Anonymous9723

I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts.

It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it.

I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well.

* Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.