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Comment by eecsninja | Hacker News Reader

Academic cheating is NOT morally wrong in a general sense.

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).

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> Academic cheating is NOT morally wrong in a general sense.

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.)

Misrepresenting your ability is morally wrong and can cause actual harm - personal, economic, or other forms of harm.

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 you copy copyrighted or patented works into your knowledge-worker output, creating liabilities for your employer which can destroy it.

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.

These are real-world situations with real consequences on people's time, money, and lives. Honesty and ethics matter here. That's what licensing requirements are for. That's different from the academic system where you only use 10% of what you learn, once you go into the real world.

My career ended up in a different field than my degree, so I don't use much of what I was taught in university, but it's still quite useful to me:

* 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

> 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.

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

How does that harm anyone? Does anyone who doesn't work at Verizon care?

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.

Ha, that story reminds me of an old Onion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ

Same concept taken to its extremes.

I mean just look at Enron. Or the volkwagon diesel fraud. Or the financial crisis of 2008

Employers do care if you outsource your code writing to India without telling anyone, which is the functional equivalent here.

> But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter.

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.

Yes it's wrong - you go in to learn, you promise not to cheat, then you violate that promise, and fail to properly demonstrate that you have, in fact, learnt. That's pretty clearly immoral.

nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works

They do if you are in violation of a license...

Attitudes like this are why we can't have good things.

Morality is relative anyway.

Yes but it's meaningless to devolve into that rabbit hole here because Western court of public opinion has already decided it is morally wrong. This is reflected in writing in the rules of very nearly every academic institution across the planet.

If I'm the essay writer, how is your morality forcing me to stop doing it ? Unless it become law, and actually enforced, your morality is meaningless.

Nothing is, but why would you do it if you weren't getting paid for it (because all your customers have been thrown out of school)?

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