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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.
They mean that Business students are the least dishonest.
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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."
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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
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.
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?
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.
Enough said.
Yeah, because there's an infinite difference between business students at 56% and engineering students at 54%. 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.
Fucktard.
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.
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"
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..
It's actually easier to cheat at IT. Google has the answer to any IT question. If you cant find it on google, then there's a forum setup with someone that'll help you. I know this because (all though I've never been to school for IT) I have a job as a php programmer because I know how to search google for what I need.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
If you're taking a multiple choice exam for a graduate level math course then your degree probably won't be worth the paper that it's printed on and you might as well just cheat anyway.
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.
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
Disregard the labels and you see something that is honestly disturbing to me.
the LOWEST % was 39%, and that is assuming that every one reported acuratly (I call BS on that), and I am sorta scared.
I admit, I never finished college (let alone start grad work), however I never cheated on anything when I was there. When I had problems (and I did have alot of problems) I sought help, I didn't get some one to do the work for me.
Mabey If I had cheated like a large number of people aparently do, then I would have finished my College education.....
Meh I would rather be an honest drop out then a fraudulent grad.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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?
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.
while normally I would rant against such generalizations, unfortunately I have found this one to be, in my experience, true.
I am a masters student at a state university in petroleum engineering. Due to current market forces (60+ bucks a barrel) most US students stop at an undergraduate degree and start working. As a result the current nationality distribution is skewed towards foreign students.
I quickly discovered that every major national network (iranian, turkish, south american, chinese, etc) had all of the previous years' assignments and exams. Woe to you if you did not belong to said networks (ie US and the poor Dutch exchange students), you were at a serious disadvantage...at least in the general classes. The moment you got into a specialized class it became basically impossible to cheat. Even if you had previous years' stuff, it doesn't help if you do not understand how to even read the stuff. Try faking it on well logging, enhance oil recovery, or a numerical methods class, and it very quickly becomes clear who are muppets and who are not. As a result ther is a real statification of students, capable ones, and those who are just squeezing by. You never see any of the latter in the interesting classes.
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
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."
I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it.
As a former (undergrad) math student I can honestly say that it all depends on how you define cheat; yes like every good math student I will argue over definitions. In one of my courses my Professor openly said that he anticipated that everyone would end up working in groups to understand and solve the challenging proofs, but he required us to write it up on our own and use our own words; as he pointed out in real world math you needed to be able to collaborate with other mathematicians in order to solve difficult problems, and anyone who was trying to get a "free ride" on the work of someone else would (probably) fail the tests so he wasn't concerned.
In many humanities and social sciences the point of a paper is to come up (and defend) your own argument; any collaboration (beyond editing) can be seen as a type of academic dishonesty.
The fact that more than half of engineering students admit to cheating should be more than a bit disturbing, if they are cheating in their engineering classes. I don't want to go through a tunnel or over a bridge that was designed by one of these folks.
On the other hand, they weren't asked in which classes they cheated. 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.
A blog about stuff.
I don't know... I'd almost rather drive over a bridge designed by a student who copied a tried and true design than one who made an original. Heck, I know I've made some pretty neat and original bridge designs, but I wouldn't really trust their safety.
LegendMUD
LegendMUD
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 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.
;)
Once that is completed they have to work for 5+ years, take more exams, and then they can be considered a "Professional Engineer."
I think its scarier that computer programmers, who might be working on that software running life support machinery, doesn't need any professional certifications other than a college degree
I got nothin'
At the graduate level? Mathematics and statistics at the graduate level tends to be very different from high school and early undergrad math and stats, and also tends to be assessed rather differently. I've had several graduate math courses that were assessed by having the students give lectures - I'm not sure how you can cheat at that easily, especially when the lecturer olr any other student can ask you a question about what your discussing at any time; either you understand the material and can discuss is well, or you don't.
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I want to know how they phrased the question.
As someone with an undergrad engineering degree I can confidently say that I never cheated in college. However, certain phrasings of the question could cause me to respond differently. For example, if the question was asked, "Have you every used another students work to complete your own without the instructors explicit consent." I'd have to say yes.
I spent many late nights in computer labs or study halls working with other students in an attempt to understand the material. Often times this means working homework problems together. Sometimes I'd do the problem independently and then share the results with others, other times I'd make little or no progress and have someone explain it to me. It wasn't about copying answers, it was about understanding the methodology. A poll question that understands this distinction is difficult to come up with. I don't ever remember a teacher telling us not to work together in an engineering class (aside from exams) but I don't think they all explicitly told us it was ok - mostly because it is part of the culture and it wouldn't occur to them to endorse it.
I wonder what the study's definition of "cheating". FTFA:
It's relatively difficult to smuggle notes into an exam when the professor is watching you take it, and that criterion is not very ambiguous, so I doubt this makes up the bulk of the statistic.
Copying the work of other students is a little more vague. Is this limited to straight-out copying someone else's work, or did they include working with other students to solve problems? I know that at my school, we're encouraged to work with other people on most of the problem sets given out as homework, and I'd suspect this is the attitude at most universities. The homework sets that are supposed to be completed alone are far less common, and specifically designated as such by the professor. I can't imagine that the study would be stupid enough to count 'working together with other students' as 'copying work', but if it did, this would explain a lot of the disrepancy.
Probably the largest component in the study is plagiarism. This is pretty clear-cut, but I have to wonder -- how many opportunities are there for plagiarism in a graduate level Physical Science curriculum?? I think out of my entire coursework, I was required to write two or three papers at the most, none of them longer than a few pages. Most of our coursework was problem sets, which I suppose could be plagiarized in the sense of "copying someone else's work" as above. But even if this were the case, the percentages they give seem unreasonably high.
I wouldn't be surprised if the study used an unnaturally broad definition of "cheating" so that the statistics would come out this way, just for shock factor. After all, how likely would you be to read an article that claimed half of all graduate students are cheaters, compared to one claiming that less than 5 percent are?
I'll disagree with you... A compiler catches grammatical errors, not mistakes in design or bad assumptions about the system your program is supposed to control or model. When the computer and software in question is a realtime system the need for rigorous design and testing is an order of magnitude more difficult. I've seen a number of folks who claimed to be experienced at embedded system design make some pretty nasty mistakes, none of which were at the level where a compiler or testbed could flag the errors.
Less is more.
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
As a social science grad student, each assignment was unique. I might be doing a paper on X while my friend wrote something up about Y. Professors always vetted paper topics to make sure that no two students were working on the same subject. Aside from comparing class and reading notes, there wasn't much we could do to help each other out.
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
You're an idiot. A well-written multiple choice quiz of the "choose the most appropriate answer" variety for testing particular abilities executed at speed can be made more frightening than a "waffle at length" variety where you can always get something for kinda, sorta, vaguely understanding.
If you equate testing to frightening, then you're worse than an idiot. Grading is up to the instructor, and it is not required to pay by the word. On the other hand, with a "multiple guess" test, it is required that the instructor recognize all possible correct and near correct answers, and it's possible to simply get lucky guessing. So I'll second Gparent, having gone through grad school, I *never* saw a multiple choice test. Ever.
Although if I were going to guess what field would use a multiple choice test with discrete allowed values, it would have to be quantum. Something appropriate about that.
A tried and true design for one application might be disastrous in another application, especially if the design being copied is unique. If 1940 hadn't had a one particularly windy day, lazy bridge designers might had copied a narrow, understiffened suspension bridge design instead of thinking for themselves and taking little things like aerodynamics into account.
I know, this isn't the greatest example, but it's the first thing that came to mind.
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No, it means you cheated on 110% of your exams. Obviously including math.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Ever been to boston?
(54 + 50 + 49 + 45 + 43 + 39) > 100
PUH-LEEZE!
Karma: NaN
The thing is, the people who are actually good at their field can't cheat, because in order to do so, they'd first have to do the work themselves so that everyone could cheat off of them, so that they would have someone to cheat off of! This is why I hate group work, especially in math classes. It winds up degenerating to a professor-sanctioned cheating session, in which I do the work I would normally do, and everyone else cheats like they normally do, except that they don't have to hide it so much.
I pride myself a great deal on never having cheated. Not once.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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.
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.
Problem is, these are GRAD students. Undergrads take a lot of unrelated crap (that makes them better human beings, well-educated, etc.), but grad students' class loads should be fairly focused on their major, no? No english papers for them to pass off...
Actually, most engineers would probably do well for themselves to spend a little extra time in English class & "outsource" one of their more technical classes - there's enough overlap between classes in the field that you could probably put the missing pieces together from other coursework fairly well.
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?
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.
It's called the "FE" (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam. It's hard to cheat on.
1. They give you a reference book which has all the equations that are on the exam. Obviously, equation-based cheat-sheets are useless. (Keep in mind that this book has >100 pages)
2. The breadth of the test is so large that any cheat-sheet you would use wouldn't cover 5% of the material, or would be completely obvious to the proctors. (Remember, the official equation book is >100 pages)
2. They require you to use calculators from an approved list -- and the first requirement is that the calculator not be able to store equations or programs.
3. They check ID to verify you are who you say you are, have assigned seating, and check the ID versus the assigned seating versus the exam ID while you're taking the exam.
I'm sure they do other stuff too.
Pass rate on the test is apparently about 50% for first timers, about 55-60% for second timers (iirc). Making sure your engineer has taken the FE exam with the domain specific test and passed it is a good way to make sure your guy knows *something.*