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Comment by pbh | Hacker News Reader

Your claim that the author has drawn the wrong conclusion relies on a major assertion for which you have failed to provide support. Specifically: why do you think a 22/108 cheating rate is non-standard for a large US research university's business school? Are there institutions that check such things in any sort of systematic fashion (e.g., TurnItIn run on a substantial portion of the classwork)?

It seems to me that the incentives that Panos describes, such as poor evaluations, funding/salary, disinterested administrators, and awkward one-on-one confrontations are common to many top institutions.

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Ah, the starchy HN argument style, lacking only a demand that I provide citations. Unfortunately, you're deploying your pomposity in the service of refuting something I didn't actually write.

I didn't say that 22/108 was "non-standard for a large US research university's business school". I said it was "big". It is big. This doesn't change if the norm at every other business school is 32/108. The OP also thought it was big and was unhappily surprised by it.

pbh brings up solid points. Stating that something is big will always lead to the question "relative to what?"

Your post indicates that you think 28/108 is big relative to what a normal cheating rate would be (as can be seen by your statement "he'd have gone back to 'normal' cheating rates"). How can you establish whether or not something is big relative to a norm when you haven't even established what the norm is?

From the rest of his comment, it seemed reasonable to assume he meant "big" relative to most people's sense of fair play.

I'm having trouble picturing an argument for how a 25% cheating rate would be "small".

Anecdotally, 25% cheating rate seems really low compared to what I observed at my top liberal-arts college. I would've guessed a cheating rate of about 60-70% to be "small", and 90% to be large. On my floor of incoming freshmen, I'd say those of us who had never cheated were in the minority, and in fact many of my floormates expressed incredulity that there were people who could've gotten to college without cheating once.

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