Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?

I’m an undergraduate doing CS at a ~T25 school and this article is 100% true. I think outsiders have almost no idea the extent to which cheating is rampant especially in engineering classes. We are talking about Copilot, taking exams with 2 or 3 of your friends who are former students in the class with you, bathroom breaks to Google answers on the in person tests, copying project source code from former students in classes who put it on their Github because they need something to put on there when they apply for a job, requesting “mental health days” any time something is due, and downloading entire homework’s off CourseHero because the instructors didn’t change anything from last semester. Most CS classes now just have projects worth about 40%, homework worth 20%, and the rest come from in person exams. This means someone who cheated on all the assignments and doesn’t actually know anything will likely at the most get a low B. Online exams are widely perceived to be cheating bonanzas among the student body.

> students have developed the habit of breaking into groups of four when given online multiple-choice quizzes. Each guesses a different answer (A, B, C, or D) to each question. Because students get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a second time. And wind up with a perfect score.

I mean they are practically asking for it at this point. 24 hours and two tries? Who's not going to cheat?

> At Tufts, sources told me that crib sheets have gone digital, with students uploading course material to their Notes app and using their Apple watches to access information while taking tests.

Are they even trying anymore? How on earth is an apple watch allowed anywhere near an exam?

> That’s because lower level courses, where cheating is more rampant, tend to be taught by nontenured faculty with little job security—the kind of people who fear getting negative student evaluations.

Looks like when nobody is buying into the BS, they treat it as BS? The students just want the degree, and the teachers just want the job, win-win.

I miss the old ruthlessness of the circuits class in electronic engineering: two hours, open book, paper. Six questions.

Average grade: 45. Curved. Lesson: You don't know as much as you think, be humble. Also, how to design a safe and simple train switching system with karnaugh maps.

So basically the only solution is for colleges to actually care about undergrads and run undergraduate classes just like graduate seminars where the students have to interact, in small groups, with the faculty for faculty to gauge their command of the subject matter.

I cheated a ton in college, though I nor my classmates never thought of it as cheating, more of as taking a competitive advantage.

An athlete playing a sport will always take a competitive advantage if they can get away with it, whether spitting on a baseball or crying out that another player fouled you so your team can get a penalty kick, you’re just taking every advantage available to you. We did essentially the same thing, just in a classroom.

Maybe when I first came to college I “wanted to learn”, but when we all started “cheating” that mentality was long gone and replaced with “I need a CS degree and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get it”.

And I’d say this “cheating” probably taught us more about the real world than those classes. It was an exercise in accomplishing a task by thinking outside the box and getting it done by whatever means necessary.

And some of the best professors I had understood this. They had one professor who gave us an exam and allowed us to use whatever tools or resources we wanted, his line was always "if you don't know it, nothing will save you".

As an old football coach constantly told us, "you're only cheating yourself."

Can we just finally admit that colleges are passé and have become nothing more than a signal and perhaps even a useless one at that?