> How universities and colleges can raise tuition an average of 8% a year and get away without doing a minimum of due diligence around cheating is beyond me.
Why would they? The students and their parents aren't paying for hard (which includes catching cheaters). They're paying for the degree. If college was harder the perceived ROI* would be less.
As far as I can tell colleges are happy if the students keep showing up paying real live money-dollars, regardless of if they learn or cheat or even have to do work.
* Individuals might feel like they are getting a good deal, but in the aggregate, most college degrees are essentially worthless now, I suspect because college is way too easy so a degree is a signal for almost nothing.
Agreed. And this article could just as easily be run with the headline "Schools do almost nothing to stop known cheating" which would make for more bad press.
And what exactly should they do? Require students to bring two forms of ID to each test? Require students to sit in Faraday cages during exams? Isolation rooms?
A school can't prevent cheating outright and it's lame to act like it's the school's fault when American and European students understand just fine that cheating is simply wrong and disallowed. If a student wants to cheat, s/he will cheat. The fact that there's an entire industry built around one culture's penchant for doing so seems to imply that maybe that culture is the problem.
> And what exactly should they do? Require students to bring two forms of ID to each test? Require students to sit in Faraday cages during exams? Isolation rooms?
The first article in this series talks about how the SAT is being gamed overseas [1]. The article makes a strong case that a unique copy of the SAT should be administered each time the test is given.
As it is right now, the College Board / ETS reuses the tests to some degree. This 3 minute video is a good summary of the situation [2]
The podcast How to Game the SAT is also enlightening [3]
There are people working on this problem. There is also an alternate test called ACT which has stricter requirements for testing in China.
Supposedly, the College Board, which creates and administers the SAT, is afraid that if it gives the SAT less often then it will give up market-share to the ACT test.
There could be a real opportunity here for some startup that can help either of these testing agencies securely administer tests overseas.
The SAT cancelled a test date in January due to concerns the test they were going to use had already been released on the internet. Then they gave a test in March and found its questions on the internet hours afterwards.
I imagine we'll see more updates from these reporters in the coming months / years. It's a tough problem.
> I would think they care about diluting their brand.
They should, but nobody has sued them over this issue of widespread cheating yet.
Something similar happened at UNC when athletes were taking bogus classes [1], but the judge tossed out the case because the students waited too long to sue [2]
FIRE is a firm whose stated goal is to defend individual rights in education [3].
> At some point these degrees you say are worthless will mean people stop paying - don't you think?
Yes, if there's an alternative to college to earning a higher salary. But, most parents aren't advising their kids to get a blue collar job like Mike Rowe espouses. Parents want their kids to go to college. They're not as concerned about their kids' debt, and high school kids haven't yet learned to be wary of student loan debt. The moment they discover that student debt is a problem is the moment it's too late, when they've failed out of school or look for a job and can't find one.
Rather than pushing college upon everyone, we should be educating students about debt and other options. At the same time, we should be pulling back some manufacturing jobs to provide such other options. The US isn't going to survive on elitist service industries alone. We need to understand that while every human being is capable of very high intellect, every person in America does not need or want to be in the services industry. Obama has been pushing to recall manufacturing jobs [4], so that's a start
Why would they? The students and their parents aren't paying for hard (which includes catching cheaters). They're paying for the degree. If college was harder the perceived ROI* would be less.
As far as I can tell colleges are happy if the students keep showing up paying real live money-dollars, regardless of if they learn or cheat or even have to do work.
* Individuals might feel like they are getting a good deal, but in the aggregate, most college degrees are essentially worthless now, I suspect because college is way too easy so a degree is a signal for almost nothing.