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Why I will never pursue cheating again

behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com

21–30 of 506 posts

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#21
post #15

I don't know what it is with you US Americans and "cheating"... but it seems to be a very touchy subject in your culture, almost like violating someone's honors. I never understood that.

When you cheat you violate an agreement everyone has made either explicitly or implicitly. When you violate an code of behaviour to your benefit, others may suffer. It shouldn't be very difficult to understand that causing someone else to suffer for your own gain is "touchy" at best.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#23
I have taught (as a PhD student) similar material and this is no surprise to me. But then, is it realistic to expect undergrads to turn out a thoughtful piece on LTE and 4G comms? If it is a technical comparison, sure, but even if you don't plagiarise your sources what are you really doing? You're going to read some articles on the internet, form an opinion, and rewrite that stuff in your own words. So long as they are learning, what's the difference?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#24
post #15

I don't know what it is with you US Americans and "cheating"... but it seems to be a very touchy subject in your culture, almost like violating someone's honors. I never understood that.

Just out of curiosity, where are you from and how is cheating regarded there?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#25
Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#26
post #10

[deleted]

I wish this was true, but it actually also hurts all the students who aren't cheating in the course since their classmates are receiving better marks than them while spending less time. Which tragically creates a strong incentive for other students to join in. In some courses this can be an epidemic and you have a significant fraction of the students cheating and getting better marks than the students who are actuall…

There is no evidence that cheating hurts the cheater. Sure, they will learn less. But if they get higher grades from cheating than from trying to learn and not scoring as highly, then this will get them a higher wage in many professions.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#27

"Cheating" is a meaningless concept once you reach college in my opinion. Either students are learning or they're not. They're (usually) paying money to be there and the only applicable metric is if the skills they acquire while chasing down the degree are worth the money they or their parents spend. To that end, I was impressed with the OP's thoughts on deterring this sort of behavior in the future. Because really,…

Full disclosure: I am a college dropout - so take this with a grain of salt.

At the very least, it matters, if only a little, to the reputation of the institution. If they start turning out plagiarizing idiots, eventually they become unable to charge as much for that education.

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#28
post #25

Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.

Yeah, standards seem to differ a lot.

There's also the whole grade inflation problem: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/93987

... perhaps a part of the problem is accreditation of higher ed schools?

Re: Why I will never pursue cheating again

#30
post #3

> I was also lectured by some senior professors that "I should change my assignments from year to year". (Thanks for the suggestion, buddy, this is exactly how I detected the cheaters.) what? how can there be cheaters to detect if the assignment is completely different?

It explains in the article that he changed certain elements of the assignment so that it was obvious when someone turned in the old version.
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