I stopped caring if my students cheat a long time ago. It's not worth the hassle and it does lower my completion rate which is the only thing administration cares about. Cheating increases the passing rate so I'm all in favor of it.
...leaving the honest students as the only ones whose grades suffer from such a scheme, whether it is from their assignments seeming subjectively subpar as compared to their cheating colleagues, or when the class average (and grades) are disproportionately skewed. In the latter case, when grades are assigned based on a bell curve rather than by a fixed percentage mark, an honest A performance can easily turn into a B+ or lower.
Foreign students are absolutely a grift at US universities, though I suspect COVID may have ended that one. A great many will come to the US hoping to land a job but most will go home with a name-brand degree and a stake in the moderately successful family business.
I guarantee you they do. I guarantee you I know people with PhDs in neuroscience who've been asked their SAT scores.
I guarantee you that Boeing or some other major defense contractor (it's hard to keep track with how many were on campus) has made it well known at my school that if you graduate with a 3.7, you automatically get a job.
I guarantee you that when a school like mine does grade deflation to the point where the average engineer gets a 2.7, the people who cheat make it such that the people who didn't cheat struggle to find a job. Then when they do find a job their success is delayed substantially.
I guarantee you that people who already study their ass off for tests also cheat so that they guarantee that A. They also guarantee what would have been an A ends up as a B. There are only so many spots at top universities, guess who those spots go to.
Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace. Guess how hard it is for the smart ones who didn't cheat to find a good job.
Cheating does a lot more damage than you give it credit for.
(I've also met a lot of brilliant people that didn't cheat but there are far more smart people who do than don't)
Working on a PhD in Neuroscience or for Boeing is not the end goal (in fact you should probably avoid Boeing if you have a degree in Aerospace)
There is a huge demand for tech workers, its all over the published media. As long as you get that degree, and can pass the entrance interview (for which a degree is far from a requirement), you can get a job.
Also
>Guess what happens to a school's reputation when their "best and brightest" end up being idiots in the workplace.
Literally nothing. Entrance interviews are a thing, and there is enough "padding" to absorb the lack of skill, especially in jobs with goverment contracting involved, where the company places someone on the project just to charge the goverment a certain rate for them, even if they don't do anything.
Some of these cycles are self-perpetuating. If cheaters make it high enough in the corporate world the "you don't need to know that skill anyway" mentality can sink in (after all they were successful) and then nothing really matters except the school that someone came from.
All the things you mentioned are before entering the workforce.
Yes, but the name of your school and your GPA does tend to affect the manner of your posterior's entry.
A lot of the honest students are too young and naive to realize the weight and importance of this though. Sometimes it takes a while before the harsh reality of how the world works sets in. When you've done well thus far just being a smart, honest, hard worker I suspect many believe that he world just continues to function in the way it has since they we're high-achieving children. Once the veil is lifted you end up with a lot of jaded adults.
Not saying they don't bear any responsibility for thinking the world is one giant meritocracy, and not being more skeptical of society. But still, it can be a bit sad to see some genuinely good people get torn down as they grow up and get pushed aside despite following what they were thought 'the right path' was.
Even if you want to learn, its not like academia is the gatekeeper to learning.
Also, learning isn’t always the end goal. Maybe you want to be a professor and teach, or maybe you want to do academic research.
"the freeloader had to take the class again."
People say "that's real life" - well, no. In the workforce there's some accountability and the freeloader will get fired while you get promoted.
Lol, if only.
Thankfully I was never the type of person who had to cheat their way into prestige. I did that because I was an immature kid. What's worse is that I was smart enough to solve the problems anyway, but I was just lazy.
It's really not that hard to imagine living in luxury and fear at the same time. That's how rich and/or powerful people feel in less democratic countries - they simultaneously have more money than they know what to do with, and are one random event (mistake, shifting political winds) from losing it all, possibly along with their lives. It's actually one of the main reasons democracy is considered the superior system - powerful people living in fear is a combination that often leads to blood being spilled.
This is statistically true for more people living under capitalism than socialism btw.