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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of okay with the cheating on English proficiency exams. They're pretty contrived anyways.

But these groups also tend to help each other out in cheating on actual assignments and tests, which doesn't sit well with the me.

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Going off-topic from the OP: Not only that, but when I was a foreign student, the Indian and Chinese students had networks of past-year students, who'd built up databases of exam questions. While perhaps strictly not cheating, this gave them an advantage, because some professors repeated questions from previous quarters/years. Some of us thought that was unfair, and talked with the professors and they were unwilling to ensure that questions were not repeated. So we asked the professors to give us exam questions from the last few years, and made them available to everyone in the library. Hopefully this at least leveled the playing field a tiny bit, but I'm not sure it mattered in the grand scheme of things. (Disclosure: I'm Indian too).

Everywhere I've studied made past exam questions available by default - and doing them as part of revision was absolutely standard. Certainly not cheating!

I am international myself and have seen international students cheating before. In one (really bad, no one cares) course that I took as an undergrad, everyone cheated. I was the only one who came to class and didn't cheat (or didn't know that you could cheat in that course). It was, perhaps not noble, but not rare for students (American + non-American) to pass on their exams to the next class and professors discuss how to deter that too.

This is exactly why I'm against this behavior -- the only one that are punished are the ethical ones [1]. Kept unchecked, soon you will have pressured all the ethical people into giving into cheating as well!

[1] It's like doping in sports.

> the Indian and Chinese students had networks of past-year students, who'd built up databases of exam questions.

A friend of mine joined a frat and he said they had the same thing.

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