I dropped out of a class because students were cheating (at least in my opinion)

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Maleficus

Diamond Member
May 2, 2001
7,682
0
0
cheating means nothing, if they understand it why should they waste their time doing the work? as long as you know what you're talking about in the end it doesn't matter.

GJ wasting your money if you didn't make the refund deadline though (mine passed already for summer school, thats why i mention this)
 

TheVrolok

Lifer
Dec 11, 2000
24,254
4,092
136
Worst reason to drop a class ever. If kids dropped every class they took where a solution manual was available, I don't think many freshman science students would ever graduate. Chem, physics, math - most courses have solution manuals. BTW, what kind of graduate course is this where the prof grades 75% of the class based on homework easy enough to simple look up in solution manuals?
 

SoulAssassin

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2001
6,135
2
0
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Can't you (possibly anonymously) notify the prof.? You don't want people to cheat through life like that. Especially something that's related to their majors.

MYOFB, do you know how hard it was for me to get the book with all the answers?
 

Scarpozzi

Lifer
Jun 13, 2000
26,392
1,780
126
My wife was telling me that she finished taking a test last week.....she heard a girl that finished with the test tell everyone that hadn't taken it yet what was going to be on it.

It kind of made her mad considering she had read countless chapters and memorized a ton of stuff so she knew the material and these stupid girls were going to walk in after reading selected passages 5 minutes before taking it. Hopefully they'll flunk the board exams and have to eventually learn the stuff for real.
 

Eeezee

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2005
9,922
0
76
So what? You'll do better on the exams by actually doing the hw and you'll get the better grade.

Most grad courses I've taken don't even collect hw for this very reason... if the distribution of scores is a delta function, then it is inconsequential to your ultimate grade.
 

ShockwaveVT

Senior member
Dec 13, 2004
830
1
0
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Even more so than undergrad courses, Graduate classes are what you make them.
Congratulations! You've successfully used 13 words to say absolutely nothing.

Let me put it another way.

As a voluntary attendee of a graduate program of study, you are responsible for your own education, even more than was the case when attending voluntary undergraduate courses. The goal of grad school is not to do well in relation to your peers, its to explore and learn more about a subject that you find interesting, or perhaps to hone your skills and acquire knowledge that will lead to a more lucrative career. Either way its up to you to make sure you learn something valuable.

cliffs: The more energy and work you put into a graduate course, the more knowledge and skill you'll gain from it.
 

Whisper

Diamond Member
Feb 25, 2000
5,394
2
81
Originally posted by: ShockwaveVT
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Even more so than undergrad courses, Graduate classes are what you make them.
Congratulations! You've successfully used 13 words to say absolutely nothing.

Let me put it another way.

As a voluntary attendee of a graduate program of study, you are responsible for your own education, even more than was the case when attending voluntary undergraduate courses. The goal of grad school is not to do well in relation to your peers, its to explore and learn more about a subject that you find interesting, or perhaps to hone your skills and acquire knowledge that will lead to a more lucrative career. Either way its up to you to make sure you learn something valuable.

cliffs: The more energy and work you put into a graduate course, the more knowledge and skill you'll gain from it.

Exactly. Many of the doctoral-level courses I've taken place much less emphasis on grades and graded class work than did my undergraduate curriculum. Rather, the importance of the process of finding (and creating, when necessary) knowledge is made paramount. The responsibility to do well is laid almost entirely in the lap of the student, and isn't enforced via grades; basically, if you haven't learned academic responsibility and personal discipline by this point, you should be worrying about much more than bad test scores.

As for the OP, it's obviously your decision to drop the class, but I personally would have stuck around. Just because the other students may be able to easily obtain the test/homework answers doesn't mean that you won't be able to learn the necessary material.
 

ChAoTiCpInOy

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2006
6,442
1
81
Wow 75% of the class was homework and you could just get the solutions. How do you not take that class?
 

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,703
12
81
Every time I've faced a problem in the real world I've been able to sit around with google, papers, textbooks, colleagues etc and solve the problem any way I like. If the solution to the problem can be found on a solutions manual, that's where I'll take it from.
 

Injury

Lifer
Jul 19, 2004
13,066
2
81
You only get out of a class what you want to.

You should have just stayed in the class and learned what you came to learn. Other students cheating in the class may have gotten an a good grade, but all that's good for is ink on paper.
 

bignateyk

Lifer
Apr 22, 2002
11,288
7
0
Uhh, just about every textbook has detailed solutions manuals available for purchase online. I had solutions for just about every textbook in college, plus previous years exams, etc...

It's not cheating at all. It's the professor being too lazy to make his own material. In conclusion, you're an idiot.
 

razor2025

Diamond Member
May 24, 2002
3,010
0
71
Originally posted by: halik
Aww and you have no friends? I googled most of my Computational Theory homework... and I still maintain that being able to prove that something is NP-complete is an absolute waste of my time.

God... I hated that BS. I've yet to find any real-world use for that NP-complete crap.
 

StormRider

Diamond Member
Mar 12, 2000
8,324
2
0
Originally posted by: razor2025
Originally posted by: halik
Aww and you have no friends? I googled most of my Computational Theory homework... and I still maintain that being able to prove that something is NP-complete is an absolute waste of my time.

God... I hated that BS. I've yet to find any real-world use for that NP-complete crap.

Here's a scenario! You have a meanie boss that gets up your a$$ because he says your code to solve the problem is too slow. You say, "There's no way to do it faster! I can come up with a faster heuristic algorithm to solve this problem by coming up with a "good" solution in "most" cases but there's no way to come up with a faster algorithm that is guaranteed to find the "best" solution in "all" cases. Then your meanie boss says, "Just do it you dumb turd!"

Then you prove to him that the problem is NP-Complete. Pwd!
 

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
19
81
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Originally posted by: hypn0tik
It's only cheating if the Prof. forbids the use of the solution manual.

I don't even know if he knows that it exists.

solutions manuals rarely show all work.
 

RESmonkey

Diamond Member
May 6, 2007
4,818
2
0
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Can't you (possibly anonymously) notify the prof.? You don't want people to cheat through life like that. Especially something that's related to their majors.

It was a graudate class.

? How's that different from any class with a teacher? (sorry, I enter college this fall...)

Well, first of all it's "graduate" not "graudate." :eek:

It's a class for students seeking their masters degree.

I didn't type "graudate," you did.
 

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
19
81
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Originally posted by: Random Variable
Originally posted by: RESmonkey
Can't you (possibly anonymously) notify the prof.? You don't want people to cheat through life like that. Especially something that's related to their majors.

It was a graudate class.

? How's that different from any class with a teacher? (sorry, I enter college this fall...)

Well, first of all it's "graduate" not "graudate." :eek:

It's a class for students seeking their masters degree.

I didn't type "graudate," you did.

in a fit of grammar rage...he misses the point.
 

RichardE

Banned
Dec 31, 2005
10,246
2
0
Originally posted by: halik
Aww and you have no friends? I googled most of my Computational Theory homework... and I still maintain that being able to prove that something is NP-complete is an absolute waste of my time.

I guess you missed the entire point of theory classes huh.
 

alkemyst

No Lifer
Feb 13, 2001
83,769
19
81
Originally posted by: RichardE
Originally posted by: halik
Aww and you have no friends? I googled most of my Computational Theory homework... and I still maintain that being able to prove that something is NP-complete is an absolute waste of my time.

I guess you missed the entire point of theory classes huh.

most students even back when I entered college in 1990, no longer wanted challenges but easy A's.

So many didn't learn anything. If one wants to cheat in a class you don't need a solutions manual to do this (also I don't know of ANY textbook that doesn't have a teachers/solutions manual offered when that text has questions to be answered).

The teacher tries to catch as many as they can. They know there is cheating. As a student it's not so important what your classmates are doing as what you are.

In my Processor class there was C++ code floating around the teacher hinted at this and was hoping someone could do something different for once. (C++ was not a requirement).

I wrote the code in vbscript. I didn't always get the best grades, but I did end up with one of the few A's in that class.
 

iamwiz82

Lifer
Jan 10, 2001
30,772
13
81
I seem to recall the solution manuals being available in the library at my college. What good is an answer without the work, though? I cannot remember a class that didn't require me to show the process, the solutions manuals were just for checking your own work, really.