Going to slap a big "NOPE" to this bit. It's the school's responsibility to educate and assess students, and therefore it's their job to reduce cheating.
IMHO, if it's really easy to cheat on a test (mostly rote memorization), then students SHOULD cheat. It's a bad test and and insanely huge waste of everyone's time and money.
> "Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a "lemon". Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop."
Anyway you just specified an implied though not supported downside, while ignoring my point that cheating has some minor upsides. Demonstrating that cheating is a dead loss for society is not enough you need to demonstrate it has absolutely zero redeeming qualities allowing for such simple syllogistic reasoning to apply
A major NYC blackout resulted in a bunch of looting. That looting is supposed to have resulted in a bunch of new musicians getting their hands on good equipment. Those scofflaw musicians invented new musical genres that revolutionized the artform. Sounds a lot like reducing the friction inside a rigid system.
Basically, while we might prefer to have people raise integrity to the highest priority, life is complicated and it's sometimes hard to say a wrong thing is 100% wrong.
I mean, hell, look at SOX. Look at the various anti-money laundering requirements that banks are subject to. The de jure approach here in the world today is to force the corporation to police its own staff and customers.
We only think it is because it's drilled into us from a young age by the educational system. But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works.
If cheating happens, it is the responsibility of: 1) schools to deal with that accordingly (withhold degrees according to pre-written rules, etc) 2) employers to interview people instead of looking at credentials (something they should be doing anyway).
Well, morality isn't an objectively-verifiable property of the physical universe but one about which different opinions exist and where even if a “correct” answer exists it isn't demonstrably so, and in that sense nothing is morally wrong in a fully general sense, and moral values are very much shaped by socialization, sure.
OTOH, academic cheating involves violation of agreements and obtaining things of value by false representations, which is fairly broadly considered to be morally wrong generally, not just in the specific case of academic cheating.
> But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter.
Pretty much the entirety of the law is about defining the what is cheating in seeking “real world” results, in the same way as academic codes define what is cheating in academic contexts.
Particularly, delegating assignments to third parties outside the scope of authorization by those giving the assignment, or using materials prohibited by those giving the assignment when completing it, is cheating in the real world, and not just the academy. (The reasons assignments have those kind of restrictions may be different, of course.)
You cheat on your test and become a lawyer, I may end up in jail because of your cheating.
... Or, you become a teacher, and my education is harmed.
... Or, an activity worker, and I fall off a climbing wall.
... Or, a scientist, and I waste time and resources repeating an experiment because you didn't understand what you were doing and lied to cover it up.
... Or, become a shop worker and I get short changed.
... Or, make sandwiches, and kill people because you don't follow basic hygiene and cheated to get your certificate.
... Or, a million other possible scenarios where people trust you to represent yourself so they know whether you're capable of carrying out the tasks you're set.
Or if you generalized cheating from "copying answers" to "producing answers that look right to your employers", you get a whole range of dishonest behavior you can get away with for years (careers?) while causing serious harm to individuals, companies and communities. Using unsafe materials which superficially pass inspection, outright faking studies so that it looks like your drugs work, fingering a likely suspect in a criminal investigation and lying on the stand to get them convicted.
I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but there is sometimes a logical appeal.
* It taught me how to learn difficult things quickly.
* The parts I do use were drilled to being second nature by the advanced courses I don't use anymore
Real Equivalent cheating:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693
The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.
He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his jo
Here's the real problem: leaking private info:
> And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.
> "Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.
> Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.
Same concept taken to its extremes.
Actual real world industries are full of possibilities for cheating: lie on your estimations, then lie to avert blame after those estimations are not met. Convert safety margings into profit margins and use that to outbid competitors who don't with prices they can't match. Real people die under collapsing structures that would not have collapsed had the safety margins been there.
They do if you are in violation of a license...
You can argue that cheating puts you ahead of students that work in good faith, systemically, though it's still a bit different. Stealing has implied intent of taking something away from someone, cheating doesn't. You're just trying to get better grades.
Merit scholarships are given based on class rank. If the #11 student cheats to get to #10, then they took scholarship money that someone else actually earned. This is a very real problem in my school district.
Additionally, if you cheated to get good grades and got into a good university because of them, then you probably took the seat of someone that didn't cheat and was not accepted but would have been.
Also, (some?) universities internally rank high schools by the performance of the students they accept. So, if School A sends a bunch of 4.0 students that all flunk out, then future students from that school get their 4.0 weighted lower than a 4.0 from School B where students regularly graduate from the university with honors.
So, if you are cheating to get a good grade and you get into a good school (taking the seat of a student that didn't cheat) and then you get caught cheating, or just end up doing poorly because you were never that good of a student, then future students from your high school will be penalized because of the poor choices you made (and because the school was unwilling or unable to deal with those choices).
The system is. broken. to. begin. with. And not just with cheating, with a number of different factors.
What incentive, as a student, do I have to NOT cheat if I won't get caught?
We only think cheating is only "wrong" because it goes against how the people who set up the educational system intend for it to work, e.g. they are short circuiting the system. It has no counterpart in the real world, and cannot be compared to murder and theft. If it were up to me, I'd make the school system results-only -- i.e. it's about how well you can build a project and explain it, not how well you can write up answers.
People who think otherwise need to wake up from their K-12-university programming.
And in case anyone thinks I'm an uneducated redneck, I am an Asian American overachiever with two engineering degrees from world-renowned universities.
.. and as cheating isn't wrong in your personal ethical system you're happy to lose your job to someone who claims to be better qualified than you but is just cheating to get ahead?
I don't know what engineering you do but I don't think society should value engineers as highly who know something is wrong but can't explain it and so don't get it fixed. "Soft" skills matter.
I'm a math major, and something I've noticed is that my exams aren't helpful for actually learning math. I don't cheat on the exams because I want to learn as best I can, and I want to say that my good grades really are mine, but in all honesty my degree isn't useful in the future because I have the ability to get the right answer by hand on a carefully constructed math problem-- it's useful because of mathematical thinking, and because I now have the awareness of the mathematical tools at my disposal and their known use cases.
But really, cheating isn't more "wrong" than any other category of thing some people wish didn't exist but does. If there's a loophole and that loophole gets you where you want to be all things considered, then take the loophole.
I agree that, for some people, cheating is ultimately harmful. For example, if you're a comp sci major and know nothing about computers going in, you're gonna want to do it the way the university wants you to do it, or you should drop out and learn a different way if that suits you better. But otherwise, just consider the costs/benefits and cheat with awareness. Our most innovative and important achievements as a species were obtained by finding loopholes.
An example: Suppose there was an obscure rule that said professors must pass anyone who had taken the class three times. Some people take advantage, enroll for the same class three semesters, don't attend at all and still receive a passing grade. That would be a loophole. Dubious and contrary to the purpose, but technically legal.
What you describe is a circumvention or subversion of the system itself rather than a loophole.