I'm not sure what to mark because I don't cheat on my own material but other students pay me to help them cheat.
Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
41–50 of 81 posts
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#42I cheated once (Data Structures II), and I feel no guilt about it.
The homework: implement various data structures in C++. The professor then gave us a printed copy of a correct stack/vector/etc implementation. So the homework could properly be rephrased "type what you see on the page into the computer, then run gcc to catch typing errors."
He then threatened that he would catch us if one person transcribed the printouts and multiple people submitted the same transcription.
I split the typing work with some friends, and wrote a perl obfuscator. Suffice it to say, I learned more about programming writing the obfuscator than I did in the rest of the class.
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can perfectly understand people saying 'this assignment/test is ridiculous. I'm not going to put any effort in it and rather copy/cheat and spend my time in a more productive way'. I can understand why someone might say that, but it would still be immoral and dishonest of them to cheat. When you take a class, you enter into a contract (often an explicit academic honesty policy) to not cheat. If you find the assignm…
We have different opinions on what is ethical. Disregarding the terms of a contract, or the law for what that matters, may be perfectly ethical in my book. There is always a difference between the letter of the contract and the intention of the contract. The letter is the same for everyone, but the intention isn't. For instance, the law must forbid jaywalking, to be able to punish those that jaywalk and endanger them…
"The same holds for the contract you have with a school."
You can not have a "contract" with the school. The student is being coerced, to a degree not dissimilar to a prisoner. (I am not saying that a student is exactly the same as a prisoner, because I can think of many relevant differences, I'm just saying the coercion level is similar; it is unilateral, the scope is huge, and there is no way out for most of it.) The concept of "contract" is not relevant.
If you think cheating is bad only because it is a violation of contract, then cheating is not bad. (You may not agree with the word "only"; I am making a logical statement here. If you think it's bad for other reasons, as I do, then that does not falsify that logical statement.)
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#44Maybe cheating is a leading indicator of efficiency, you get things done no matter what :)
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#45I'm not sure what to mark because I don't cheat on my own material but other students pay me to help them cheat.
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Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#46I cheated a lot in high school, a couple times in college. I don't feel guilty, but now I know the only person I cheated was myself.
I think it depends on the form of cheating. Cheating on anything you can do through learning - yeah, that's cheating yourself. But (in my high school at least) I've noticed that many homework assignments are pure busyword: there is no intellectual value to be gained through their completion, and all you are doing is wasting your time when in reality you could put it to a better use. In those cases, I would not feel g…
You're just rationalizing. It doesn't matter how much value you place on the assignment. It only matters if you cut corners.
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#47[deleted]
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#48I once used to believe that "I cheat because I can, not because I have to". I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but that phrase was just a way for me to justify procasination. Nowadays, no, I don't cheat :)
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have different opinions on what is ethical. Disregarding the terms of a contract, or the law for what that matters, may be perfectly ethical in my book. There is always a difference between the letter of the contract and the intention of the contract. The letter is the same for everyone, but the intention isn't. For instance, the law must forbid jaywalking, to be able to punish those that jaywalk and endanger them…
"The same holds for the contract you have with a school." You can not have a "contract" with the school. The student is being coerced, to a degree not dissimilar to a prisoner. (I am not saying that a student is exactly the same as a prisoner, because I can think of many relevant differences, I'm just saying the coercion level is similar; it is unilateral, the scope is huge, and there is no way out for most of it.) T…
As another commenter suggested, there is a stark difference between high school and universities. high schools in the US can be justifiably compared to prisons in this sense, but universities cannot.
Re: Poll: Were/Are you a cheater?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no honor in taking someone else's hard work and passing it off as your own. Looking at someone else's website for visual inspiration is a far cry from copying someone else's paper or having a friend do your math homework. Please tell me you see the difference.
"Cheating" does not necessarily mean taking someone else's work. I have cheated before by taking my own work (usually equations and the like) into exams in which I was not supposed to have them. This is technically "cheating," but what it really came down to was that I didn't want to spend hours memorizing information I would only use on one test and then immediately forget.
If you don't like the way a teacher or a school runs things, then don't cheat. Vote with your feet.
Requiring students to memorize has as much to do with the logistics of testing as it does with learning. If you think the school is being lazy and making it easier for them to test at the expense of substantive (non-rote) learning, then why go there?
Even if this is high school, there are still choices. There are people who have gotten into the Ivies with a GED. If you are the right kind of person, you will do substantive work, be recognized and succeed. You can add the drop out, get a GED and do volunteer work step to this plan:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141
If most people voted with their feet, then schools would get a lot better, fast. Instead, people cheat, which enables the schools to keep up their appearances. You're just as guilty of propagating the paper-reality of testing over actual learning.