Those of you who agree with this student please stand up and be counted. Post it on your Facebook pages, MySpace thingies, personal blogs, etc. I want to know who you are when I'm interviewing to hire new talent.

You don't create a new fucking word by prefixing "cyber-" to it. Didn't we already go through this with that fucking "E-" shit ten years ago?

The word is "cheat," dickholes. It's not any different because it's on the internet. What is this, a fucking patent application? /rant

I found some pretty damning evidence that a relative of mine was cheating in high school, using the "purchase a paper online" method to "write" instead of actually doing the work himself. While he graduated high school without incident, you wouldn't call him a great student. He went on to college, but dropped out after one year of his own volition, though most of us suspected the real issue was (though never confirmed, as he wouldn't share) his grades. The work is there to for educational means. Cheating means you learn nothing, and yes, sooner or later, you will reap just rewards.

You're only cheating yourself.

Nobody cares that you have a degree if you can't even answer simple questions about your subject in an interview.

I'm pretty sure that your using the internet to investigate an applicant would be counted as "cybercheating" the hiring process. Way to be a hypocrite.

The whole idea of penalizing people for using the internet to produce answers in today's world sounds silly now doesn't it?

People that cheat, don't learn. In the future of all those students, it will all be sorted out: people that cheated constantly only to get a degree, will have lost time and money to get an education that they rejected when they cheated themselves out of actually baking the certificate with actual skills (beyond stealing). So, long term competition, I think, will favor the intelligent. Non cheaters with a degree will go further and get another one, will go to a company and actually make it money instead of looking like they make them money....

Ah, you should have written "training" not "education". If you had gotten an education, perhaps you'd know the difference. Not that there's anything wrong with that, very few companies indeed want to hire educated people, they almost exclusively want highly trained people. Advanced vo-tech, regardless of what campus its held on, is not by any means an education.

You also missed out on some excellent dating opportunities. In my bachelors of CS era I found the CS classes to be a near 100% sausage-fest, the IT classes to have about ten percent women, but "history of the civil war" or "intro to sociology" now that was a target rich environment. And the class gives you something to talk about past the "whats your sign?" stage. Look at this sample script and try to find the mistake: Cutie: Wanna come over to my place and study together? Engineering guy: Uh, Sorry, I'm just bittorrenting the homework.

you are working under the assumption that 4 years (or rather, 120 credits) in college is "an education". I understand your misconception, they do everything in their power to convince you of such.

I would say go to technical college then. Have fun at DeVry. Those that want a more well rounded education and not just training, will benefit from your absence.

I think people forget that education isn't just to prepare you for a job, but rather for life and to become a better more educated person.

You talk of "paper mills", but in actuality your ideal university is exactly that, churning out diploma's of peons ready to be sent to their corporate cubes.

That's not to say that I would particularly like to take "jazz history", however that is why they are called "electives". You get to choose what interests you outside of your principle discipline. What is not to like? I think taking things like Classical History and Astronomy during my CS degree made university more fun any interesting, not to mention meeting more people of the opposite sex.

There are a lot of problems with that view on things:
1. If you're taking classes on jazz history, literary analysis, political science, etc, I sincerely hope you're interested in it, because it's probably costing you something on the order of $200 per class session. If you wanted to attend a school with practically no requirements beyond technical work, you should be looking to transfer to a school that has that.
2. Being able to digest information about non-engineering topics matters more than you'd think in engineering. For instance, if you were designing 'green architecture' buildings, wouldn't it help you to be able to make sense of all the political, scientific, and economic discussions around green architecture?
3. Being able to write well really matters, because part of your job as an engineer is being able to describe your designs.
4. Why would your life possibly be worse off by knowing something about jazz history or literary analysis?

If they're overworked and under-rested, they need to find a way to lower their courseload or get some more rest, not find a way to cheat. Although I went through a pretty rigorous program myself, my solution to the rest problem was to get to sleep at more-or-less the same time every day, get up at more-or-less the same time every day, and work on schoolwork from about 9 to 4:30 unless I was in class. The result was that I found myself getting projects and papers in good-enough shape well before the due date, and would spend a few hours refining the results, and could devote my evenings and weekends to fun stuff and frequently ending up with it being 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and nothing to worry about until Monday morning.

Complementing people on their time management when their solution is to not get something done is a bad idea.

I don't recommend everything Joel Spolsky writes, but his college advice [joelonsoftware.com] is pretty good.

I've worked in numerous companies over my career and my experience would suggest you are incorrect. Like it or not cheating is a skill and those who are good at it are usually good at making upper management think they know what they are doing. They are also pretty good at getting other people to either do their jobs or take the blame for failures.

I'm replying to the parent because all of the children who replied to this have said basically the same thing and it needs to be addressed.

It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.

The school I attended had a very broad curriculum. I majored in Computer Science, minored in Math, but also took a year of Chemistry, Physics, History, English Lit, EE, Foreign Language, Biology and a semester of Aero, Astro, Civil Engineering, and Psychology (not an exhaustive list, just the ones I remember off the top of my head). I haven't used the majority of those subjects in my current job. In fact, I haven't even committed any Computer Science for most of my career. Does that mean my entire education was a waste? I certainly don't think so. I've been in situations where my Civil Engineering class actually proved useful to me. My wife loves to talk with me about history, and I draw heavily from my world history classes in those discussions. When studying genetic algorithms, my biology class came in rather handy, and I was grateful for that foreign language class when vacationing in Germany.

In short, my college education has enriched my life, made me a better person, and provided a broad foundation from which to launch new inquiries when I'm feeling curious. I humbly suggest that those who view college as only vocational training take a look at their local community college. There are many degrees offered there that don't require a liberal arts education, don't put you in a position that you feel you have to sacrifice your honor just to get a grade in a class you do not care about, and cost dramatically less than a college where you basically paid for the privilege of cheating your way through the classes you didn't find "useful" to your career choice.