Cheating Upwards: Smart kids may especially do it. But why?
nymag.com
nymag.com
"Callahan blames the dog-eat-dog economic climate of the past twenty years: An unfettered market and unprecedented economic inequality have corroded our values and threaten to corrupt the equal opportunity we cherish. Callahan's "Winning Class" has created a separate moral reality where it cheats without consequences-while the "Anxious Class" believes choosing not to cheat could cancel its only shot at success in a winner-take-all world."
The bottom line is if you create a system which makes it so that one terrible thing (like a job loss or medical emergency) can ruin your entire life, and are also told that you are easily replaceable - you get a culture like this. That unless you take lower wages, longer hours, and fewer benefits, that your job will be outsourced/offshored. That unless you get the right grades, and get into the right schools so you can get what's left of the jobs (in many fields, not everyone can be a dev, admin, business owner, etc.) that you'll wind up homeless, you will have this stuff happen. The more competitive and brutal things get (more unemployment, greater concentration of job opportunities), the worse this will get - and it's not likely to get better any time soon.
When you try to run societies - as many Social Darwinists think is good, healthy, and proper (where the weak die, and the strong prosper) people get an incentive to cheat on a massive scale.
For instance, we decide who will become a physician largely by grades and MCAT scores. Many people who would have been good physicians will not be accepted to med school, and people who get into top schools are better positioned. Med school is hard, but the vast majority who get in make it through, so "getting in" is the most important thing. Unfortunately, we won't be deciding who will be a physician by seeing who is best at being a physician, it doesn't work that way. Instead, we use a GPA and exam as a stand in. This system can be malevolently cracked, with huge payoffs for the people who aren't caught, and potentially life altering consequences for those who don't cheat and fall short (I know a guy who was borderline and didn't get into med school - after two tries, he gave up on being a doctor).
Compare this with being a programmer. I'm not saying there's no cheating in CS classes, I'm sure there's plenty. But if you really want to be a programmer, there isn't a magic proxy that you can crack. And if you're at the 49%ile, it's not like you don't get to be a programmer the way some people don't get to become physicians.
But imagine if decided that every year, 50,000 people were allowed to study to become "programmers" (with fines and imprisonment for those who programmed without this credential), and we chose them them all based on a logic test that correlates pretty damn well with programming ability. Now I think you'd see really horrendous amounts of cheating. It isn't just the competitiveness, it's the added reliance on a crackable proxy.
Character matters, but we should also see widespread cheating as perhaps a sign of a deeply flawed system - and if it's clear that we can't stop the cheating, we should understand that the system is profoundly unfair to honest people who accept the results. If cheating on a single exam can make such a difference, and it's clear that we are unable to control the cheating, then maybe we should try to be less reliant on a single, mass produced exam.
One of my math professors in college said he figured he could assess a student's knowledge of an area of math after an hour of discussion. No "mass produced" exam needed, just take it where it goes, probe a bit, allow the student to consult the books of ask for a reminder if needed. It would be nearly impossible to cheat on such an exam.
I understand (and so did the professor) that this is idealistic - it wouldn't be the same for everybody, it wouldn't scale, and so forth. But it's still a direction some of these struggling institutions might want to investigate.
Perhaps smart kids find themselves competing for this kind of thing more often than others? A 99%ile LSAT score actually does increase your chances of getting into Yale law school over a 97%ile LSAT. A 3.95 GPA in the sciences really does increase your changes of getting into UCSF med school over a 3.7.
It gets even worse when students are aware that their peers are cheating. I remember reading about a cyclist who admitted to doping and regretted it deeply. His discussion of why and how he came to cheat was interesting - he said that he could have accepted losing as a non-doper if he'd believed that the people besting him were competing honestly, but that when he realized they were going to win because they cheated and he didn't, he cracked and started doing it too. And of course, once he's doing it, then even more people realize they'll lose if they aren't doping. Eventually, it becomes endemic. Sure, that sounds like a rationalization, but it also provides a very clear illustration of how a large population can essentially corrupt and cheating can become widespread.
My guess is that cheating is less common in environments where the measured outcome of learning has little bearing on your opportunities afterwards. In other words, in environments where you need to meet a standard of competence to graduate, but people aren't especially interested in what your grades were, my guess would be that cheating is far less common.
Though as far as immoral/unethical/illegal activities go, cheating was really the tip of the ice berg for my particular university.