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I agree with you. Cheating was and probably still is very huge on my campus. Honor systems don't work and many of my professors didn't care.

Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes:

I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked.

The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities.

Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.

I know what it is like to cheat and not to cheat: I cheated like crazy in high-school in my weak subjects, but didn't cheat at all at university because I was the best student in the year so copying from others would have reduced my grades.

    Why would anyone not cheat?

You forgot the most important reason: to learn. In some sense cheating is a self-punishing crime, because the cheaters forgo the learning opportunities that courseworks and exams offer. Indeed the only reason universities have to have graded courseworks and exams is to put an incentive structure in place that focusses student attention. In a way grades are an anti-procrastination framework.

I technically cheated a lot in college and HS, but not in my weak subjects. It was an economy of time. Person A would do some parts of the assignments and I would do other parts. Combine the work and you've got twice as much done with 3/4 of the effort (I would still spend a little time deriving the work instead of wholesale copying). By the rules, I should've been thrown out of most of my courses (except CS and EE where I loved the work too much to let someone else take it from me) but I wound up with marks that put me at the top of the class. I learned enough doing just enough of the assignments to show up and get good marks on the tests without cheating.

I honestly don't think what I did should've been considered cheating, and I would do it that way again today- in fact, don't our jobs work just about the same way? But I'm all in favor of strict rules around cheating on testing or final projects. Those are where you demonstrate what you personally have learned, I don't think it should matter how you got to that knowledge, but you should have it.

I guess this also means the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get.

As you say, the incentive and resource for the university to do something about this just isn't there.

   the university is indirectly cheating when they publish statistics about the grades their students get.

Not really as long as they don't guarantee that grade X guarantees a specific skill level. Clearly there is a usable correlation between grades and skill, but it's not super reliable, whence coding tests, interviews, requirements for n years experience, and so on.

It sounds like your university needs fixing. I went to a run of the mill State school in the US, and it was made abundantly clear that cheating on an exam would be followed by expulsion.

It was pretty rare that I heard of anybody doing so.

I'd recommend going ahead and having those kids expelled, or at least starting the process and taking it as far as you can go (before the university has to step in and make a point of stopping it). Change has to begin somewhere, so why not with you?

Edited to add: I don't really buy the economic argument either. A top school has a pretty long list of kids wanting to get in. They could toss out half the current students each year and never run in to an issue filling back up the next year. If anything, it would only serve to improve their reputation as an "elite" school where you really do have to pull your weight to make it through.

By the time you're out on the street, they have your money. If tossing out a few cheaters makes the class size a bit smaller for the rest of the semester, that also can't be anything but a net good.

    cheating on an exam

I was talking about coursework and dissertations. Cheating on exams is harder, although not impossible (e.g. bathroom breaks).

   it was made abundantly clear

We also make this abundantly clear. But when they get caught (which is already rare), we issue warnings, send them on courses where they learn how properly to quote and so on. 10 strikes and you are out ...

    so why not with you?

Because life is short because I don't like tilting at windmills, because I have better things to do, and because I believe in specialisation. I didn't sign up to be a police man, and I have no skills in this direction. Our department actually used to pay somebody to scan rent-a-coder.com and we also used turnitin.com. The former was abandoned and the latter was reduced to a student service (i.e. they could check their coursework before submission)! We were never really given a reason why. One has one's suspicions ...

   having those kids expelled

What in your opinion is the cost, financially, in terms of time and reputation, of dealing with all the law-suits that the aggrieved and high-paying parents of the expelled students are sure to launch? (Aka "my precious child a common cheater? Never, we raised her well, it must be your fault!")

   A top school [...]  could toss out half the current students

LOL. In 1837, Hong Xiuquan failed the imperial examination and was denied his dream to enter the Qing dynasty's civil service. This lead to the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. I really don't want to know what would happen if you fire 1/2 of Harvard students in the time of helicopter parents and tiger mothers, Lord have mercy!

"my precious child a common cheater? Never, we raised her well, it must be your fault!"

Clearly I've been living abroad too long. I had completely forgotten about this aspect of the American psyche.

You're right. No amount of having done something wrong will ever be enough to make something an American's fault. I remember golfing with a guy and hooking a ball into somebody's yard, saying something along the lines of "glad I didn't break that window." He then went on to explain his view that the golf course should pay for things like that, since it would clearly not be his fault if he hit a ball through somebody's window.

Expel that guy's kid, and I can see what you mean. Good luck fighting the good fight!

I don't understand why universities don't do the obvious and simply require the students to defend their work in a viva voce and a written final. When I studied physics (Exeter Uni., 1974-1977) there really was no possibility to cheat because written examinations were open note, theses and project reports had to be defended orally, and the class of one's degree was determined entirely by the finals (oral and written).

    require the students to defend their work in a viva voce and a written final.

Time & effort, primarily.

Also equality is a problem. Academics are human too, and tend to have preferences regarding looks, sex, nationalities etc that are hard to ignore. I had female students rub my legs in presentations, wear super short mini-shirts, see-thru top with massive clevage etc. Preventing this is a major advantage of anonymous grading. These days you want to protect yourself against harassment lawsuits. I feel very uncomfortable with non-anonymous examiations even though I agree that from a pedagogic point-of-view they preferable, not just to deal with cheating, but also because they give a much better view of the students strengths and weaknesses, leading to much better feedback.

If your students are behaving like that then run of the mill cheating is the least of your problems. And I can't see how a thesis can be properly defended except in real time, we aren't talking about marking an exam here but getting the student to make it clear that he or she really does understand the work presented (in my case over a hundred pages of experimental design, execution, results, and interpretation) and can explain it and defend it against criticism.

Some universities still require PhD theses to be defended in public, for instance Oslo: ==== begin quote

The PhD degree is conferred on the basis of:

completion of the programme's educational component

the doctoral thesis

the doctoral examination

The doctoral examination consists of the trial lecture and the public defence of the thesis, also known as the disputation.

=== end quote