Survey Finds Cheating Among Students At All GPA Levels

An anonymous reader writes "Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics (abstract). The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated. Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating."

Comments

Re:How much of the cheater is in the filler classe

[Missing.Matter]

A little off topic, but there's no such thing as a filler class. Only people who don't realize the full value of a well rounded education seem to consider breadth courses as a waste of time. At a time I did too, but instead of going into those classes with a bad attitude I went in and learned as much as possible. Sure I wasn't interested in things like social psychology, medieval history or graphic media, but I can talk with a lot more people about topics they're interested in because of taking courses like that.

And at most schools, if you have enough foresight you can craft your breadth courses to reinforce your major. One of my history courses I could take for my Physics breadth requirements just happened to be about the ethics of the Manhattan project... something every physicist should have to learn.

Regardless, people who choose to only expose themselves to a single subject or viewpoint are almost universally boring or close minded, or some combination of the two.

Re:It's not just drugs. Sometimes it's culture, to

[ackthpt]

"They often come from a very different academic culture, where cheating is seen as perfectly acceptable."

Yep, it's the ungodly heathens. Americans don't cheat as much, because they are too dumb to go to college.

The best exams are the Open Book ones - yes, you can see answers in front of you, but your grade is based upon your understanding - if you don't already get it, you don't have enough time during the exam to read the entire book over.

In the 80's we cheated like hell

[Maxo-Texas]

This one time we took 27 hours studying every problem in the book- including making a test of all the example problems and doing them until we could see the answer and write the problem.

For 2 of of us- it turned out the professor had gotten cute and made a test entirely out of example problems. They finished in 15 minutes and aced it. I finished mine in about 40 minutes and aced it.

Oh wait.. I guess that wasn't cheating. And I was working a full time job taking 13 hours at the time. So anyone who isn't working full time just doesn't have an excuse.

The closest I came to cheating ever was buying solution books with every category of problem with solutions and working them until I understood them and buying an extremely powerful calculator which was allowed.

Cheating doesn't pay. You don't know the material - it makes the next class even harder. The only class you'd be justified to cheat in would be one that didn't matter at all to your degree. In which case- why are you taking it?

The more you know- the less afraid you are and the easier later classes will be.

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Also was a student judge for one cheating case. Was a girl- she even copied the exact errors from the other student. She got an F for the class and that was it. I think that's fair-- the penalty should not be completely draconian. Kids make mistakes.