a text i found online about cheating

I DID NOT WRITE THIS!! here's the original tweet.

the article shown in various screenshots is critiqued by the author of this text. it's a bit all over the place, but i believe what the author of the text is conveying is what most students are able to agree with.

has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? would a buddhist monk "cheat" at meditation? would an artist "cheat" at painting? no. when process and outcomes are aligned, there's no incentive to cheat. so what's happening differently at colleges? the answer is in the article:

by revealed preference, students must think the work they do in class is a waste of time. fake bonding activities and "hippie gardening" clearly aren't worth their time, so they outsource to AI. anything "fun" or interesting, they still do by hand.

this student wants to write by hand, but is "forced" to use AI to get good grades! we cram for tests. we copy from wikipedia. we distort our learning to match the legible, regimented evaluation metrics. getting good grades and learning are constantly at odds in modern education.

the author mistakenly believes the ivies are about education. Lee understands the ivies are about elite production and networking. For ivies, *all* schoolwork is a distraction. Zuckerberg learned a lot from Harvard, but never in a class. He got what he needed and dropped out.

college kids *want* to get a job. why do they pay $10k+ and 4 years to get a degree, but then they skip or cheat on all the learning? ask a student, they'll tell you: most of that learning doesn't translate to job performance. the degree matters more than the learning.

our society should care about more than just job skills. but when you force chemical engineers to study Descartes, or high-minded philosophers to learn Excel -- yeah, they're gonna cheat. you're wasting their time. maybe they should want to be more well rounded! but they don't.

in summary:

1. college-as-liberal-arts-education and college-as-jobs-program are fundamentally incompatible goals

2. the way we evaluate students has terrible incentives and isn't predictive anyway

3. the learning done on colleges has a very weak relationship to real world goals

fix the teachers, the grades, the curriculum, teach more practical skills, and let them use AI, and people won't cheat. but after you've done all that, what is left of universities? very possibly, nothing, and THAT's the real reason educators are freaking out

here's the link to the referenced article (click here)