How We Encourage Cheating in Education

I was watching a news report this morning about students using ChatGPT that asked whether this was considered cheating. That got me to thinking about how we encourage cheating in education..

Think about it: The purpose for education is to provide the student with the foundational knowledge they need to be successful in work and life. We all want to be successful, so cheating to get there doesn’t seem to me to be a very profitable endeavor. After all, at the end of the day you still have to know how to do things in order to be successful. I used to remind my nursing students of this all the time: If you want to be a good nurse you’re going to need to actually know what you’re doing. Cheating might get you through the class, it might even allow you to pass the licensing exam but the real test is whether you can function in the real world. It’s a hell of a lot less stressful to actually know what you’re doing when in an emergency than to try to wing it because you lack the knowledge to actually perform correctly.

My Thoughts on Competency Based Education

Competency based education has gathered quite a lot of steam over the last few years. Many universities now assert that they are competency based and promote this as somehow better than traditional education. In general, it seems that competency based education is a way of expediting the educational process whereby the student can move forward more quickly so long as the student can demonstrate competence in a subject.

Returning to Basics

The title of this blog is iamcuri.us. That title was chosen to reflect the many and sundry interests that I have and the drive I have to explore new ideas and to learn new things. While I think some of my posts here have reflected that, others seems to skew in specific directions that seem to narrow the focus on the blog. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the posts that outline my tinkering in websites and self-hosting do reflect my questioning and exploring and learning. Still, I think that it’s time I pushed into some new areas and revisit in more detail some old areas, too.

The Evolution of an Academic

Had someone told me on the day of my high school graduation in 1977 that I would one day be an academic, in possession of a doctoral degree and teaching at the university level, I’d have warned them that whatever they were smoking was muddling their brain. Yet, here I am, forty years later, in possession of not one, but two master’s degrees, and a doctorate, teaching at a university. How did that happen?

Science Fiction and the Polymath

Throughout my junior high years I was a huge science fiction fan. One of my favorite authors of the time was Isaac Asimov. I was quite surprised to learn that Asimov not only wrote science fiction but had also penned books, short stories, and essays that ranged from religion (Guide to the Bible), chemistry (he was educated as a biochemist), engineering, and the list goes on. This realization intially confused me. How could a science fiction writer be so bold as to write on so many different topics? How could he know enough in each of those fields to qualify himself to write books on them? It would be many years before I encountered the term “polymath”, but surely Asimov earned the title.