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> Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance.

This attitude is so strange to me. I would assume that cheaters are a minority of students. (Perhaps a large minority, sadly. I've heard some third-hand stories.)

My school had a policy of an automatic 9 month suspension for a first offense. Professors were officially discouraged from exercising any discretion, and they were supposed to report all incidents to the disciplinary committee. For a second offense, the penalty was a permanent expulsion. I did see the system fail a few times when I was there, but it worked a lot of the time.

having such a severe penalty for the first offense probably causes professors to look the other way if they don't agree that it's reasonable. imo, the severity of the offense can vary a lot. cheating on a homework might not be as bad as cheating on an exam (worth a lot more points), wholesale copying of answers is much worse than getting a little too much help from your study group.

as far as how widespread cheating is, that probably depends on the culture at your particular institution. my school had a very strict policy for programming assignments: you were only allowed to discuss them with the instructor, a TA, or in public on piazza. and yet, every time I went into the cs lab, I would see everyone huddled around each other laptops debugging code for the latest assignment. I'm not sure whether they simply didn't understand the rule or didn't realize how obvious it was what they were doing, but essentially everyone in that room was bending the rules a little.

There is definitely a point at which anyone will cheat, and one time I met that threshold.

There was an Econ exam that I hadn't prepared for, and I got there fully prepared to flunk it. That day there was a problem with the photocopier. We had to fill in a scantron, but they didn't have copies of the exam for everyone. The professor read the questions and answers.

And I watched people's heads go down.

> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others.

This is an age-old question in education: are you trying to learn something, or get the credentials necessary to get a job? I wasn't doing a major in Econ, so the fact that I didn't get much out of the class put me strongly on the side of shrugging that off as "they pretend to teach me, I pretend to learn."

But for most of my coursework, I really did want to learn things and get recognition for having done so.

> Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat.

I strongly agree. I know there were guys who cheated in various ways, I watched one guy who went around the labs asking people to do his homework for him. And because universities have allowed degrees to be devalued, I've spent hours in interviews demonstrating basic CS concepts.

> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade

I’ve been listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, and one thing that struck me is that early philosophers seemed to consider virtue the end goal of philosophy. That is to say, we should care less about if our physics students can do physics, and more if doing physics had made them more ethical human beings. It’s quite a reversal we’ve ended up with...

> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others.

Some people, yes. Others are there to actually learn something. Either because they're intrinsically motivated to do so, or because they understand that while a degree may help get them in the door somewhere, career success in many fields does depend on actually knowing what you're doing.

For those who are there to learn, do you think they would also pass up the opportunity to both learn and improve their grade?

I don't think anybody would cheat based on how easy it is, but they would based on how common, normal, and socially acceptable they think it is.

True story: One day, an assistant professor (and a first time teacher) came to class and announced that there would be a "surprise test" on so-and-so day. Not just that, the questions asked would be 5 out of 8 possible pre-announced questions.

On the day of the test, the professor wrote the questions on the board and then left the room. Almost every student in the class cheated. Some came with chits to copy from. Some copied from others. Legends though, they came with pre-written answer sheets for each of the 8 questions and attached answers for the 5 questions which were asked.

And in that case, (almost) everyone learns. The people who came with the pre written answer sheets studied, the people who wrote the chits studied, and the people who copied from others presumably learned _something_ in the process. Maybe some didn't, but that's always going to happen

I can't agree with this viewpoint at all. If you take a viva of one of these students who came in with a pre-written answer sheet copied from a friend, a vast majority of them would straight up fail.

As TA and prof, I have seen cheaters copy word to word, spelling mistakes included, incorrect grammatical structures as is, basic mistakes like 6/2=2 untouched, because they are literally Ctrl-C Ctrl-V with their hands, with no brain involvement whatsoever.

I agree that the university has some responsibility to make cheating hard, and to not entrap people.

But I don't see where the responsibility goes from hard to "as hard as possible".