I've seen rampant pre-ChatGPT cheating at my university where it's popular for business undergrads to take computer science as a second major to get a leg up for Product Manager roles.

These people don't intend to ever write a single line of code after university. They aim to be just familiar enough with software development to be able to nod along and throw in a few buzzwords in interviews.

Big money attracts people who just want the money.

This essentially makes credentials more meaningless than ever, even as tuition has grown astronomically.

The cost of making a poor hiring decision can be vast throughout an organization and punish its velocity. It’s pretty typical to want to minimize risk in scenarios like that, so reputable credentials can instill confidence and get past gatekeepers.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a better way to prove domain expertise, adaptive reasoning, and collaboration skills?

This is why leetcode problems might have some actual use.

I wish. They are the most easily exploitable, sadly. People memorize and dump stuff all the time, and it usually doesn’t show reasoning, just how much money and effort you spent on CS fundamentals.

My team has weeded out a lot of bad candidates with super simple, practical tasks. Explain DNS. Order keys from a JSON object. Make a 2 column layout in plain html. You would be amazed at who can’t do that.

What we don’t do is ask the same questions too many people times, as we know some candidates compare notes and even publish the interview questions. With large language models doing the talking we have already found candidates that have been unable to describe the for loop copilot made for them off-screen… so I guess the best system is to be good at being humans and having a go at working together in something.

I would agree with your position on the assumption that the skills being taught by universities are truly valuable.

My computer science and engineering course didn't teach git. I got a test on CSS and I wasn't allowed to use references, I assume the presumption was that I might need to write CSS without the internet I suppose? It introduced a proprietary UML code generator meant for working with oracle. There was 0 percent chance that company wasn't giving my university kickbacks. Speaking of kickbacks, have you looked at the insanity university textbooks are engaging in now?

If I had a choice of hiring someone who had field experience over someone with a degree, it wouldn't even be a choice for me, field experience. But you can't quantify that. you can't CYA with that. So this farce must go on.

Now, obviously, we should improve these issues. Obviously, that piece of paper should mean something. And hey I'm not saying I learned nothing. Despite these failings I managed to learn some valuable skills while I was there. I did take it seriously. But that made these issues all the worse. I would not operate on the assumption that if someone cheated their way through university that they have no skills.

I'm thinking the exact same thing. It also makes me wonder why professors still have mandatory homework when they know students will cheat. Why not give optional homework, and allow students to have their work reviewed by the professor or TA if the student wants. But if the student doesn't want to do it then, they can skip it and waste their money. Then, have mandatory in class tests that cover the material.

I feel like this would cut down the BS professors have to wade through, allow students that want to learn the opportunity to get valuable feedback, prune the students who don't want to try by failing them when tests come around, and hopefully lead to a better overall outcome for everyone actually invested in the education.

Students have lots of competing deadlines. If one class has no deadlines, most students will deprioritize it until the very end when it's too late to realize their mistake. So, having homework worth something (no matter how minor) would be beneficial to most.

It's unfortunate, but a key component of education is motivation -- and deadlines are one key way of providing that.

> what the hell is wrong with students, that they don't want to actually learn the subjects they've enrolled in?

To play devil's advocate, half of my classes were relevant and interesting, the other half were bloated pointless time wasting filler.

There are a lot of classes I didn't take, but wanted to, because they weren't required and your optional electives are a tiny number of credits.