It’s not a victimless crime.
Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.
And why should any young person think that? Just observing the world around them definitely says the opposite.
Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but because they know what they're doing.
Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull exercises that seem practically designed to kill their curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?
In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to get past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging way possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in life?
Or is doing exercises a moral obligation, regardless of their ill effects on the student?
That's a discussion worth having. "You know, like a psychopath" short-circuits that.
If you only care about yourself and not the impact on others. Cheating is not a zero sum game. You are depriving others, and are committing fraud.
Perhaps the least damaging way would be to seek professional help to better yourself so you can cope with any “ill effects” you get from doing “inane, dull exercises”.
Or finding a course or career that doesn’t require you to endure activities you don’t want to do. Running your own business maybe.
What I was saying was amoral and psychopath-like was the act of "excluding ethics from the picture". You have reacted as if I'd said that the person I responded to had those qualities. Sorry I wasn't clearer, to avoid that apparent misunderstanding.
Your questions seem puzzled, irritated, as if I obviously have no common sense or understanding of what life's like, and you've had to instruct me in the basic realities, like a condescending teacher to an unlearning novice. I'm not sure what I said that suggests that. I would've thought it would be uncontroversial, a mere repeating of the dictionary definition, to suggest that to exclude ethics from the picture when acting in life is amoral, and like a psychopath.
You mean like what they are going to have to do when they actually start working?
You can always discuss the fact that the exercises are bone chillingly boring with the professor, and potentially you don’t even have to do them because all your score comes from the test.
But at the end of the day, if your professor/boss tells you to do the boring stuff, you either do it, quit, or get fired.
Cheating only kicks the can down the road to a failed career and possibly even criminal behavior. Best path for a student with that attitude is to drop the course or push through it and reevaluate their educational choices.
…On the other hand, a big part of the reason I ended up with that set of goals is that it worked well for me when I was young, for both practical and emotional reasons I won't waste your time with. So I won't claim to be holier-than-thou. And I don't feel entitled to judge people for having different principles.
Cheating is a form of fraud, and fraud is a crime.
Doesn’t this logically lead those that don’t want crime and cheating to clamp down hard on these acts to discourage them? Ie should we have harsher punishments? Expel students? Convict students?
Want people to stop cheating? Fix the incentives. Stop using a points evaluation system, and curves. The professor in this article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a problem. Imagine that!
The students on the next semester used DMs, as the end of the article points out, and the professor didn't care, which means that the amount of cheating for that semester was unknown and hence, not less of problem. Unless that is, you're the professor and seem unwilling to punish cheats, or you're one of the students who cheated.