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Comment by teagee | Hacker News Reader

> Ten percent of respondents who reported having a 4.0 said they had cheated in an academic context while at Harvard.

Imagine how many cheated and didn't admit it! A very sad state of affairs...

Though this implies that 10% of the 4.0s don't deserve it, it's not proof; a single cheat may or may not have affected the grade.

When that single cheat might have resulted in expulsion if it were caught, it implies a pretty significant effect on the grade.

It wouldn’t actually change the result of the metric (because survivorship bias: you don’t count students who never graduated in the graduated student population), but it changes the believability of and the ethic behind the metric. Now we can say that at least 10% of the folks who graduated didn’t earn their grades, and the school’s reputation is less for it.

My experience is that in recent years, cheating is ubiquitous in many elite schools. This goes all the way to the top. Fake research data. Self-enriching financial schemes by faculty. Conflicts-of-interest. Etc.

Cheating is probably the best thing to do. It's a zero sum world.

Sure, if you're satisfied with rampant corruption and dysfunctional institutions. Let's embrace dishonesty and underachievement.

Cheating may be a rational thing to do, on an individual level, if we ignore ethics. Outside of that it breaks down. I wouldn't say "best" without a lot of qualifiers.

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