Never went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did.
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)
I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating.
Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree.
If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students?
I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it.
That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number.
Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
Most people did not done this: Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test.
It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.
We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.
I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it.
It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore.
The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her.
In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that.
It apparently works across time!
In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.
Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.
It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade
Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.
Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.
Before I went, I also made money selling essays/code to lazy students.
Much was learned today.