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I get it wasn't the nicest way to earn a living. My day job was loftier but poorly-paid.
Still, I've got respect for anyone who got by doing this, it can be fun and interesting with the right material, but the clients are often dicks and the money is rubbish. It's quite stressful too, even given the low stakes. I never wanted a bad grade.
My more significant sideline, and the one that ultimately got me into good work, was copy-editing. Also dead by AI.
It's hard not to be bitter about this. I needed those jobs to keep me going whilst I made it in my chosen field. The rich kids in my sector never had to hustle and won't be affected. The folks doing it out of Nairobi, and the state school kids trying to get by overseas will.
A case of AI pulling the ladder.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
Look at your boss, his job is "gainful to him". He likely cheated in college and learned to delegate work and lead people.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
Flattering, in a way.
It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?
It's not like heap allocators are hard to come by, there's one right there in the Linux source code.
I've had plenty of courses where professors were afraid of answer sheets leaking out because they intended to use the exact same tests and practicals the year after. Those were always the courses where someone had a copy of last year's answers that was passed around between groups of students. You can't rely on secrecy to save yourself from having to come up with different tests if you hand out a piece of paper to 50 or even 300 people.
Maybe more coop programs and less class time.
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade
It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
Much was learned today.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.
As long as the Kenyans don't try and use AI themselves.
If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/help
I guess I should not be surprised by people being sympathetic to this “business model.”
It's the old parable of whether it's unethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children.