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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

> The students bullshitting their way through course work are like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. They completely miss the point.

Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly". Especially in subjects you know you're already competent enough in or that aren't relevant to your future goals.

It's stupid in weightlifting because nobody is going to pay you a higher salary if you can do 15 reps instead of 10.

(Although there's a related and opposite problem where people massively overestimate how important their highschool grades are and get unnecessarily stressed out over it.)

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> Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly".

I knew a few people who cheated and gamed the system at every opportunity through high school, all in the name of getting into the best universities.

They got absolutely crushed in college when their old tricks stopped working and they had to actually do the work. One of them got caught cheating and had a wake-up call when the university threatened him for it. He eventually put in the effort to grind it out and graduate a year late, but graduated nonetheless.

He's mentioned that he could have saved himself a lot of pain and suffering by just engaging in school the first time instead of cheating.

This idea that you can cheat your way into a job and then just coast doesn't really match reality. It may work for some people who get into weird jobs that don't fire people, but the idea that it's "optimal" to cheat your way through life until you're handed an easy job doesn't hold up in practice.

Some of them didn't want to make the time commitment-- or partied. But a lot of smart students make then had old answers to tests especially in hard majors like the sciences. I think that counts as cheating.. they probably figured out they were giving canned answers or suspicious they arrived to answer right away.

I did this accidentally once at uni. Previous years tests were posted online (intentionally, by the person running the class) so I was doing those while studying to make sure I knew the material.

I sit down in the actual exam and lo and behold the questions in the test were exactly the same as one of the previous years I'd been using to study, I guess the professor got lazy.

In your anecdote, the person who cheated got into a well-regarded university and graduated (albeit a year late). That's likely to have a better long-term outcome than not cheating at high school, and going to a lower-ranked school.

Cheating worked.

For the individual, maybe. For society, no.

The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play...

Some people can bullshit their way through life forever, but I've seen a lot of more bullshitters stuck doing entry level crap for a long time because their limits became apparent...

> The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play...

Or that perhaps you have a better plan for your own education than a cookie cutter curriculum that is intended to applied indiscriminately to millions of people and hasn't been updated in 50 years.

That's shifting the goalposts from the parent poster who was saying "all you need is the grade for your future career prospects," not "you are educating yourself independently."

Let's not pretend most people happy to cheat their way through to the eventual level of their mediocrity are doing so because they're doing a bunch of other learning.

It’s not a shift. I’m suggesting that both could be happening at the same time: you are maximizing your superficial credentials as easily as possible because credentials will help you and you are genuinely educating yourself because that will also help you.

In theory, maybe, but how many cheaters are undertaking their own great books curriculum in the copious spare time they're freeing up?

If you've written off yourself as "competent enough" or things "aren't relevant to future goals" you might want to think about the phrase "you don't know what you don't know"

I mean stuff like bullshitting your way through an english assignment when you're going to study computer science at uni.

You can be fairly confident that understanding the intricacies of Catcher in the Rye won't be important in any compsci paper or dev job, but the writing skills from the bullshitting are still useful.

Well, I for one hope I don't have to work with people, who only ever spent the minimal effort even including cheating on assignments, because their shortcomings will be what I have to deal with, because they cannot stem (or lift, ha!) their weight. But in reality it is highly unlikely, that one will never have to work with such people. I guess more realistically I should hope for not encountering too many of them.

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