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Comment by spikels | Hacker News Reader

Cargo Cult Education - Schools are built, students attend, teachers lecture, assignments turned in, tests taken and degrees granted. Everyone gets what they want: politicians, students, staff and parents. Yet nothing needs to be taught and nothing needs to be learned.

Doesn't this go on a lot more often then we want to admit?

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I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation.

It's incredibly interesting that not a single party in the process sees actual knowledge as the value gained. Everyone sees the piece of paper as the value: the box that's checked. How long can such an illusion continue? Your guess is as good as mine. At the end of the day though, you either learn what you need to learn or you don't. Industry isn't too terrible at calling out those who can't produce value, but can only cross their t's and dot their i's.

EDIT: I should definitely draw a distinction between the magnitude of cheating/carelessness described in the article and what I encountered at an American university. The article describes a situation that is much worse.

I can promise you that there are schools in America where students and faculty see the knowledge gained as the value, it sucks that you're not at one though.

I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't schools where knowledge is the goal, only that such is the case at a minority of schools. My education was definitely better off than most; I attended a good school. If you do believe there are schools where very little or no cheating occurs, I'd love to hear about it though.

"I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation."

www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/my-articles/engeduc/ARUSSIAN.PDF

The article is about a Russian mathematician who starts teaching in American universities. The same thing already happens in America with these 'business calculus' courses.

There are numerous more subtle forms of corruption in the US system of education

1. Grade inflation.

2. Bell curves so that a certain percentage of students must pass.

3. Student evaluations and students voting by enrolments that discourage tough/realistic marking.

4. Marking of courses is controlled by the teachers of the course. Thus the teachers are in effect assessing themselves.

5. In some countries students who pay full fees are marked easier than those who have government funded places.

Hiring people in IT, I was amazed to find that a high percentage of people who have passed programming courses are totally incapable of writing a working program.

So let us not be too scornful of the Chinese.

This has most to do with the student. If the student wishes to acquire knowledge, most American universities can provide the student with a great deal of knowledge. If you are not at such a university (unlikely, though some schools are significantly weaker in some disciplines than other schools, so YMMV), then such a university is generally just a transfer application away (protip: admissions standards are different for transfer applicants, it is generally, though not universally, easier to get into a more prestigious school as a transfer, having already shown an aptitude for college work).

No student at an American university can honestly claim not to have learned anything and yet be blameless for not having learned anything.

I will admit that many students are not ready to attend college at the age of 18. I think we should do more to allow students the freedom to take some time to explore their options and possibly even take a year or two off of school before deciding whether or not to attend college, where to attend college, and what to study once there.

I agree, and disagree.

Having recently been a student in an American university, I found that in a number of my classes, having a wish to acquire knowledge puts you at a disadvantage. When the majority of your peers are "working in a group" (read: academically sanctioned cheating) and you are not, your grade is likely to suffer. I was able to grasp and learn the material better in the long run, but at the cost of not having a great GPA.

This situation forces any student interested in maintaining a high GPA to focus more on the grade and not the material. The delicious irony being that students who are most eligible for graduate studies are those least intellectual.

> Having recently been a student in an American university, I found that in a number of my classes, having a wish to acquire knowledge puts you at a disadvantage. When the majority of your peers are "working in a group" (read: academically sanctioned cheating) and you are not, your grade is likely to suffer. I was able to grasp and learn the material better in the long run, but at the cost of not having a great GPA.

You are possibly conflating "working in a group" with "academically sanctioned cheating". There are several situations where working in a group happens:

1. Cooperatively solving an assignment as a group, e.g. a programming assignment where pieces of code are divided amongst the members. In such a scenario, I would argue that if you were solving it on your own, you were being stupid. Sure, you learnt how to solve a technical problem on your own; on the other hand you missed out on learning how to work in a group.

2. Studying together in order to comprehend the material better. I am not even sure how this could be interpreted as cheating.

3. Solving say a theoretical assignment together where in reality one person solves the damn thing and everyone else copies the solution. Most math/theory classes (in a decent school) acknowledge that this can happen and have exams to smooth out the grades.

> This situation forces any student interested in maintaining a high GPA to focus more on the grade and not the material. The delicious irony being that students who are most eligible for graduate studies are those least intellectual.

Really? Tell me more about these graduate programs that look only at your GPA. If you are so damn well intellectual, you should be out there working with professors on research projects and whatever to show that you are cut out for graduate school.

> If you are so damn well intellectual, you should be out there working with professors on research projects and whatever to show that you are cut out for graduate school.

Out where? Do you mean in between your class load? (I'm not too familiar with US graduate schools)... I thought your GPA was exactly what they looked for?

During undergrad. It's not like the Engineering college at a given university is that hard to find.

And while GPA is nice, any group selective enough to care is also going to check the transcript. Getting a "C" in Diff Eq. is far different from getting a "C" in "Intro to College Math", for example.

No, GPA is not generally a priority in graduate school admissions. You need a reasonable GPA, but a 4.0 is totally unnecessary. GRE scores and other factors like letters of recommendation and research projects with faculty members during undergraduate are usually more important.

GPA is unimportant to graduate work if you have good research recommendations and skills that the grad department you are applying to needs.

> This situation forces any student interested in maintaining a high GPA to focus more on the grade and not the material.

This also reflects almost every job in the post-university world: the skills required to keep a job are very different to the skills required to do a job.

GPA really isn't all that important for graduate study. GRE score, personal statement, letters of recommendation all matter more, provided the GPA is reasonable. This is, of course, also dependent on the program you are applying to. But with hundreds to choose from, it is usually possible to find a good fit.

as is the essay. My PhD co-advisor was the dean of the graduate students for a spell, and he repeatedly said, 'the one factor that determines the success of a grad student is their GRE writing score and the quality of their essay'. Which is deliciously ironic, because I think he himself was an atrocious writer, I think he has dyslexia, yet, he's the only professor in the institute that has a drug that made it to Phase I.

At the engineering school I graduated from in Canada, which is ranked in the top 20 worldwide, cheating was prolific with nearly all unsupervised work being gratuitously plagiarized.

Although supervised examinations accounted for at least 50% of each grade, any student who didn't cheat and wasn't also very, very bright probably lost at least half a letter grade on their CGPA as a result.

It was common for me to do well above average on examinations and well below average on assignments, since I was not plagiarizing them.

In my engineering school in Poland everyone was given a different assignment, so copying off other students was not possible. Other pathology occured though - since most of the tasks were group assignments (with the usual group being 2-3 people), it was common for a group to just divide the workload among its members across multiple courses, which in practice resulted in a possibility of getting a grade for course x on which one didn't do any work (because he was busy doing group's assignment for course y). The cool unintended consequence of this was that the whole studies were a multiyear training ground in team organisation and negotiations, which is arguably worth more in real life than some of the highly theoretical courses.

Maybe it's different here in the UK, or maybe I'm naïve.

With my A-Levels (end of high-school exams) I felt like I was learning material that I would need to know for my university course, and my university entrance was conditional on the grades I achieved.

Having been at uni for 3 years now, it has confirmed this for me. I had friends in high-school who didn't study maths, and they wouldn't have managed the CS course at my university. I wouldn't have managed it without the A-Level grades I got (or slightly below them).

I also think that my degree matters quite a lot. To me it's a piece of paper that says I have a reasonable competency in computer science, and anyone who has a brief look at the syllabus should see that I will be of a certain level of ability.

It is possible to self-teach yourself much of computer science, but when I talk to other people of a similar age to me who have self-taught and not gone to university, I don't want to come across as cocky, but the gap in knowledge appears very significant to me. After 5 years working I'm sure my degree won't matter much, but I think it will give me a big head start on knowledge and understanding.

Everyone gets what they want except the chinese companies who employ them in their first job.

It's ok, they only have to implement plans stolen from other companies.

Flagged. Lets keep xenophobic comments off HN.

[Edit: s/racist/xenophobic as per conversation below]

It's interesting you assume he was being racist, rather than culturalist. I think it's equally valid to assume he was talking about mainland Chinese business culture.

Is it controversial to say that mainland Chinese companies (as we're talking about here) commonly steal or clone business plans?

That's equally unacceptable, saying "mexicans are lazy" is as bad as saying "hispanics are lazy". It's just xenophobia.

The OP wasn't starting a conversation about business practices, they were attempting to make a witty one-liner by denigrating a group of people and reinforcing a negative stereotype. They were implying that Chinese people don't need to be educated because they do unimportant work.

Imagine if someone had said that it didn't matter if women or blacks cheated in exams because all they did was housework and unskilled labour ? - that's exactly the same as what the OP is doing here.

Please point me to the company BYD Stole from?

Or Tencent?

Or Alibaba?

The "copying" that you seem to be referring to, is no different to "normal business" in the US: Apple open a retail store, Microsoft open a retail store (or was it vice versa?) Is that "copying"? or is that "competition"?

Is it only copying when the parties are different races? or more controversially when one party is chinese?

There's enough corporate espionage happening in the US also.

Just 3 days ago, an officer at a certain US software company announced their intention to launder some open source code written 2 years ago by someone else and bundle it in the next version of their product.

That sounds interesting. Do you have a link you could share?

edit: I'm going to tone back my comment a bit and try to assume the best - that this was a simple misunderstanding and not an attempt to trivialize intolerance.

I believe the person you are replying to was making a statement about widespread Chinese government and corporate practices, and not about the Chinese people in general. God knows that the American government and corporate practices are under a constant barrage of attacks from around the world, yet we do not accuse those critics of xenophobia or racism.

Also, from the Hacker News Guidelines: "If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

This ignores the fact that a huge part of a degree's value is as proof you've passed a lot of difficult filters. One of those filters is ability to do an institution's bidding for many years. For many companies, this is much more important than any particular academic knowledge. For jobs that really require deep knowledge, there are fairly easy ways to test for it that the employer can do themselves (i.e. by interviewing).

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