LC Thread 2020: What the PUNK? ROCK.

Or someone who died from bathing in their own filth.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JasonIsbell/status/1284962800268447753

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https://mobile.twitter.com/thedogist/status/1284982591360294913

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https://mobile.twitter.com/ImIncorrigible/status/1284979055968886790

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So what did you do? We can’t assume they were cooperating. It’s possible that one was copying from the other without the other’s knowledge. But they could each claim that the other was the copier.

Oh, that makes it easier. When you said they sat next to each other I assumed exam.

For homework problem sets isn’t it somewhat standard for people to work together. I’m sure I did that plenty and it was all kosher.

I’ve always been told that you should cite the other person and do the write up yourself. So, yeah, chat and figure it out together, but then write out the proofs (or whatever) on your own.

Wait, seriously? On a homework problem? (I’m assuming something mathy here)

Yeah. It was pretty standard in my logic classes to write the names of the people you worked with on your homework.

Interesting. Maybe I’m just old, but I’d never heard about that back in my day.

In my limited exposure to graduate math people did homework either in groups or walked all over the city in the middle of the night talking about it. Working in groups on problem sets was expected. I never saw any formal citing of other people in groups. But, you really couldn’t get away with not knowing what you were doing.

Flat out cheating was rampant in undergrad, mostly in the lower division courses.

My wife taught lower division University English and there was tons of cheating — far too much to punish anything but the most blatant and the administration was not at all supportive of catching cheating.

I have no idea what I just watched but I enjoyed it.

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As a grad student, I used to just copypaste text into google to catch cheaters. I guess this was in the early 2000’s, students just assumed their TAs were oldsters who didn’t know how to internet or they were too lazy to care. It’s always great when you have a foreign student with an extremely limited command of English who turns in an assignment that’s in masterful English. Or when you have a Midwestern student who uses British spellings, it’s like, hmmmmmmmm.

You aren’t catching the right cheaters. It’s not about D students at Michigan State cheating on history midterms. It’s about people competing for the few high-stakes spots that are most desirable. Your President paid someone to take the SAT and somehow “went” to Wharton, presumably cheating there too since his mental ceiling is identifying giraffes in a coloring book. What about all of the people who paid and took the SAT fairly and paid the application fees to Wharton and other schools that ripped them off?

It’s not just idiots. Talented Chinese (and I’m sure other nationality) applicants are cheating to win the coveted seats in top MBA and PhD programs, for example. These people aren’t hacks en masse–they’re engineering types with IT work experience and strong quant backgrounds in many cases. They can post really good scores without cheating, but you can’t go to the same schools as bona fide geniuses like Elon Musk with merely really good scores. Gotta have THE BEST scores. On forums they come in legions and claim to be targeting 99th percentile and Stanford or Harvard, almost to a man. Grifters trip over themselves to pitch them shit like private coaching.


If you’re a dunce, seeing 4 out of 31 exam questions in advance won’t push you to the top. But if you’re already close, you get there just about every time, not only due to free Bingo squares but also (very precious) time saved for other questions. This from a Chinese forum on such matters, Google translated to English:

Foreword : The landlord started in mid-October last year and did not end the tug of war with GMAT until last week.

Landlord = original poster in Chinese apparently which I just love.

When I first came into contact with GMAT and read a lot of experience posts, I found that most people’s evaluation of GMAT math is “simple, multi-questioning can take 50/51, and brushing chicken essence before the test will be stable”

The chicken essence (jijing, jj, etc.) refers to leaked exam questions that are currently in use on the real test. It’s a crowd-sourced effort of people smuggling questions out from memory and compiling into a question bank. Max quant is 51 which is what everyone claims to be gunning for since it’s widely understood that Asians are wizards at math and must not deviate from that stereotype (see: footnote). Our landlord was nice enough to provide this table with scores and amounts of cheating involved for each:

time 10/15 11/06 12/06 12/23 02/26
fraction 48 47 46 42 50
Do you encounter chicken essence? Yes, questions 2-3 no no No chicken essence in the trousers Yes, 3-4 questions, two of them are variants
location Shanghai Shanghai Shanghai Shanghai Bangkok

The correlation is not as straightforward as it seems because the test is adaptive and scored with IRT algorithms, but it’s clear enough because of the huge difference in percentiles in these scores. That’s another danger with cheating on adaptive tests:

Cheating is a common phenomenon in high stakes admission, licensing and university exams and threatens their validity. To detect if some exam questions had been affected by cheating, we simulated how data would look like if some test takers possessed item pre-knowledge: Responses to a small number of items were set to correct for 1–10% of test takers. Item difficulty, item discrimination, item fit, and local dependence were computed using an IRT 2PL model.

A multiplicative combination of shifts in item discrimination, item difficulty, and local item dependence detected item preknowledge with a sensitivity of 1.0 and a specificity of .95 if 11 of 80 items were preknown to 10% of the test takers.

Cheating groups smaller than 5% of the test takers were not detected reliably.

In other words, these assholes can affect the test algorithm by making the computer think the leaked questions are easier than they actually are, and the cheaters may not be detectable if their group is small enough. It’s almost certainly not 5% of the total test takers worldwide working from this list of leaked questions, and they are biased in their focus, choosing to memorize the most difficult questions. Missing an actual hard question that the computer erroneously believes is easier can wreck you.

What other advice does our landlord have?

Although the chicken essence is good, please do it steadily, and don’t be lucky. What should I do if I change the library, or if I can’t even touch it?

!?

Mindset is also a part to be tested in actual combat. Lessons from blood and tears: Before the Fourth World War, I had always been lucky. I thought that relying on chicken essence before the test, it would be no problem to get 49 points. As a result, the library was changed the day before the exam, and the mentality exploded the next day, only scoring 42 points.

Ha! If you cheat, cheat steadily and don’t rely on luck. Otherwise you may be forced to not cheat, have a meltdown, and drop to the 40th fucking percentile like stupid American gringos that can’t math.

But how do we cheat steadily? We need to get into the weeds on the timing for our studies. Here is what landlord recommends:

Later period (one week before the exam, mainly based on model test, chicken essence and reviewing wrong questions, adjust the mentality):

  1. Chicken essence. Essence of chicken must be done for each question, don’t just remember the answer. In case there are discrepancies between the actual data and the essence of the chicken, or the question stem changes, the GG [another secret code word] will be the answer. However, there are some very difficult questions (such as a zoo permutation and combination question, it seems that the answer is 30000+?) I feel that there is no need to spend too much time to study the idea, you can remember an answer.

“Study the questions, don’t…haha jus’ playin’ dawg u should memorize that shit it’s too hard especially that zoo permutation.”

I like how they say “Fourth World War” to refer to fourth attempt at the exam. Maybe it’s just Google being stupid but it’s funny. Final thoughts from the landlord:

Above, I hope to give you some inspiration for GMAT mathematics, or if you can’t find a review idea. I wish you all success in killing chickens and ducks! ! !

Anyway, the point is there are a zillion of these threads on said site and this isn’t even the best. There’s one I scraped where the landlord saw 9/31 essence of chicken (!!!) but claimed it was fine since he took the time to work through most of them and verify, not just immediately click the answer from memory. He only did that on a few of them (probably the zoo permutation) which is ok because it’s cheating just a little bit like Dan Ariely said.

Footnote: Landlords are really good at math unlike Americans who are fat and stupid. See:

The article text is posted here:
WSJ: High GMAT Scores From China, India Spur Separate Rankings for U.S. Students « Economics Job Market Rumors

New waves of Indians and Chinese are taking America’s business-school entrance exam, and that’s causing a big problem for America’s prospective M.B.A.s.

Why? The foreign students are much better at the test.

Asia-Pacific students have shown a mastery of the quantitative portion of the four-part Graduate Management Admission Test. That has skewed mean test scores upward, and vexed U.S. students, whose results are looking increasingly poor in comparison. In response, admissions officers at U.S. schools are seeking new ways of measurement, to make U.S. students look better.

Domestic candidates are “banging their heads against the wall,” said Jeremy Shinewald, founder and president of mbaMission, a New York-based M.B.A. admissions-consulting company. While U.S. scores have remained consistent over the past several years, the falling percentiles are “causing a ton of student anxiety,” he said.

Ha, I bet! Especially since they’re paying this sham test company $250 a pop not including the racket of expensive test prep materials and consulting fees from companies like mbaMission.

Percentile rankings are calculated using a raw score—for the quantitative section, typically between 0 and 51. In 2004, a raw score of 48 in the quantitative section yielded a ranking in the 86th percentile, according to GMAC; today, that same score would land the test-taker in the 74th percentile.

Jesus.

On average, Asia citizens fare better on the quantitative section of the exam than Americans do, according to GMAC data. This year, the mean raw score for students in the Asian-Pacific region on that section was 45, above the global mean of 38 and the U.S. mean of 33. Asian students’ raw score has risen to 45 from 42 over the last decade.

Okay so I concede that Americans really are stupid (#NotAllAmericans). The landlords have increased their can’t-cheat-meltdown score by 3 points in a decade which requires ingenuity and dedication while Americans spin their wheels. Maybe they actually are getting the right students after all.

Stuff like this is a better argument for encouraging people to try poker and gambling than whatever Alzheimer-curing shit Sklansky came up with. We have too many rubes like this journalist who never question anything. Not being able to do zoo permutations is one thing; not being able to spot a fake Rolex or Ponzi scheme is another and it’s way fucking worse.

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I had to look this up, but apparently Musk also graduated from Wharton! The fuck is it with Wharton and these world-class dipshits?

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I think it’s literally a herding effect where corrupt idiots see other corrupt idiots they idolize go there and they follow. It runs forever like a perpetual motion machine of assholes.

#NotAllWhartonGrads obv lol

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Yeah, I’m still not convinced any of that really matters. There’s hardly any (maybe zero) difference in the real world performance between a 99th percentile student and those above. So the 99ther who cheats to get there doesn’t matter much. I’m much more concerned with the failing student who literally can’t read or write cheating to get the degree than a genius cheating to get into a great school.

And Trump cheating at Wharton is a different conversation. I’m sure he was caught many times and there was an understanding to let it go. That’s something much different and much worse.

There’s an app that does the googling for you now. And the student gets the results as well, which has made it tougher to cheat, and obvious to the student that the old way doesn’t work anymore. You can’t just copy and paste something you found online. You have to actually hire an essay mill in India to write an original paper.

Someone on my Nextdoor called the police ‘gestapo’.

Because they are giving tickets to people not wearing masks obviously.

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For a moment I thought you had converted someone!

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