and their work suffers from it. For a recent example (which I hope doesn't get picked apart): even with help they can't guesstimate the complexity of simple algorithms they write.

Genuine interest is a requirement, a degree isn't. Anyone wanting to measure knowledge is even more fucked than we assume.

> Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.

It's not the only way, but it is certainly a good way (at least for some).

In my case, I didn't really know what I didn't know. Before studying CS, I had this vague idea of programming as an activity I liked, but it never really "clicked" in the larger sense, as it was woven with magic that I didn't understand at the time. We make programs using Code::Blocks? Well, who made Code::Blocks, and how did they make Code::Blocks without using Code::Blocks?

After studying CS, it just felt like all those mysteries disappeared. Everything made sense, connected into a coherent whole by various mathematical links.

Of course, there's still a lot of things I don't know, and even more that I don't know I don't know. Every now and then, I run into a new concept that teaches me things that I've kinda wondered about, but couldn't put properly into words. Reading about such topics, and seeing the journey unravel, that another person took in order to discover what I'm getting on a silver platter, is one of the most rewarding things in the world.