This $12B Company is Monetizing Cheating

The solution of course is not to prevent cheating, but to make it irrelevant. We need to find new ways to assess the student performance, such that cheating will be unnecessary or impractical, i.e., not worth it. There are ways for small classes (project based assessment), but these do not scale up easily.

If you create a metric, it will get gamified until it&#x27;s no longer measuring anything.<p>Especially now with remote school, where students pay regular tuition to get the privilege of having multiple choice exams proctored via some spyware, I can see why some just see it as an exercise to be min-maxed.<p>Caltech always had a strong culture of take-home exams and academic honesty, so it&#x27;s really a solved problem.

The most interesting part of the article, to me, is the estimate that 2&#x2F;3 of college students cheat. I think it&#x27;s surprisingly plausible. Personally, in one algorithms class I took, I was tasked with peer-grading ten other students&#x27; homework, and at least eight of them were clearly copied from the solution.

People optimize for the metric of intelligence not actual performance, reducing time and difficulty. The education industry is not about making people smarter, just getting them to grind away at problems and measuring their performance: like a grind-centric video game, except a thousand times more boring and of course prone to automation.