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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add something like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their power to make a reasonable determination.

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The flip side of this is from the professor's perspective: some undergrad in every class will lie their ass off about why their assignment was delayed.

Unfortunately, this reality produces no good options if you think someone is telling the truth: (1) make an exception, and be unfair to the rest of the class or (2) don't make an exception, and perpetuate unfairness for the impacted student.

That's fair, but in this case it should be pretty easy to verify if the person is lying. The claim is highly reproducible and the instructor wouldn't even have to do it.

It's only "reproducible" if you find other 555's mixed in the shipment but not distributed to students. Depending on what the error rate in the shipment packing is, that might be very easy or it might be quite hard. At any rate, it's a stats problem that the professor is unlikely to want to engage with. Unfortunately.

For the next semester, a good prof would have a QA step or a harnass that turns on a green light if you plug in a working-as-expected package. I can see how the lab assistant job gets plenty to do in a well-run course, and also how unlikely it is to be happening in real life. There aren't enough incentives.

I suppose, although if the student is able to show the prof with the tools that the chip they have (which based on the story should be visually identical or very similar to the rest of the chips) behaves incorrectly, that test can be repeated many times. It's possible the student could have acquired it elsewhere and is snowing, but even if that's the case the fact that they can do the analysis and show (and waited so long in the class to get there), and have the history of asking for help throughout the course, all add up to pretty powerful evidence IMHO. The prof could even do his own test with the chip if he doubts. It seems hard to believe that one student would intentionally try to "cheat" by making his life much, much harder. It's surely a path of much less resistance to just follow the book.

How? What happens when students start buying faulty hardware to justify unrelated delays?

As a teacher, my first rule is, be kind. Sure, there are people who will take advantage of the situation, but they are not really taking advantage of me.

In this case, I'd have a harness that ensures the parts they were given work as advertised, and make it the students' responsibility to report within the first 3 days if it is not working.

Yes, although just having the faulty hardware isn't enough. They also have to use the tools to show that it behaves incorrectly, which is surely a lot more work than just following the book would have been. That is the part that is easily reproducible. The student already knows how, so in a few minutes he can set it up in front of the prof and show him. The prof needn't do anything other than watch for a few mins.

If more of these cases crop up then you should get suspicious, but you also need to consider the impact of giving a student the wrong chip and expecting them to succeed! I think Blackstone's Ratio should apply here personally

Unfairness to the class, if kept under wraps, is a case of no one actually being harmed.

Translation: scammers get the green light.

But OP wasn't a scammer.

The problem: it won't stay under the wraps. People talk. Feels shitty when the scammer tells everybody how easy scamming was, when you yourself worked through the night to finish your assignment.

Note that AI provides a whole new range of possibilities for automating lying about assignments.

Option 3: treat your students like adults as much as possible and be flexible with everyone about how they complete the class as long as they demonstrate that they've done sufficient work and have sufficient mastery of the material. Then you don't need to play arbiter about whether having a child in the hospital is a better excuse than having their backpack stolen, and you don't unfairly favor squeaky wheels over meeker students.

It's a general problem with large bureaucracies. If you're a cog in the machine, the safest way is to always stick to the rules, and avoid any situation where one has to exercise discretion, since any personal judgment comes with potential personal responsibility down the line.

It bugs me that oftentimes there appear to be nothing but cogs (e.g. Intel)

That shouldn't be surprising at all, since that is the safest arrangement for everyone, and therefore the system will tend to approximate it closely in the long term.

I forgot where I read that large organisations are effectively accountability dilution machines. No one is fully in charge, and everyone gets to say that their hands are tied, that computer says no.

This is the dark side of scale.

THe original version of that idea seems to come from "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost Its Mind", by Dan Davies (the "Lying for Money" guy.)

There's a shorter interview with him (in podcast form, includes a well-made transcript) going into these ideas at https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...

Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System – Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo, 2018

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...

“Aggression has an adaptive significance for most animal species and is critical for acquiring and protecting territory, food, reproductive mates, and offspring. In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status (Box 2). It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing (Fish et al., 2002; Falkner et al., 2016; Golden et al., 2016, 2017).”

Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.

I hear so many horror stories in the sciences, I have no idea why anyone would pursue an academic career in it.

Well in the industry you have the weekly JIRA humiliation rituals, bad things are everywhere

What's this a reference to? Not familiar with JIRA humiliation rituals.

Scrum/Kanban ceremonies with assigning points to tasks etc. GP is being melodramatic

I've been redditing for 15 years and until a week ago here on HN, I've never seen the previous commenter reffered to as GP. What is that an acronym for?

GrandParent

Parent is the comment you're replying to, GrandParent is the comment above that, OP is the original poster.

At this point it’s the track to get a visa to work and live in the US. I’ve met so many graduate researchers who put up with way more bullshit than I would ever deal with. And why most grad programs are mostly immigrants.

That's why you should select your PhD advisor very carefully.

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