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At the university level, the problem of cheating is more a problem with our idea of a university. In an ideal world, you go to a university to learn. If someone wants to cheat, ultimately they're just cheating themselves (and, if at a private university or even most public universities, throwing a lot of money away). "Cheating" isn't really the university's problem in that view.

Ofc, in reality universities aren't (or not only, and in most cases not primarily) about learning, but about credentialism. Employers and various social systems outsource to universities the role of verifying that people actually know something, or are the "right" sort of person, or other signals.

I don't know how one goes about fixing that, or if it's even possible, but I'd like to see more acknowledgement of it. Fixing "cheating" feels like the equivalent of looking to clever programming to fix product bugs.



Universities should stop issuing transcripts and diplomas that they refuse to guarantee. They are complicit in a fraud against employers.


That's on employers for putting too much faith in educational institutions.

It's like expecting a guarantee from the church that all their exorcisms render the host demon-free.

A degree is an artifact of a belief system. That there are credentialed idiots among us means the belief system itself is flawed.


Grades are also needed in university to check for prerequisite knowledge for courses. You waste everybody's time and resources if you let people into courses who think or pretend that they have the prerequisite knowledge. People who are cheating aren't only cheating themselves.


You don't really need any radical changes, you just have to get rid of the idea of graded homework, which I always hated from elementary school onwards.

Larger projects have a role to play in education, but ultimately if you can't pass the proctored exams, you don't pass the course.




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