Georgia Tech manages to teach a CS degree for $7k | Hacker News Reader

Georgia Tech manages to teach a CS degree for $7k

nytimes.com

37 pointsarthurjj6 comments

I read the whole article a couple of times, I find it hugely interesting. The part where they wonder if they are taking what could be $57K students and getting $7K students was fascinating, and obvious in retrospect. The answer is no, they are getting $7K students where they would not have gotten a $57K student.

The part about the prof interacting more with the online students was also interesting.

Color me weird, because the other comments here seem like "meh", but I think this is a big deal. Have an upvote :)

"Tests are proctored by a company that locks down a student’s computer remotely and uses its camera to check for cheating"

I'm surprised that is sufficient.

The testing company used appears to be ProctorU, I've used them 4 times for my own online degree. The controls go well beyond simple camera use, they do a lot of checking for programs in the background (programatically, not manually). It can be beaten by a motivated individual, but at the point significant cheating is an issue for a program, there are larger issues to address, like "why do our students feel compelled to cheat?" and "why are tests so valuable that cheating is effective?"

> there are larger issues to address, like "why do our students feel compelled to cheat?" and "why are tests so valuable that cheating is effective?"

I don't quite understand this statement. Tests are so valuable because a university degree is valuable. If there is cheating, it simply means it is too easy to cheat. The doesn't seem to be any larger issue.

The simple solution would be to require that candidates sit the test in a room which is physically supervised by someone who is responsible to the university.

> I don't quite understand this statement. Tests are so valuable because a university degree is valuable. If there is cheating, it simply means it is too easy to cheat. The doesn't seem to be any larger issue.

University degrees have two levels of value: social signaling ("I have a degree"), and proof of knowledge & skills. From an instructional standpoint, social signaling isn't a program goal, it's just an outcome. It's good to realize that degrees are social signals and that has an effect on who applies and is successful in these programs, but the instructional aspects of the program are pretty much entirely focused on knowledge and skills.

So cheating really means that students who are cheating either value the knowledge and skills less than they should, or that the test is a poor method of assessing the knowledge and skills. The student values issue is complicated, and is really more about student selection criteria than anything else - if the school is only selecting students who want to socially signal, that's an issue that needs to be addressed in a systematic way.

Conversely, if the issue isn't a social one but rather about skills, the professor probably isn't doing a good job teaching the material, and there are plenty of ways to remediate that - lower stakes, higher frequency assessment, improving instructional materials and time, etc. In general, both of these problems are pretty well solved by having a more diverse assessment set than just standardized, proctored tests. Even if you can cheat your way through a 2 hour midterm/final, doing the same for a 2 month long course project is much harder. I haven't taken any of the GT course,s but based on their udacity listings (which mirror the MS courses), I would guess appears they are doing fairly bespoke projects on complex topics (i.e. machine learning), where cheating is harder to hide.

> The simple solution would be to require that candidates sit the test in a room which is physically supervised by someone who is responsible to the university.

Beyond the fact that a motivated individual can also cheat on an in-person exam (something like 60% of US college students admit to cheating sometime in their college career), that would create a whole other layer of logistics and cost. It's a lot easier just to have good instruction throughout the program than to spend huge amounts of time trying to catch people who are willing to cheat on their tests.

HN post title makes it sound more impressive than it is.

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