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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

Steve Pavlina recalls his days at Berkley:

"My main academic recollection was lurking by the printer in the computer science lab (aka the WEB, which stood for Workstations Evans Basement) and snatching printouts before someone showed up to claim them. When I found the right completed assignment, I’d write my name on top and turn it in as my own....I really hated Lisp."

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/rediscovering-the-past/
Time well spent? :)

Prose like this makes we want to walk a block and a half to one of the local bars and put some great or even just adequate spirits inside me. If only he had stuck to shoplifting, theft of printouts, and academic time-serving, the prososphere would be a better place.

Holy cow... give this guy a teddy bear and a hug.

That's to say that you don't need to succeed at everything, but you do need to succeed at all. :-)

I am not an angel either. Nobody is. We just choose to focus on different things.

LOL at the previous comment. :-) Good one.

It's spelled "Berkeley".

You need to post to ?off to qualify for troll of the month.

There should be an award for link to the most useless blog entry of the month.  This one would win easily.

"Time well spent?"  Doing what?  Reading that blog entry?  Well, I did learn that my expectations of how useless blogs can be needs to be expanded.

+1 George.  The prososphere would be better without that guy.

And, of course, Lisp was just an incidental player in the blog entry.  The guy didn't just hate Lisp, he shouldn't have been a student at all.

I've found that the people who really succeed in life are the ones who pay other people to do their homework for them.

ok, I went to Berkeley and here are a couple of things that ring true:

1- everyone steals everyone else's homework.  Sometimes, they steal it and don't turn it in at all, just to hurt you when it comes time for the curve.  This is standard behavior, particularly if you are a chemistry major in classes with Molecular Cell Biology majors (aka soon to be doctors that care about grades and NOTHING else). 

2- In Berkeley, shoplifting is the norm.  The place is a hell-hole, going to jail would be a welcome relief.

3- I have spoken to an inordinate amount of people who have had this same UC Berkeley experience.  They are out finding themselves, but the environment in which they are doing it is so askew to the real world that as you find yourself, you find yourself committing crimes, or realizing that, in fact, nobody is watching so you could easily commit crimes. 

4- None of the above is an excuse to write that blog.   

[Just in case you missed it, I didn't enjoy my time at Berkeley, but unlike the OP, I did enjoy learning Scheme.]

Ok, then, no hire from Berkeley.

"Prose like this makes we want to walk a block and a half to one of the local bars and put some great or even just adequate spirits inside me. If only he had stuck to shoplifting, theft of printouts, and academic time-serving, the prososphere would be a better place."

Hmm... Either
1) you're an alcoholic or
2) you never read any documentation from your team or
3) your technical writer is the next Shakespeare

I'd put my money on 1 or 2.

What Josh says rings similar to a jail, i.e. sudden new rules that change the person.

"Going through the bottom at light speed": have you ever heard of rhetorical devices? (Microphones don't count.)

As for your money, I can tell you where it won't get sunburnt.

OK, that was a bit intemperate; the moderators should feel free to zap it.

Nobody expects technical writing to be sparkling prose, though some technical writing is in fact quite good.

However, the piece linked to above isn't technical writing, is it? It appears to be someone telling us that going out and searching for great spirits is better than academia or the programming business. Maybe so, but the writing conveys no such conviction to me, rather a hint of the writer's self-infatuation.

If you want some good writing on getting nothing out of Berkeley, might I suggest _Because I Was Flesh_, by Edward Dahlberg? A curious and often annoying book, but well worth the reading.

Remember kids: guns don't kill people, functional programming languiages do.

Heh. From elsewhere on that site (http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/do-it-now.htm):

>It took a lot of convincing to get the computer science
> department chair to approve my extra units every semester,
> and my classmates often assumed I was either cheating or
> that I had a twin or that I was just mentally unstable.

So it turns out he was cheating. That casts a new light on his "time management skills".

>aka soon to be doctors that care about grades and NOTHING else

I had the "special" privilege of being a TA for 1st year calculus classes with lots of pre-meds. This was at a name school, but not Berkeley.

Let's just say that my view of doctors has never been the same after that experience.

@Michael

Steve was expelled from Berkeley and did a 4 year degree in AI (I think) at another college in just 3 semesters.

Berkeley has always had a problem with cheating. You have to ask yourself what are the odds that all those freshmen with 4.25 GPAs received their grade honestly? Those kids are taught early on that grades are everything, so they’ll do whatever it takes to get them. It's even worse with Chinese intl. students. They have had a cheating network in place since the 60's.

Right! It's always best to blame the strangers: Chinese, Arabs, Jews, gays... Nothing like a good scapegoat to single out, eh?

Yes, of course, when someone criticizes a specific action of a cultural or racial group other than their own, it's always motivated by irrational prejudice.

Because we all know that only members of our own racial and cultural group (whichever one that is) do bad things. Everyone else is a saint. Always.

MBJ is correct about the Chinese cheating network. This was investigated by some of the professors at my alma mater. The network is sophisticated and supported and coordinated by the chinese government. They have hardcover books in chinese that are translations of the professors class notes from the previous semester, and they receive translations of the tests before they tests are given.

Get a grip Roman, it's so well known at Berkeley that even the professors joke about it. My MIL has hosted dozens of Chinese students and they were getting stolen tests in the mail. Perhaps you should refrain from commenting on things in which you have no direct knowledge.

I have long maintained a theory that only one person from the above mentioned group could actually program, and he did all the work and everybody else copied.  I am basing this on first hand personal experience that is in no way a scientific study.  However, when you have a couple of discussions with some of these people (who are part of that group - and no, not all in that ethnic group are part of the group) you quickly learn they don't know what they are doing.  I once had someone from this group as me what "==" meant about 50% of the through a semester long Java data structures course.

I think the issue with Berkeley is that everyone who is going there is used to getting a 4.25GPA, and when the curve settles in, it becomes clear that 30-40% of them are going to fail.  Take people who are used to 4.25 and give them 1.0 and you get behaviors that are not necessarily ethical, but they don't care because they worked for years to get there and they aren't about to let ethics get in the way of their degree.

1. If they get the test, someone is leaking them. Chinese professors, perhaps?
2. If "everyone knows that" how come nothing was done about that?
3. If it is so easy to cheat, how come only Chinese students formed a "cheating network"? Superior American morale?
4. How anyone can think having a hardcore copy of the last year's notes is cheating is beyond my comprehension.

OK, guys. I spent 10 minuts of my morning coffee fishing in Google for the references to the "Chinese cheating network". Came with 1 direct hit and several articles complaining that Chinese working as TA's speak poor English. The one hit was not about Berkeley. I'm sorry, but that's pretty poor for something which "everyone know about". If you've got the links, feel free to post them.

"MBJ is correct about the Chinese cheating network. This was investigated by some of the professors at my alma mater. The network is sophisticated and supported and coordinated by the chinese government. They have hardcover books in chinese that are translations of the professors class notes from the previous semester, and they receive translations of the tests before they tests are given."

Scott,

the Chinese government pays for these people's studies so that they learn something and come back to China to be useful to the government and the country. It would make zero sense if at the same time they let them study less by helping them to cheat. Chinese are Commies but they are not *that* dumb.

If you come up with some more plausible conspiration theory, let me know...

"Prose like this makes we want to walk a block and a half to one of the local bars and put some great or even just adequate spirits inside me. If only he had stuck to shoplifting, theft of printouts, and academic time-serving, the prososphere would be a better place."

Words like "prososphere" make me want to drink the entire yearly output of all Polish vodka distillers combined...

"I spent 10 minuts of my morning coffee fishing in Google for the references to the "Chinese cheating network". Came with 1 direct hit"

Well, Roman, obviously, if it is not on Google, it doesn't exist.

We're talking about a supposed scandal on a major US university, about which everyone knows there and professors are supposed to joke about. Come on. Noone blogs at UC Berkeley? Noone complains? Absurd.

Every decent conspiracy theory gives some Google hits. Elvis lives? Hits. Aliens at Roswell? Hits. Illuminati? Hits. Chinese cheating network -- no hits???

"Right! It's always best to blame the strangers: Chinese, Arabs, Jews, gays... Nothing like a good scapegoat to single out, eh?"

And PC nonsense is why people don't get in trouble for this sort of thing.

If you don't think that that sort of thing happens, you're fooling yourself. Many tight-knit groups do this sort of thing to help out their members... Fraternities have been keeping "test banks" and cheating for decades.

"It's even worse with Chinese intl. students. They have had a cheating network in place since the 60's."
 
"Right! It's always best to blame the strangers: Chinese, Arabs, Jews, gays... Nothing like a good scapegoat to single out, eh?"

When I was in grad. school in the late '90s it came out that *many* Chineese students had cheated on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam, allowing them to enter graduate programs at American universities even though they did not meet minimum requirements for speaking the language. Thinking back to my undergraduate days, this made a lot of sense. When I first started out in the early/mid '90s, many of the Chineese students spoke passable English. By the time I graduated, several Chineese TAs in the CS dept. could not understand the students and the students could not understand them. Something was obviously amiss. This was on an entrance exam and does not necessarily support the theory of an achedemic "cheating network" for Chineese students.

I'm not saying, but I'm saying......

The TOEFL test is seriously a joke. It doesn't show whether someone is able to communicate in English on an adequate level and it costs $130. A two minute in person test would be a much better solution. Heck, you don't even need two minutes before you make a yes or no decision.

The fact that someone has to cheat to pass the test surprises me. It's insanely basic. If you don't ace it, you're in for some serious trouble in the future.

(I've taken it)

The tremendous irony of using a recursive markup language to state that you don't like s-expressions is lost on him, apparently.

"The fact that someone has to cheat to pass the test surprises me. It's insanely basic. If you don't ace it, you're in for some serious trouble in the future."

It may not be too difficult, but no everyone ace it. I took it twice to get a score of 603, and I've learned English for 12 years before the test. Many others spend much less time.

"When I was in grad. school in the late '90s it came out that *many* Chineese students had cheated on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam, allowing them to enter graduate programs at American universities even though they did not meet minimum requirements for speaking the language."

How is that possible? I understand that you take TOEFL in an authorized centre. If this unreliable, US universities may switch to Cambridge exams (FCE, CAE, CPE) or do their own test on the spot. What's the problem?

Y'all know that most Frats and sororities have 'cheating networks', right?

Frats & sororities: the story is told of the fool who took a paper out of his fraternities term paper file, had it retyped under his own name, and turned it in, having failed to notice that the original author was his instructor for the section.

I saw, put them all on Double Secret Probation.

http://www.asianweek.com/2001_03_02/news12_chineseschool_cheat.html

http://english.people.com.cn/200208/14/eng20020814_101472.shtml

http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-9-8/32106.html
(Don't think they don't take that behavior elsehere)

http://www.brookescreening.com/en/module/itemdetails.php?catid=2&id=41
(cheating to get into Berkeley)

http://www.ethics.org/resources/article_detail.cfm?ID=826

http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/33/06/kaleidoscope/
(Fake IDs for PhDs)

http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/careers_workplace_employment/pns_doctor_0705.asp

"How is that possible? I understand that you take TOEFL in an authorized centre."

Most exams for anything are taken in "authorized centers" but that doesn't mean that people don't cheat on them. Where there's a will, there's a way.

"If this unreliable, US universities may switch to Cambridge exams (FCE, CAE, CPE) or do their own test on the spot."

I can't remember what the national reaction was but the school I went to (a state school) did not take any Chineese students for at least a year. Testing on the spot is a little problematic because by the time the student arrives the school and student has expended considerable effort. To simply send them back would be an increadible waste of resources. I'm not sure changing the exam that is given will solve the problem. It seems that people would simply find a way to cheat on those, as well.

"Let's just say that my view of doctors has never been the same after that experience."

LOL! I had friend's that TAed for the Chemistry and Biology 101 sequences. The line they would hear most often at the end of the semester was: "but I can't get a C, I'm pre-med!" Heh! Not for long, buddy.