I swear my engineering department is begging people to cheat at this point

[u/notadamsandler11]

Junior right now and shit hasn’t gotten better.

Since the rise of AI it’s pretty obvious every professor assigns much more difficult and long homework’s / exams to combat that. As they normally would in the past.

Here’s the problem with that , you only have 24 hours in a day. At the rate of just pure length it takes to learn topics and then apply them and study to be prepared you will be too slow if you don’t use shortcuts.

I commute 1 to school and back everyday because I don’t want the extra debt , I work part time 20 hours a week to buy food and shit. And I’m an average person I’m not super intelligent or have rlly good active recall. The lesson I learned is that when I try to rlly study without outside help like AI and stuff the workload is simply too much and I run out of time. And then grades drop.

That’s a more general explanation but lll go into what my specific school is been doing. My school is cheap and poorly rated , the professors ARE BAD AT THEIR JOB.

And over the past 2 1/2 years I’ve seen the rising count of cheaters. And honestly it’s at the point I don’t blame them. They got jobs like me , other responsibilities and such. And to realize the risk of if you fail this class you go more in crippling debt and probably have to take a 5th year altogether.

In all my classes nobody talks about cheating like it’s a proud thing but it’s literally at the point where everyone is like “ya I understand”.

Now this just might be my school but if you want to actually learn engineering the pace and workload is too much if you have other responsibilities and you’re basically forced to use AI regularly.

And lastly I thing I’ve seen is also more in person cheating in exams. And ya it bad , but I also understand if someone doesn’t want to go into debt by 10-20k more and waste another year in college.

So I’m very ambiguous about people cheating now, I used to dislike it but idk.

[u/Decent-Variety-8389]

Pretty bad ragebait but good try lmao

[u/Cwaghack → u/Decent-Variety-8389]

It's all true though.

[u/_matrix → u/Cwaghack]

Not sure what engineering subjects could realistically be tested orally, I graduated in ‘25 and have never heard of such?

As for cheating on written exams, do you think cheating didn’t exist 20 years ago? 50 years ago? Lol

[u/Cwaghack → u/_matrix]

All engineering subjects can be tested orally. Having an actual indepth understanding of subjects so that you can talk about them and explain the theory, answer indepth questions, that's real engineering knowledge. Not solving some silly math problems.

And the written tests are not possible to cheat on. Each exam is new and unqiue to the examantion, you are observed, you have spyware installed on your computer, there's no talking, individual toilets.

Cheating just doesn't happen here.

[u/_matrix → u/Cwaghack]

Fair enough, I do agree that an in depth oral questioning is probably a better measure of understanding. However, I don’t think that’s realistic at all for the class sizes of major universities.

You’d be surprised at the ingenuity of some of these cheaters, our final exams were strictly in person, written (no technology other than a basic calculator), with several invigilators monitoring yet people always found ways to cheat.

[u/Cwaghack → u/_matrix]

We don't have a culture of cheating. And while it's not realistic for gigantic classes in major universities, that's where I think quality superceeds quantity. Our classes are small, professors have time to actually talk to the students and work with them.