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Which Grad Students Cheat the Most?
SpectralDesign.Net writes, "The results of a research paper released Wednesday reveal who is admitting to cheating (in North America). The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the U.S. and concluded that the biggest cheaters were business students — 56% of them admitted to copying papers, plagiarizing, etc. The author of the study said, 'The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important. You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.'" Other grad-student cheaters include: engineering students, 54%; physical sciences, 50%; medical and health-care, 49%; law, 45%; liberal arts, 43%; and social science and humanities students, 39%. These numbers are close to the guesstimate of the anonymous professor.
Enough said.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
They mean that Business students are the least dishonest.
Best Slashdot Co
You'd think in business that it would be fairly easy to see who was cheating because when people write extended essays it would show up strait away with people using the same sources in the same way etc. I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it. They even sit next to ech other unsupervised during exams and sometimes take multiple choice exams... maybe they just seem more trustworthy?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I run a website about video game cheats. Therefore cheating is "a necessary measure and the sort of practice I'll likely need to succeed in the professional world". ;)
Video Game cheats, hints a
I rationally decide to cheat.
-- from an anonymous coward B-schooler :-)
^(oo)^pig~
The study focused on 5,300 graduate students in Canada and the US and concluded that the biggest cheaters were business students -- 56% of them admitted to copying papers, plagiarizing, etc. The author of the study said, 'The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important. You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.
The study must have been done on students in the first half of their business degree, and the second half must be the part where they teach, "Always lie about cheating."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
and an amazing 0% of Political Science students!
They learn quick, don't they.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Okay, I'm not so much the grammer freak, but this one is not good.
"students confessed cheating" maybe?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The numbers for physical sciences may be skewed by the presence of foreign students.
There has been a number of scandals involving professors from the far east that fabricated research. This is evidence that research ethics are different in those countries than in the west. And most foreign students from the far east go into physical sciences.
It doesn't look at though the study focuses in on the students' country of origin. It would be interesting to see results when nationality is included.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.
I've seen this too often when managers focus on getting their numbers in instead of doing the right the first time. One company I worked for promoted the supervisor who always got his numbers in to be the department manager. Senior level people started to leaving (I was number three out of a dozen) since the guy was so ruthless that no one wanted to work with him and he would find reasons to fire you if try to hold him to a higher standard. What happened? He hired new people and quality took a serious hit but he got his numbers in number. BTW, the company is facing bankruptcy but the manager is still getting his numbers in.
As a university professor, I have caught cheaters on numerous occasions (approximately one a semester, often more) -- mostly undergrad, but the occasional grad. I have heard that justification numerous times. It's an odd one to give after you got caught; obviously, failing the course and facing possible expulsion is hardly "getting the job done." But I get the sense that I am the anomaly - I think students get away with cheating in many of their courses. Most of the cheating I find is plagiarism, and there are many cases where I don't think the student really understood what they were doing. I had two very interesting cases - both grad students, bizarrely enough - where the student plagiarized work that I had written. One of them copied sentences from an article I had written that was published on the web, and used them without attribution. The other had actually plagiarized a wikipedia entry that I was an active contributor to! I caught the latter one because I recognized a quotation she used as one I had contributed to the wikipedia entry; when I went back to look at it, entire chunks of prose were being used without attribution. I do think there is another explanation for a lot of these cases than "getting the job done," however; many of the students are doing things that are so stupid that they must know (at least subconsciously) that they will get caught. I think there is a category of cheaters who are seeking attention, as bizarre as it might sound.
I would like to know where you find anonymous professors, anonymous reader writes, and anonymous joe
please tell me where you got your sources from
The survey gives the percent of cheaters who admit the cheat? Does that mean the business students are the most honest in admitting they cheat, and the other students (**cough** law students **cough**) both cheat and lie more?
It's a heck of a lot harder to cheat in IT degrees. You either know how to fix a computer, hook up a network, or write a program or you don't and since most of it is hands on, it's pretty hard to cheat on anything actually worth decent points. Plus, us IT people are smart so we don't need to cheat :D lol
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Billy Madision, where the business graduate is asked to give a speech concerning business ethics in a "decathalon of education", this results in him pulling out a gun and trying to shoot his opponent.
Pretty accurate protrayal of what i've seen in the business world...
Unfortunately, when you work for a corporation whose ONLY motive is profit then moral considerations are barely an afterthought, to the detriment of everyone who uses that corporation's products and are affected by the same and those who work for the corporation.
Well of course Statistics students has the most cheaters, but they are also the most likely to understand the consequences of admitting en masse to cheating on a survey!!! ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
I don't like to call it cheating.
It's just a question of which resources you are utilising to accomplish the task.
Maximizing the benefit of your available resources is clearly something you should do both in school and in real life.
Where cheating breaks down is that you are improperly using them in violation of the rules. In school it is cheating, plagarism etc, in "real life" it's fraud, cooking the books etc.
Go ahead push the rules to the limit, but don't use the "real life" excuse, it's just as invalid in school as at Enron.
Having just graduate from Business School earlier this year, I have to disagree with those statistics. Everyone I knew was very careful about NOT cheating. However, there were lot's of "Group Projects", including take-home exams, where the professors actually encouraged students to work together. I don't think that qualifies as "Cheating" though.
"The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important," McCabe said. "You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."
Which is exactly the type of reasoning that leads to this clusterfuck. Perhaps it's time for professors and the deans to expel these students rather than let the behavior continue? The cheaters might learn a valuable lesson, and society as a whole would be the better off for it.
Now trackback the cheating of those in Enron and MCI/Worldcom back to their cheating days at Harvard and other business schools. I bet the relation will be pretty high up there.
Unless they were cheating on the survey too!
Interestingly, in my studies I stumbled upon 2 or 3 subjects which were plain impossible to pass without cheating. And not that "I failed", simply anybody not cheating would fail, and most of the cheaters still wouldn't make it through. The subject was too difficult for my group, for the group year before, two years before, three years before and that's where known records end. From groups of 30-50 students 2-10 most proficient at cheating would pass at the first try, the rest would get a clue and re-try while cheating (passing another 10-20 students or so), and whoever tried the honest approach, would simply fail.
Interestingly, these were informatics-related subjects.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
My position remains the same. Cheating is just a symptom of a much wider problem that a lot of people don't want to face. e.g. It's the managers/politicians/the guy standing next to me that are doing it.
You can't cheat off of someone when you're trying to come up with interesting physics experiments, and then trying to perform them and write a thesis about it. Maybe if I had had a way of cheating I wouldn't have taken 7 years to graduate.
Unless.... I could have faked that data!
Goddammit
Buisness Ethics. nuff' said.
The biggest cheater I've ever seen was a grad student who plagiarized his entire masters thesis, and then at the thesis defense didn't even know what the material in the paper was, to the point where the examiners were asking him to explain why he covered things that were not in the paper, and he just bluffed about that too.
Lesson here: If you're going to plagiarize a major paper, there are two things you should make sure of:
1) Know what's in the damn thing (maybe even actually read it?)
2) Don't take a paper written two years ago by your main supervising professor and submit it as your own work, that's just stupid beyond belief.
End of the story was: No graduation, just a quiet dissapearance, and never seen again.
Bodes ill for our future health care needs.
Almost a 50/50 chance of getting a doc who cheated his/her way through college.. scary.
On the bright side if your doc is ever stuck with a diagnosis he can always look it up on wikipedia..
ok, let's keep this civilized. In Group 1, posters who would like to rant about the general decline in morals in this country, please line up right here; Group 2, people who want to say that these students are only following the example of a world gone to hell in a hand basket, please line up right next to Group 1. In Group 3, we'll have those who would like to say, "who cares, it's just school, I did the same thing in college but I don't do it when it really matters". And finally, Group 4, those of you who would like to post variations on Slashdot cliche's, please line up outside the free sterilization clinic, and I, who for one, am welcoming our new ethically challenged overlords, and am imagining a Beowulf cluster of processors designed by immoral engineers (in the Soviet Union, no less), will be right behind you.
the point is, that stupid people tend to take business or education because they cant actually DO anything. besides half the people who get 4.0's are cheating. cant you tell if someone is stupid or not after 5 minutes of conversation. its all a crock of shit.
I am a student in the MBA program at my school. If you want to look at the big cheaters, look at the Public Administration students. These guys are VERY brazen about cheating and their teachers don't seem to care. Most of the PA students get into trouble in the 'normal' business classes, like accounting, due to cheating. Plagerizing, collabrative work when it isn't suppost to be (like take home finals), turning in the same paper in multiple classes. Our instructors in the management classes use turn-it-in religiously, so it can get funny to see the surprised look on the PA students faces when they get told that they get to have a fun talk with the Dean.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I wonder if there isn't some amount of truth to that.
At my college, our final graduating class size was less than 10% what it was when we started. I know of people who cheated, copied, and plagiarized in the associates program but none of them made it to the final graduation. Oddly enough, only about 33% of our starting class graduated the assoc program, we had 5 students tossed out of the school in the second to last class of the program for plagiarizing code. Once we got into the bachelor's degrees, even though the papers got longer and more common, there was significantly less cheating. Sure, there were a few slackers who depended on other people in group work, but it was more like 15% than 50%.
I would be much more interested in seeing those numbers from graduates, not active students.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
psst! ...what did you put for "name"?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Yeah, but how'd that compare to students studying to become Ninja?
[Insert pithy quote here]
University of Toronto has had a cheating detection program called MOSS running against student program assignments for several years now. How many other schools have something similar?
I really think there's something to be said for using the internet in certain situations. Using google is sort of like 'Open-Book' exams. It should really be encouraged in order to make finding information in the modern age part of your skill set.
Why waste time debugging php yourself that when someone has done this for you already?
Cheating is a now a norm in american society.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
I used to run the "Acadamic Committee" in my 1980s college fraternity - about 100 guys each year in a 10K student university. Most of our job was campaigns to reinstate members who'd been expelled for low grades or partying too much (and burning down a frathouse, but that wasn't my committee ;). After that, our biggest operation was lending out old tests in our library from which members could study (for the often-repeated questions). I knew about all kinds of cheaters, including paper-writing operations, all around the school - we used to trade with other frats and "independents".
Every biz major I knew cheated regularly. At very least by studying the old questions first, before studying the entire section being tested. But extending to buying/stealing tests not in our library, buying papers. I even knew one biz major who paid someone (smarter) to take a class for him, attending occasionally but taking every test.
The universal attitude among biz majors was actually "this whole major is a cheat, to get me a business job without having a business". Sure, they learned some accounting, some marketing, some management, some finance, but those classes were all seen as "dues" to be paid, not any source of training necessary to do the job.
Once I got out of college, through a successful business career modelling and supporting in IT many businesses large and small, I learned that they were right.
--
make install -not war
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway :) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
Statisticians do!
Now by the morning you'll be good as new. Or dead. The important thing is, we'll know.
Don't you just love the 49% rate on medical students ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Sure, only 56% of business students admitted to it... the other 44% just print out fake degrees online and don't ever consider themselves students, they just go straight to "graduates".
stuff |
...by quoting your wikipedia article, then editing the same article so when you look back, you won't see any direct match with the stolen quote ;=) ...
Who checks the history anyway
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
business persons in this country are so unethical. Well, now they know. Business ethics 101 is all about cheating.
It would seem from these figures, that Law students actually are more ethical than engineers.
;-)
Who did this study, again?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
56% of business students are cheaters! OMG!!1!
What I think this fails to take into account is both the severity and frequency of cheating. Someone looks over the shoulder of a fellow student on a multiple-choice test and directly copies their answers. Definitely cheating. Now, someone includes a line from another person's paper, and forgets to cite it. Cheating as well, but definitely not the same level of cheating. This second form can be accidental, if someone just forgets to add the proper citation.
Also, the study fails to determine how often people are cheating. Does this mean that 56% of business students have cheated ONCE in grad school? Or that 56% are consistent cheaters?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I can't see how these statistics can be remotely accurate simply because of the topic. Cheaters are dishonest people and obviously many of them are going to lie.
I know this has been brought up before but what is the significance of this study when its obviously not accurate?
First you must define cheating.. To copy from one and quote as your's - cheating, to copy from many - good research. Ok end of humor... Just the other day we flame a guy that cheats on Xbox live, his explanation is that there are probably others on the other side cheating. Today we hear how 1/2 of all the students are cheating in college. I find some parallels here that really scare me, I am to now assume that 50% of the population cheats at everything?
I would guess the Statistics students who cheat are more likely to be the ones that DON'T understand Statistics...
Okie, this is bad. You can't let the standards of education drop so low. How will the rest 55% survive in this big bad world. Damn it guys, you cant just start your job one fine day - you have to cultivate the habits earlier on from the university.
A very white and affluent college friend faked on a medical test so that he would be diagnosed as dyslexic. He then had unlimited time on his admissions tests (GRE) for the university of michigan school of business. Needless to say, he got in. He was *always* gaming the system. So was another friend who went to the same school and went on to become a CEO (his father was a VP at ford).
I was disgusted at the time, about 13 years ago. Now that I have been out in the real world of business, I can see that I was naive and they had it right (at least for success in their field). The world of big business is not about playing fair or any of that bs.
I cheated a little in my 9th grade german class.. But that was it. I remain an honest engineer and am proud of it. Of course I don't have the wealth of my former (cheating) friends.
I guess thats how we'd connect the dots, right liberals?
Since all profit is crooked, and 56% of business grads cite their corrupt profit role models,...
Then the statistically equivalent 54% of cheating and lying engineers must get that behavior from the so-called geek culture. Slashdot is supposedly a prime example of geek behavior, so it must be all the lies on this board that produce the lying engineers.
You morons...
Statistically speak, it looks to me as if the random error due to the sample size is around 3% per group of students. So it's difficult to say, statistically speaking, whether there is any real variation in the populations. On top of that, you have the possibility of lying about cheating which could introduce systematic biases, although there are ways of controlling for those.
This is actually a bit shocking to me, as a relatively-recent graduate of a doctoral program in a physical science. I can honestly say that I know of no cases of cheating that occurred in my department, so I'm surprised to see that the average is around 50%.
I'm enrolled in a Gothic Literature class and was having troubles understanding the timeline. Instead of going to the prof first, I read the Wikipedia. The site read almost exactly like the syllabus. I emailed him asking if he contributed (also about my unanswered question), and he said he had worked on. Profs aren't that "unhip".
In Starfleet you get a commendation for original thinking. Who says the Kobayashi Maru senario is a no win situtation - losers, thats who.
Of course cheating happens. You have professors who seem to think their class is the only thing you'll be doing 24 hours a day for the rest of the semester. Take 5 classes like that in undergrad, or 3 in grad, and the only way to keep your head above water or sleep is to cheat (or invent a time machine). the worst in my experiance is I had one class where it was a choice to cheat, drop the class, don't sleep, or drop every other class and quit work. Since it was a required class for the major, you can see what pretty much every student in the class did (you could tell the few who didn't because they had breakdowns during class and the tests). Not to defend any actions, but B school is more important to find the answer then know it. Plus most of the things you do are group projects with one answer/source. One person spends a bunch of time to find each answer, change the wording, share, everyone only spends 5 hours on each answer and everyone doesn't spend 50 on the test. -Anon Student
Ok, I can understand if you're studying computer science, or engineering, or math, and you cheat your way through English 101. Nobody in these businesses cares about this Shakespeare nonsense unless it's a hobby of theirs, so yes, I think cheating in these subjects, which you are forced to take but have nothing to do with your major, is perfectly acceptible. After all, how can you be expected to understand a sentence like "Wherefore art thou, O Romeo?!" Couldn't she just say, "Where the fsck are you? No sex tonight!"
Why would anyone need to cheat in Liberal Arts? They can't remember the line Would you like fries with that?
There is a large disparity in forms of cheating here. As an example- I was an engineering student, so it was obviously very heavy on technical classes. At a point you realize how ridiculous *some* of the tests really are: teachers have become lazier and lazier in creating their tests- most tests are pure memorization exams rather than tests for conceptual understanding. As the tests relate less and less to practical, applicable knowledge, which um is really what you should be learning, the lesser forms of cheating suddenly become more rationalized, and almost necessary. So you get no notes allowed on a physics w/ calc test that contains problems using maybe a dozen of a possible 40 formulas you've covered in that section. What is that testing? Just pure memorization, basically, and you are going to dump basically all of the formulas that you crammed shortly afterwards. In nearly every real world situation you can use open reference to look up a formula when you need it, draw on others to solve a problem, etc. The testing experience often exists in it's own little box in the world, just be glad you have a graphing calculator that can fit notes. That's the only way I made it through a few classes- even though most of the time I would not need to reference them. I would say that's quite a few ballparks away from copying answers from some other student, which I never considered, but a 'have cheated' answer nonetheless.
I don't know, but you might want to ask the guy who got 1780 on his SATs.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Most engineering schools have been pretty lame when it comes to actually being able to teach. (I sense that things are improving, in some cases a lot.) They gave students impossible tasks and expected them to sink or swim. The result is that if one of the students managed to get the "X35 Cross-platform IDE" (they lost the documentation five years previously) to work, everyone else used his code. In my experience, no single student was actually able to do all the work in the time allocated. So, 100% of the class cheated, myself included.
As far as I can tell, I have very little cheating going on. Of course, I do my own labs before I assign them, then I double the time I took and that's how long the students should take. The students are a lot less likely to cheat if they aren't desperate.
How exactly does one cheat in the Humanities? I mean it's not like there's a "right" and "wrong" answer, like in Math and Engineering. As someone who taught Assembler to undergrads, I never had a real problem with cheating, because of the way I structured the assignments to encourage groups to work together, and because I gave really hard tests that I made up every quarter, so there was no test recycling. Well that and they were all engineering students... Sure a few may fudge an assignment here and there, but I made it clear that if I saw students putting forth effort to learn the materials in labs and during my office hours, that I would grade their efforts accordingly. It was amazing how many students did extra work because they felt like I was actually paying attention to the work they were doing, and it mattered. A buddy of mine, had the "privilege" of teaching one of those required JAVA computer programming classes to Business students. They were infamous for "hiring" someone to do their homework for them, or for downloading an answer on the internet. He also would catch many grad students (often of foreign nationalities) who kept batteries of his tests on archive, by giving a test that "appeared to be identical" to the last test he gave the quarter prior, with very slight changes. He said it was amusing how many students just memorized the answers in multiple choice tests(A B C or D), never even bothering to learn the material or even read the questions. It was killer for those who had issues with the language... because he could tell they'd studied an old test, rather than the actual topic of the question... --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
"[I'm] ... emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."
This sort of remark demonstrates how clueless they are about the so-called "real world".
I think that these people would do well to realize that the real world requires being innovative and original. If most of what you expect to do in the "real world" is copy somebody else's work, you will rarely be the first to get anywhere, and that will intrinsically limit your level of success.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"That's likely within the margin of error for the poll, which means there is no real difference between the two. But you go ahead and stay comfy wrapped in your preconceptions."
Ok, go to the real world, remind me who fills up prisons quicker, MBA's or engineers?
It's the whole reason "business ethics" is a category separately differentiated from "moral ethics".
An interesting statistic would be what percentage of business majors are in the greek system. This could be skewing the numbers a little.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
A few years ago, I taught at a private school. One of our biggest problems among the older students was cheating. On test days, students would regularly congregate in the bathrooms to share answers with one another. It was very common to read homework assignments and essays that sounded almost exactly alike -- one group of students even had a sharing program of sorts worked out, such that one person would do Monday's homework, the next person, Tuesday's, and so on. What was really shocking was not how prevalent the cheating was, but how many of the parents reacted when we brought it to their attention. One person was caught with a crib sheet in his lap during a test, and his parents insisted that he hadn't actually been "using" it -- that he had just accidentally left it there after some last-minute studying. One student was using a teacher's edition of a physics textbook to memorize answers for the tests -- when the teacher caught him (by producing his own slightly modified test), the parents admitted that they bought the student the textbook and maintained that there was nothing wrong with that. Some of those kids are probably in college or grad school right now. It's no wonder they don't think cheating is wrong, that they think it's just the way things are done -- their parents encouraged them to do it while they were growing up.
I dropped out of college about 18 years ago a bit shy of my degree in Computer Science. I hardly noticed any cheating back then at all. I mean, I'm sure it happened and I knew of a few people who did, but for the most part, it wasn't something I noticed often.
I have recently gone back to school majoring in chemistry and biology and I'm just astounded at the amount of cheating that goes on. And at least 18 years ago, when people cheated, they tried to hide it, even from other students. These days, it's just right out in the open. I have other students asking me for answers all the time. It makes me very uncomfortable because I want to get along with people in my classes, but I simply will not get involved in cheating. I'm pre-med and it would ruin my chances of getting into medical school. And somewhat related, one of the biggest cheaters I've noticed is another pre-med student and all I can think is, if she ever does get into medical school, she's not going to survive very long.
It's leveraging. No really. It is.
This article doesn't distinguish between grad and undergrad (and is a bit dated), but it I think it is interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/march1
Wait, they're Canadians! From my graduate school experience I thought they would be Chinese.
Is this all just an attempt by a few software vendors attempting to push their unproven "anti-cheating" products into the higher ed marketplace?
Anonymous postings by "tenured professors"? Or a "research paper" that hasn't been accepted for publication in a any respected journal? Do the rantings by a couple of individuals have any more weight than a press release by a software vendor attempting to sell their products to a cash-strapped Higher Ed institution?
I think not.
I'm much more likely to listen to a research study that was conducted in a manner that is generally accepted by the research community. I'm much more likely to believe a non-anonymous, highly respected professor than an anonymous posting. Instead, I am given some kind of story - but there is no way for me to determine if it's valid - or just opinionated spin.
Yes, I have an opinion. But I can be convinced to think otherwise if I see quality information. I haven't seen it.
A few years ago I went back to school and got a CS degree (already had degree in Economics). I was approached many times from other CS students asking for help on programming/database/math projects. Most of the time the questions were legitimate and I wouldn't consider them 'cheating'. However, there were times when I was flat out asked to share my code/algorithms. I hated that. One of the primary reasons I went back to get another degree was because I loved the problem-solving aspect of software development. It's kind of like cheating in games. If you're handed the answers, where is the challenge? Where is the benefit? Also, I found that (at my school at least) there was a strong community of Indian students who stuck together. Once I made a few friends in this small community, I found that the cheating was rampant. Code sharing, test sharing, etc. was commonplace. It always put me in a difficult situation when I was asked to show someone else my code. I don't mind helping others (frequent message boards), but simply giving someone else code that I worked hours on was out of the question.
This is part of the reason why I weight college degrees so lightly when I interview people. It just doesn't mean much, when half the students only know how to google for answers. While that is a useful job skill (I google problems every week, if not every day), an employee that just does that, and isn't thinking independantly or really understanding the problems is a big problem.
Good companies to work for will generally treat this kind of attitude with a 'fired with cause'. There are a lot of bad companies out there to be an Initech slacker at, collect a paycheck, and do as little thinking as possible. I have no idea why anyone would want to end up there. So, it's kind of a self-correcting problem in that sense.
For those actually working for a college degree, it's more annoying. I have a CS degree, and I never cheated in college. (Really. Risking explusion is so not worth it.) Yes, it was obvious that some jerks were, and it leads to more experienced people like my present self finding very little corrolation between the degree and good hires, so it does devalue the diploma. But if you actually can contribute individual insights, are smart, and can get things done, you'll rise above these shortcutters very quickly. They'll work in the trenches at a job they hate, while you decide between Google or a hot startup for a career path. You'll win, in the end, 9 times out of 10. So don't worry about that other guy.
Winners don't do drugs!
-- Kate
cheating out of their parents' hard earn money for years of 'finding one's self' journey through college.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Cheating by plagiarization, or sneaking in notes to exams are clearly a bad forms of cheating. The student is obviously not even trying to learn and do the work. However, copying off of another student's work can get a lot murkier, and is not necessarily bad. Definitions of cheating are usually kept rather broad. Why? Because it helps protect the professor.
For instance, let's say that student A and student B have both been working on 20 math problems separately. They decide to compare answers (often considered officially cheating, but in reality a good way of learning), they find that they have different answers on one question. They discuss it and realize that student B was correct for that question. So student A copies the answer to that question off of student B. Technically cheating, but learning has been achieved.
So why doesn't the professor allow this as part of the cheating policy? Well let's say the prof. does allow it in the cheating policy, but then has a student who copies half of the problems from another student and is caught. They can then argue that the cheating policy is vague, and the prof may be powerless. So the net result (at least in my experience in CS), is that cheating policies are officially kept very strict so as to give a prof leeway to come down hard on people cheating to just not do work, but profs allow and expect small amounts of cheating if students are learning from it. The funny thing is that it tends to be a fairly open thing. All too often I've been in classes where the official policy is that no student is allowed to receive any help from/work with any other student in the class, but at the beginning of a class a student will begin with 'We were talking about question x and had some questions about it.' and the prof is all too happy to see that students have been actively trying to figure out the material, even if there was a bit of technical cheating involved.
To reiterate, it just depends upon the intentions of the students when they cheat.
while reading this post I thought that while there may be more cheating in these majors, I've always thought that they were the more difficult on the college menu (I know not everyone will agree with that). My point is that pressure/work-load and cheating will always be correlated even outside academia- like baseball or cycling. As someone who has gotten behind on homework and had someone else sign the attendance sheet, I've made myself look hard at the ethics. I personally feel that it is worse to cheat yourself, i.e. not learn - kinda the whole point of school. So I felt it ok to cheat on homework, which could be argued a more efficient way to learn; however there is no learning involved in taking a test. Cheating on tests cheats your classmates, school and yourself -but the silver lining is that it doesn't really hinder gainful employment (as I do know some 'Real' cheaters who are doing just fine).
An opportunity to use one of my favorite Simpsons quotes...
Mr. Burns: I've always felt that there's far too much hysteria these days about so-called cheating. If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!
Homer: Mr. Burns, I insist that we cheat.
Mr. Burns: Excellent.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
This is about people who said they cheated. There are four groups of people.
Cheated/Admitted
Cheated/Denied
Didn't Cheat/ Said they did
Didn't Cheat/ Said they didn't
If we could compare real stats to these, that would be interesting. But i don;t think this is indicative of the real world. Just what people are willing to tolerate.
Have you read my journal today?
(54 + 50 + 49 + 45 + 43 + 39) > 100
PUH-LEEZE!
Karma: NaN
C. Montgomery Burns: "I've always felt that there's far too much hysteria these days about so-called cheating. If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!"
Simpsons Episode: Mountain of Madness.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Little roll and plain hyper-reduced photocopies by two medical students (both women).
In the second picture there is an eurocent for comparison (however, sizes are similar).
And here there is a scientific paper about cheating in medical schools published by the British Medical Journal; in particular, about the possible relation with future dishonest behaviour.
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves) The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on. Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad. (Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
Read the article. It says further that 50% of physical sciences students cheat as well. Not surprising given recent Shoen affair... I hope most of them cheat on secondary subjects, like evolution, global warming or sex harassment classes.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Edit: The post above lost all formatting somehow, that will teach me not to use the preview button. If modding the post, please mod this correct version instead.
I feel very saddened by this study. I am an electrical engineering master's student and I have never cheated and would never consider cheating. My policy has always been an honest failure is orders of magnitude better than an ill gotten A. (This has worked so far without me having to confront any "honest failures", but this study does make me wonder about all the people in my undergrad classes with suspiciously perfect homework scores all the time that i was competing with on the curves)
The simple fact is, some things are very hard, both in mental effort to comprehend the material and sheer level of work required to succeed. If you don't love your area of study enough to tough it out and maintain your integrity, you really shouldn't be there. In engineering at least, cheating wouldn't even be possible in something like a group design project with large deliverables, since working with groupmembers is part of the process and faking your deliverables wont fool anyone (professors, people considering you for jobs, and most importantly yourself). Cheating in general will hurt the cheater most of all, because they will have gaps in their knowledge that will put them at a disadvantage in the future (it's hard enough remembering all this material when you work it all out yourself honestly). Cheating hurts you, those forced to compete with you, and eventually anyone depending on you to produce quality designs/code/(insert output for your field here) later on.
Within the group of people I personally know and work with, I have observed no cheating whatsoever. Everyone takes our university honor code and our professors instructions on what level of collusion (including none) is allowed on things like even small homework assignments seriously. We all accomplish the ever important "getting the job done" by working hard, not by bending the rules. I used to generalize this to all of engineering, believing we had some intrinsic integrity and work ethic that allowed us as a group to design and build so many cool things. Now, I'm afraid if the majority of even graduate engineering students admit to cheating I'll have to go back to judging people completely individually with no positive prejudgement based on area of study. I have lost a bit of faith and trust in my cohort, and that makes me sad.
(Lighter note: I was going to try to work a reference the the ST:TNG episode "The First Duty" in here somehow, but I've decided there's enough righteous indignation above to forgoe cranking the nerdiness up to 11 with a star trek reference in a serious post about ethics)
I read the numbers and they seem pretty low. Here in Greece 100% of University students cheat on homework assignments. There are "bookstores" around Universities that somehow get their hands on homework from past years and students go there to xerox the one they need and go home and copy them to a clean sheet of paper.
And I'd guess about 99% cheat in exams. Everybody goes into class 20 minutes before the exam begins and write everything they'll need on the desk. Then they copy when they exam begins.
How is it in other countries? I want to hear from people all over the world on this because I think we've overdone it here.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
I agree with the previous poster from Harvard, who was appalled that cheating could be so widespread when it was conspicuously absent from my peer group. Why aren't the schools throwing these Bozo's out,with a nice note on their transcript about "violation of educational ethics"? No wonder the world is so screwed up, we're so busy trying to make a buck that we've forgotten the basis of civilization. Machivellian behavior is only advantageus when it's statistically improbable. In primates, troops disband (often violently!) when trust degenerates below a minimum threshold. Since our society is based on similar social contracts (e.g. shared trust), I would expect extremely serious repercussions as the percentage of liars/cons/cheaters increases. I need a nice rock to hide under.
Could these figures be exaggerated? I mean, there still exists the chance that someone made an honest mistake somewhere and is perfectly willing to rectify that once it is pointed out.
nor inhale
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Whether it is is 56% of 39%, it is equally distressing.
That even 40% of those business and law students who very well may be the future business and political leaders of our society lack the integrity to stand or fall on their own merits, is deeply saddening.
Rather than earn their degree and reputation by hard work and dedication, they instead choose to tell the lie that the work of another is their own, fraudulently misrepresenting their own abilities, work ethic, and personal integrity. They rationalize their despicable behavior on the notion that there is nothing wrong with cheating, only with being caught.
No doubt they will fit in well in the halls of government.
In preparation for their arrival, we should continue to push for more transparency and public accountability in our government. They are coming. Let's be ready for them.
In my junior year of comp sci undergrad, I took a class with my friend (hi, Aaron!) that required us to write a lot of programs. We usually talked about the projects in detail, figured out the best way to solve them, then went off and separately implemented those solutions.
One assignment was the typical "you have ten telephone lines and five operators..." sort of problem. We hashed out our strategy as usual, sat down at our respective computers, and typed out the exact same programs. I mean it. Line-for-line identical. Since we both pulled variable names out of the assignment text ("int telephonelines = 10; int operators = 5;", etc.), we'd evolved the same formatting style from years of working together, and we were implementing the same relatively short algorithm, our answers were perfect matches.
Fortunately, our professor was a good guy and believed our convincingly dumb-struck expressions when he told us what he'd discovered. We were also both able to explain every step of the algorithm and why we'd chosen it, and we all had a good laugh about it afterward.
I know that's a bit different than a kid turning in your Wikipedia entry for credit, but remember that strange things do happen sometimes, and not every case of obviously blatant cheating turns out to be legitimate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Enough said.
I didn't cheat in grad school at all and knew very few who did.
In fact, the only time I ever cheated on a test was the color blindness test for my military physical. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to read the numbers in the colored dots so I memorized the sequence as I stood in line waiting for my turn. For some reason, when I got to the head of the line, the army seargeant giving the test started going backwards through the book instead of forwards. I got the first two or three in the backwards sequence but then I missed a couple. He started choosing pages randomly in the book and I couldn't get any of them even the ones I already had.
There was an occasion in grad school where I could easily have cheated to help someone else. We had weekly homework to turn in each Monday in my Calculus of Variations class. The morning of the first homework assignment, an engineering student asked if he could see my homework to compare my answers to his. It was not unusual to check your answers against each others and then if there was a difference to go through the work and find out what either of you did wrong. So I let him borrow my homework for that purpose and he disappeared to an empty room down the hallway for an hour or two. When he came back, it was obvious he had copied my homework.
So the next week I didn't do the homework. He showed up on Monday morning and asked if he could see my homework and I told him I hadn't done it yet. This continued through the entire semester. Every Monday morning, he would ask to see my homework and I'd tell him I didn't do it yet but I would before the end of the semester.
Finally, the week before the last homework assignment was due, I did all the homework for the whole semester except the one I had already turned in and on Sunday night, I went up to the Math Department mailroom and put it in the prof's mailbox. The next morning the engineering student showed up and asked if I'd done my homework yet. When I told him I had done all of it the previous week, he was very visibily relieved. But he quickly became very upset when he asked to borrow it and I told him I had already turned it in.
Employers care about what you learned in business school? I thought they only cared about what school you attended. Besides, isn't business school about creating a personal network? Why bother with papers and tests if they get in the way of building that network - it is the really the only reason you should be attending business school.
Where are the technology and computer science students?
If I were to order those types of majors by the potential income a grad could expect, it would come out in the same order.
To put this another way, no one takes a history major because they want to make the big bucks after college, while no one goes into business school because they are fascinated with the subject material in the classes.
IAAL, and I can't figure out how 45% of law students cheat. Most every school in the country follows the same model - each class, you have one exam at the end of the term, and that exam is 100% of your grade. The exams are almost always essays, and the grades are based upon your ability to spot the legal issues in a fact pattern, state the rule of law, and apply it to the facts. Many exams are "open book" because the book doesn't matter. Memorization is not that important. There aren't papers to write or mid-term quizzes.
Really the only opportunities to "cheat" would be if you're on the staff of an academic journal, or in an advocacy/legal skills course, but those are rarely part of one's GPA. Even if 45% of the students could figure out some way to cheat, I seriously doubt many would. Most schools put the fear of God into you, because if you're caught, your career is basically doomed. And most schools make it an ethics violation if you know that another student is cheating, and you fail to turn him/her in. There's paranoia aplenty.
It's a head-scratcher....
I have a professor right now who has no problem where we get our code/solution/whatever as long as we cite our sources specifically. Even if its "My friend Bob's paper".
His attitude is that if you do work that is available somewhere else, you're an idiot.
One time in Spanish class, the teacher was giving a verbal quiz, asking students a series of questions (in Spanish) and having them reply in the same language. A good friend of mine (who was also a total screw-off in class and who basically had learned zero Spanish in the course of the year) who sat in the seat directly in front of me was asked "Como te llamas" (it's been a long time, so pardon any error in spelling) which is essentially "What is your name?"
Unfortuantely, he had no idea what the teacher was asking, but he vaguely remembered a previous student answering "Mi llamo... {something}" so he started out with that, rather tentatively. After "Mi llamo..." he trailed off into a long period of silence. It dragged on so long that the entire class was trying not to laugh, and the teacher said "Si... te lamas..." and waited. Finally, I leaned forward and whispered "leche" (Spanish for milk) and the whole class burst into hysterical laughter as he confidently and loudly asserted, in Spanish, that his name was "milk"
Just thinking about it makes me smile, and when we're together with High School friends, all it takes to make the whole group laugh is "Mi llamo leche!"
Or maybe you had to be there.
I think this survey needs to be broken down more-so by courses rather than degree/major. I was a Computer Science major, but I never cheated in any of my "Computer Science" related courses. I cheated in my literature and enlish clases. Particularly, "modifying" papers from my brother, friends, etc. Both of which were apart of the basic classes most people take during their first two years of college. So saying that I cheated in "Computer Science" is probably incorrect because I never cheated in any of my computer classes (that's because I enjoyed those classes).
Are physics majors cheating in Physics I and II or are they cheating in "Home Economics"?
Pompous prig. Graded problem sets are not college-level practice anyway - or at least it shouldn't be. Homework is for the educational value to the student, not for the professor's convenience in grading. Papers, lab work and tests are different matters.
I'm a computer science major and I have plagiarized and cheated in the past.
It was not that often and it was always for convenience, not because I needed it. Sometimes, I had to write papers which had no purpose other than making sure I read something--Like those biology papers about phosphate's role in plants. It annoys me. And it is not because it impugnated my honesty or some such romantic nonsense. It annoyed me because it was unneeded. Unlike some, it takes me effort and time to write up 4 or 6 pages on something. I am a perfectionist. I am psychologically unable to just type crud away at 20 WPMs. And so I must waste countless hourse of my time trying to paraphrase several sources as best I can. That doesn't teach me biology, it teaches me HOW TO PARAPHRASE! And That's only useful to slashdot editors, not to a biologist. He could've just tested me on it and saved me the pain.
On the other hand, I have never cheated on papers which addressed something actually worthwile. I have written some essays about my friends and family, videogames and drugs, plays and books. They were not easy to write, but when I finished them, they meant something to me. I felt the writer's satisfaction. I'm a pretty good writer; Not good enough to write books, but good enough to get As and Bs on english essays. As you'll have noticed, my punctuation sucks.
As far as cheating on tests goes, I almost never do it. Once, I did it because one of my professors was a really horrible teacher (but a nice guy!). The entire class had signed a petition against him within a month and over half of them were cheating in the final. It has NEVER happened before. I worked pretty hard to no avail, cheated on the last test and passed with a C in the class. I am so glad I cheated and passed. I went on to get an easy A in the harder course on the same topic, without cheating. Other than that, I did a few dozen times out of tens of thousands. Most of them were formulas since I have a hard time memorizing those.
Of course, I recognize that many do not share my motives. But then, that's just the world we live in, ain' it?
My girlfriend is a big high flying professional medical college instructor. One of her duties is to go through and process plagiarism cases, do fact finding, and make recommendations for action against the accused. By the time a plagiarism case lands on her desk it has failed the plagiarism checking program: "turn-it-in". Some interesting facts about her situation: -As the school where she works has a lot of foreign students worth big bucks..... Many actions that recommend punishment are overturned by higher ups. The money is more important than ethics. Warm body + cash = good student. -The buck rogers program "turn-it-in" puked once and gave out conflicting results on different dates for the same paper. ( They are having their I.T. people ask the vendor support about how that could have happened ) -Some foreign students come from cultures where it is considered a compliment, to copy work created by someone else. This takes effort to inform them what is considered unacceptable. Language barriers between teaching staff and students don't help. -The preventive briefings to students still needs a lot of work so less plagiarism cases land on her desk. -As there doesn't seem to be any hard punishment... the usefulness of checking for plagiarism seems useless.
MBA's are the army of satan on this earth.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world.
I have to say they are absolutely true. If you are honest, it will hurt you financially (yes there are exceptions, I know). It is a cruel dog-eat-dog world out there.
This is not saying I encourage cheating, but only that if you don't cheat and don't know how and when to cheat it may hurt you financially.
However, you may sleep better at night and be able to look in the mirror without guilt, which may be worth more than the 20k you didn't get.
Table-ized A.I.
So we could be talking about an engineering student having a friend write an english paper for him, which, while less than desirable for his education, is not a matter of safety.
Yeah, sure... Engineers don't need to understand speling or grammer or how to express ideas clearly & concisely... They dont need too rite dokumentation a maner that are easy reed... Uther ngineers will have noo problem inside following such dir rections to buld a brige or understand coments in a progrram.
And if you think that programming doesn't involve much english, you've obviously never seen extremely large assembly programs written for DSPs.... Virtually every line must be commented and even that leaves a lot of details out. [Yes it sounds crazy, but its true]...
There's no such thing as self-documentation assembly code, especially when its written for a SIMD SHARC processor...
But why is this a question of safety? Well, what if programing controlling large/dangerous machinery/explosives...
Most people I came across in med school were honest. The ones who I thought were lazy/slackers/cheaters usually did not do well. The tests were set up in such a mannner that it was impossible to cheat - besides that since you studied soooo much by that point, you certainly did not want anyone else getting your hard studied answers. I proctored some exams - everyone keeps their head down and does the test. Cheat sheets are useless due to the voluminous amounts of information being tested.
I call bullpoop on this and would like to see this questionaire.
..........FULL STOP.
I preface this post with a disclaimer that much of what I am about to describe applies to law schools in the US and probably in other "common law" jurisdictions such as the UK and Australia. It does not apply in "civil law" jurisdictions like France.
Law schools are generally accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and are commonly ranked into 3 tiers. There is an fourth tier of unaccredited schools. If you attend and graduate from an ABA accredited school, you can sit for the bar exam in any state. If you go to an unaccredited school, you can usually only sit for the bar exam in the state in which the school is located (provided also that the school is "state-approved").
Top-tier law schools (also called the "top 20" although it is commonly stated that there are 25 schools who can claim a place in the top 20 - go figure) generally teach using the Socratic Method. Students don't listen to lectures by professors. Rather, the professors lead class discussions by asking questions about court decisions and then change the facts of each case when constructing hypothetical questions to see if the students reason their way to the same conclusion as in the case decision or whether a different decision is warranted. This is an unnerving way to learn (especially with those professors who strictly adhere to the method and refuse to reply to any question except with a question of their own) but in my humble opinion and experience, it is the single best way to develop and hone critical thinking skills.
In law school the cases you read are specific (and real) controversies between parties. You are supposed to read the cases (and trust me - if you don'tand you are called on in class - at random most times - it will be painfully obvious if you did not read and analyze the cases) and then try to draw out general principles of law from the cases. This is the exact opposite of most undergraduate programs in the US where students are expected to learn the general principles and then apply those principles to specific situations.
Against this background then, students still need to receive grades. Most law school courses give one final examination - all essay questions with either 3 or 4 hours to complete. The grading is based partly upon your knowledge of the law but mostly on the quality of your legal analysis. These are tests where there are really no opportunities to cheat save copying your classmate's answer verbatim - very hard to do with the professor right in front of you. From the professor's perspective, these types of tests are exceedingly difficult to grade because not only do the professors have to read each and every essay, they also have to fit the grading into a mandatory normal grading distribution (a/k/a "grading curve" - in place for most law schools).
Some tests are multiple choice and still require your ability to engage in legal reasoning but like any other multiple choice test, all you have to do is copy a mark on a sheet. However in 3 years of law school, I only had 1 test that had any multiple choice component and that test also included a significant essay.
For some classes, such as seminars, there is no exam but there is a significant writing assignment upon which your grade is entirely based. This assignment is usually expected to be a publication-;quality paper on a legal topic related to the topic of the seminar. As with any other writing assignment done without in-person supervision, there are numerous opportunities to plagarize. However, seminars tend to be smaller in class size and the professor (if any good at all) frequently engages the students in dialog. I th
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
...are you... could you be... are you implying that the researcher..... **Cheated** ?!?!?
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
The other 55% elected to take the fifth.
*joke rimshot*
---southpaw
I hate cheaters. When other people cheat, it devalues my degree. Furthermore, it is a slap in the face to anyone who puts in the time and effort to legitimately receive the marks. I believe there are many other students who feel the same way. I was wondering -would it be possible to set up a system whereby students police each others work? Say, after the final due date has passed, the assignments all become accessible online (arbitrarily coded so we don't know which assignment came from which person) and students can flag passages or portions of the assignment that appear to be violations. Overseers then, presumably the prof, can look over the most oft flagged sections (if not all of them). I would have no problem participating in such a program. Cheating pisses me off to no end, and the childish notion that "snitching" is wrong does not affect me -these people are breaking the rules and adversely affecting both the system itself and me personally- I would be happy to see them caught in droves.
I have many friends in engineering, and all of them had to become certified "Engineers in Training" before being employed. This process involves taking a couple standardized tests which were general science and math knowledge, and one that was taylored to their specific engineering field. I don't think many cheaters would be able to pass it.
At my alma mater (Purdue), no mechanical engineering student had failed the EIT exam in the 7 years before I took it... the record may be even longer now. When I took the test there was a break for lunch during which several students went to a local bar and returned to the test drunk.... other students left 2 hours early so they could go to a football game. And no one failed.
The EIT exam is a joke. None of the material is beyond sophomore level classes, and on top of that you only need to get around 70% of them right to pass.
And the professional engineer certification is pretty much only really required for civil engineers. Other disciplines get it only sometimes... and some discipline like Aero engineering get it.
AND I work with several people who cheated they're way through engineering school. They get by at work by having other people do their work for them and by schmoozing and kissing ass, and often very quickly end up in management. Basically they skills the honed by cheating in school serve them well in the real world, and those of us who actually did the work in school end up carrying everone's weight in the workplace as well.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
At least in schools that enforce academic honesty standards.
When I was in school I saw a kid flat busted cheating on a calculus exam. Out the door he went. The only way into another school was to deny he ever went to the first school. Such denial is itself grounds for the boot at any future school.
I suspect a law 'Character and Fitness Committee' amounts to: 'Can he keep up the appearance of honesty?', 'Yep, he's in.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'