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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

Having grown up in America and moved to Czechia for college I have to say that I was absolutely shocked by the level of cheating both by Czechs as well as those from "farther east" like Ukraine and Russia. Just brazen obvious sheeting like taking notes into exams and hiding them. Cooperating during exams. Even collaboration to distract the teacher during exams. When I was at college in the US getting caught cheating once meant an instant fail for the course. Twice meant you were kicked out of school and you'd have a cheating mark added to your credit transfer paper so you couldn't move your college credits elsewhere. In Czechia, getting caught cheating meant having to re-take the test. Nothing bad happened to cheaters and they cheated rampantly.

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This contradicts what we read here about cheating being very often tolerated in higher education institutions in the US, because money.

Usually I try including at least a few links, but in this case I think anybody who has read these threads right here on HN should remember those numerous posts and discussions? I remember comments from educators who wanted to do something but the higher-ups prevented it, for example, or reversed the decision. Unfortunately I don't know what to search for to find these kinds of comments again.

EDIT: Found one very quickly after just a little cross-reading of one cheating related thread, the reply to this linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533086

Quote:

> The amount of cheating was insane. He started academic dishonesty proceedings against many of the students but the department pressured him to "work it out."

It's not just the students either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2019/06/21/americas-l...

Cheating might be tolerated more in the US if the student is wealthy, which might be a US student or far more likely the scion of some family in a foreign country. It has not been tolerated anywhere I've attended though.

Two things can be true at the same time. There is a lot of cheating in america, but nowhere near as much as in low-trust countries.

fwiw - I think Americans value integrity a lot more than most other places, and academic cheating is not nearly as common.

> Two things can be true at the same time.

Of course, but the commenter I replied to made a specific statement, first sentence, making it sound to my reading - and I don't think I'm reading something into it that isn't meant to be there? - as if it's a lot less in the US. But even a little bit of searching, and every single time the topic comes up here, which usually is for higher education so I'm not making any statement about anything below, ends up with a lot of comments, and no opposition to them, saying there is a lot of cheating there.

Examples:

https://academicintegrity.org/resources/facts-and-statistics

> McCabe’s original research and subsequent follow-up studies show that more than 60 percent of university students freely admit to cheating in some form.

https://proctoredu.com/blog/tpost/5dk67zrns1-academic-dishon...

> The level of cheating in high school according to statistics is extremely high. One of the most thorough studies, carried out by Dr. Donald McCabe, reveals that about 95% of polled students (both undergraduates and graduates) admitted to having cheated in some form.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031255390/reports-of-cheatin...

Therefore, it surprised my that the original commenter made such a strong statement.

thx for clarification and added links, will read up.

As someone born and raised in Romania, I can 100% confirm what the above poster was saying for Romania as well. Even if cheating may be widespread through corruption and other means in the States, it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.

The worse penalty possible for cheating (IF you get caught and IF the teacher/professor even cares, which was not by any means universal) is getting a grade of 1 (out of 10) on that specific item (exam, project etc. ).

This is even true for the national country-wide exams you take in 8th and 12th grades: if you are caught cheating, you get a 1/10 on that specific exam, but can still take all the rest, and will be forced to re-take the one you cheated on in the next session.

The only thing treated more seriously were bachelor's/master's/PhD theses, where you could face plagiarism charges. But even this is mostly theoretical, especially for the bachelor's, since only some cursory verification was ever performed, at least at my university (one of the biggest ones in the capital).

> it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.

My impression from reading HN, where the topic came up numerous times over the years, was that that is not so. See the link I presented as example, I saw a lot such stories, right here in the discussions, but also in some articles. Not just the US, I also remember similar anecdotes about management preventing punishment from Canada even when a professor initially tried to do something.

If it is not representative I apologize, I go by what I read mostly here, and it was a lot over the years.

There certainly seems to be an official stance against cheating, e.g. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=201609211...

It's just that I saw so many stories from or about educators who tried and it went like in that link I included, especially when many students were caught.

"Why Professors Don’t Do More to Stop Students Who Cheat" - https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-professors-dont-do-mor...

> Some who have tried say that administrators, fearful of lawsuits, don’t back them up

> “In the majority of cases of trivial cheating, I think most professors turn a blind eye,” says Donald L. McCabe, the associate provost for campus development at Rutgers University at Newark, who has studied the issue. “The number who do nothing is very small, but the number who do very little is very large.”

I did say theoretically. That in practice corruption and various power games make it difficult to apply the theory in reality is very different from there just not being any punishment in the rules at all (or only very weak punishment).

I'm gonna have to go with scarface on this one. While your statements could very well be true, it is dangerous to make cultural generalizations without the data to back it.

What kind of "data" would you accept for this? Crime data by demographic?

Scarface just said "can't generalize to everyone" which is true and not the original point made.

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