Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school.
These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.
And there are ways to engage students in learning. In fact, my experience humans basically come out of the womb with a burning desire to learn.
It's just that when you throw at them the 57th of the same exercise with some words swapped out, that desire is extinguished a little.
Humans do something amazing in response: they cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
Give them more interesting things to do and they will cooperate in more productive ways too!
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I also disagree that you have to learn everything for yourself and stop relying on others. Granted, I only have a decade or so of full-time work behind me so far, but in all of it, I have been as productive as I have been thanks to the ability to rely on others.
I don't know how to pave roads, yet I rely on roads paved by others to even get into work. Well there, I don't know how to build refrigerators, but I trust it to keep my lunch safe. Even in performing my actual job, I'm not the sharpest at economics, so I often cross-check my reasoning with other people before going on to spend time on things.
I would be stuck in a cave looking for berries if I didn't rely on other people for skills I don't have, every second of the day.
Humans are built to survive by offloading work on each other.
> cooperate to reduce the damage done by the 58th such exercise.
This is laughably naive. Most of the cheaters I dealt with in my courses were masters students who had zero interest in learning. They were paying for the M.S. on their resume for job prospects or for visa reasons.
You’re right that some students will cheat on rote stuff because they just get bored. Where you’re wrong is thinking that’s the majority of the issue. Huge chunks of students are in college for entirely the wrong reasons.
Curious would you go to a surgeon who said he has his friend do all his brain surgeries? His friend might be out of town when yours is scheduled.
Of course we rely on others for stuff. But you don’t take a math class to simply say “I’ll just skip the classes and have my neighbor take my tests. My goal is to learn as little as possible.” Why even take the class then?
I'd much, much rather have the surgeon who asks a colleague for a second opinion when they are unsure, rather than just going ahead on the wrong assumption because "otherwise I would be cheating".
In fact, the medical profession has practically adopted cheating as a formal practise: they call it grand rounds and it consists of sharing "answers to exam questions" (outcome of patient care) with their colleagues, so they don't have to go through the effort of discovering them on their own.
In this case, the surgeon isn’t conferring with a colleague; the surgeon is wholly unable to perform the operation. Collaboration is not cheating. A WhatsApp group used to collaborate on simple assignments or complicated projects is one thing, wholesale copying multiple choice answers or plagiarizing whole essays or projects is something completely different.
Even so, if my surgeon for whatever reason signed up to do an operation they are unable to perform, I would rather they ask their colleague to step in than charge ahead to avoid accusations of cheating.
I suspect you aren't trying to argue about this situation, though.
I think you're asking about comparing the performance of the student who does know the material well, and the student who needs assistance with it. The answer is not to forbid assistance, it's to design tests where assistance becomes obvious.
edit: looking back at the thread here, I see now that we're arguing over semantics I think. To me, "relying on someone" means that they are incapable of doing it themselves. It seems your definition of "relying on someone" means to get help from someone. If so, I agree, if someone needs to get help from others that's fine. If they are completely dependent on the other person being there (my definition of "rely on"), then the surgeon is incapable of doing the surgery if their friend isn't there.
This thread is about engineers not surgeons. And it happens all the time when an engineer does not feel competent for certain problem, they ask friends for help. Would you ban such practice or what?
I sure as fuck wouldn’t want an engineer responsible for anything important if they cheated. The problem with engineering is that if you cheated through the fundamentals, you won’t even recognize when to ask for help. You’ll just build build something shitty or (depending on the field) sign off on something that puts people’s lives at risk because you missed fundamental flaws.
> Sure, but at some point you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others. And that point is high school.
Pretty sure stack overflow would be out of a use case if that was true.
The real answer is that in the real world people pay you to provide value. If what you are doing can be replaced by a google search, the value you are providing is nill, and you are probably making min wage. Real jobs are not contrived, and thus can't be cheated on in the same way. Sure you might have to look things up, but that's not the part they are paying you for (unlike in many exam settings)
I'm not saying you can be a moron, or have no understanding at all, but Google and stack overflow are tools that more people (engineers) should learn how to use.
I learnt to program using books (pascal, c, c++ etc) and that was slow. When I learned JavaScript every question was seconds from a clear answer. That's a MUCH faster way of doing things, and I for one am a fan.
Mind you that's all just syntax. Analytical thinking, data structures, program logic (ie, how to actually program) we're laid down in a CS degree 30 years ago. So it helps if the foundation is there.
"you have to actually learn skills yourself and stop relying on others"
This isn't either-or, unless you have a very specific job where you only do the same thing again and again until retirement. There are people who do specialize like that (e.g. developers of compilers or kernels), but most of us aren't them.
My experience says that the best programmers with the best skills are precisely the ones that the boss will take aside one day and say "Hey, Bob, we are about to tackle a really complicated problem and you are the best fit."
At which point, you are back to "relying on others", because your skills need updating and it will be the others you are going to learn from. It is a cycle, not a straightforward journey upwards on some kind of skill ladder.
>You can't just coast forever on the people around you. //
I mean to need some skills, and the right birthright in general, but this is exactly what Capitalism is and the wealthy ruling classes seem to be doing excessively well at it. In the UK, some of the over-class have collectively banked £billions from government reserves -- under the guise of providing PPE -- for doing nothing more than knowing the right people and being prepared to cheat (ie be criminally corrupt).
Those involved, if they manage things well, could have a dynasty of extraordinarily wealthy offspring that going forward are likely to have the power to spread immeasurably more corruption.
These are people who will eventually go into the workforce, into jobs that have certain expectations of individual knowlege and ability. You can't just coast forever on the people around you.