But isn't this abstract notion of improvement supposed to be the entire point of education? It feels to me like education's purpose is undermined by its role as a prerequisite for a middle-class career. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

> and a job well done is its own reward right?

Sure, if the life you want is to be at a desk for 8 hours a day regurgitating your superior's existing biases back at them, go ahead. I find employers much prefer someone that can attack a real problem and think critically about potential solutions from multiple levels of analysis. If all you're good at is chewing someone else's cud and spitting it out with a slightly different word order then you're useless to people that actually want to solve problems.

And, sorry to say, credentials are counting for less and less every year. If employers have to take a year to train you to think critically, then what use does a credential serve as a filter? I wonder why that's happening...

(for work) I have both "plaigiarised" a policy that I found on the internet, AND written one using as source the ToC of 2-3 other policies, but did the fill-ups all by myself. I learned nothing from copy&paste, I gained plenty from typing it up from scratch myself (even added points that the ToC's were missing).

The clients got the same value (they wanted a v1 policy, and they got one). I became better by doing the work, so next time I had a discussion on the matter I felt that I controlled the discussion instead of pitching in.

Faking it till you make it has the risk that you fake it forever and you become the paradigm of the Peter Principle.

Walking the walk takes more time but always benefits in the long run.

I have met plenty of people though that take the risk to never grow/evolve and stay in their comfort zone because they just want the base salary to fund their hobbies and they get no sense of accomplishment through their work (for many reasons)(I am not getting into this discussion).

Edit: Ps: I now work like this (when asked to develop a policy for a new client): spend some time thinking of key points (technology changes fast enough in some areas), drop a couple of examples for each bullet point, and then "plagiarise" from previously made work. This way I have prepared part of the downstream Procedures. You would think that a Policy is high (enough) level so it shouldn't need frequent changes, but different clients want different things.

> a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much)

If every person at the school had this reasoning, the credentials wouldn't count for anything.

The credentials only count for something if enough of the people graduating are actually fulfilling this promise of self improvement in the subject of their studies.

The cheaters are literally freeloading off the prestige of the credentials produced by the people who do put in the effort. If that group of people did not exist, the credentials would be useless to the cheaters as well.

> in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much);

Those credentials only matter insofar as they describe the likely caliber of the alumni that come from that particular school. Being a terrible student isn't going to help the value of your degree a whole lot...