

Cheating Upwards: Smart kids may especially do it. But why? - zt
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/cheating-2012-9/

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Futurebot
I recommend everyone read "The Cheating Culture", which explains in great
detail why the author believes cheating is done the scale it is today:

"Callahan blames the dog-eat-dog economic climate of the past twenty years: An
unfettered market and unprecedented economic inequality have corroded our
values and threaten to corrupt the equal opportunity we cherish. Callahan's
"Winning Class" has created a separate moral reality where it cheats without
consequences-while the "Anxious Class" believes choosing not to cheat could
cancel its only shot at success in a winner-take-all world."

The bottom line is if you create a system which makes it so that one terrible
thing (like a job loss or medical emergency) can ruin your entire life, and
are also told that you are easily replaceable - you get a culture like this.
That unless you take lower wages, longer hours, and fewer benefits, that your
job will be outsourced/offshored. That unless you get the right grades, and
get into the right schools so you can get what's left of the jobs (in many
fields, not everyone can be a dev, admin, business owner, etc.) that you'll
wind up homeless, you will have this stuff happen. The more competitive and
brutal things get (more unemployment, greater concentration of job
opportunities), the worse this will get - and it's not likely to get better
any time soon.

When you try to run societies - as many Social Darwinists think is good,
healthy, and proper (where the weak die, and the strong prosper) people get an
incentive to cheat on a massive scale.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheating_Culture>

~~~
geebee
I definitely agree that competitiveness has something to do with it, but I
think you could have a highly competitive culture without as much cheating. I
think it's the "winner take all" mentality along with "gateway by proxy" that
creates such a toxic environment.

For instance, we decide who will become a physician largely by grades and MCAT
scores. Many people who would have been good physicians will not be accepted
to med school, and people who get into top schools are better positioned. Med
school is hard, but the vast majority who get in make it through, so "getting
in" is the most important thing. Unfortunately, we won't be deciding who will
be a physician by seeing who is best at being a physician, it doesn't work
that way. Instead, we use a GPA and exam as a stand in. This system can be
malevolently cracked, with huge payoffs for the people who aren't caught, and
potentially life altering consequences for those who don't cheat and fall
short (I know a guy who was borderline and didn't get into med school - after
two tries, he gave up on being a doctor).

Compare this with being a programmer. I'm not saying there's no cheating in CS
classes, I'm sure there's plenty. But if you really want to be a programmer,
there isn't a magic proxy that you can crack. And if you're at the 49%ile,
it's not like you don't get to be a programmer the way some people don't get
to become physicians.

But imagine if decided that every year, 50,000 people were allowed to study to
become "programmers" (with fines and imprisonment for those who programmed
without this credential), and we chose them them all based on a logic test
that correlates pretty damn well with programming ability. Now I think you'd
see really horrendous amounts of cheating. It isn't just the competitiveness,
it's the added reliance on a crackable proxy.

Character matters, but we should also see widespread cheating as perhaps a
sign of a deeply flawed system - and if it's clear that we can't stop the
cheating, we should understand that the system is profoundly unfair to honest
people who accept the results. If cheating on a single exam can make such a
difference, and it's clear that we are unable to control the cheating, then
maybe we should try to be less reliant on a single, mass produced exam.

One of my math professors in college said he figured he could assess a
student's knowledge of an area of math after an hour of discussion. No "mass
produced" exam needed, just take it where it goes, probe a bit, allow the
student to consult the books of ask for a reminder if needed. It would be
nearly impossible to cheat on such an exam.

I understand (and so did the professor) that this is idealistic - it wouldn't
be the same for everybody, it wouldn't scale, and so forth. But it's still a
direction some of these struggling institutions might want to investigate.

------
geebee
I remember reading Colin Powell's autobiography (many years ago). He wrote
about how he was selected for a very elite training program meant to groom
military upper management. When his cohort arrived, they told the room (I'm
paraphrasing here) that the selectivity for this program was so intense, and
that so many talented people were rejected, that if the plane carrying them
crashed and everyone on it died, they could completely replace his cohort from
the "reject" pile with absolutely no loss of quality.

Perhaps smart kids find themselves competing for this kind of thing more often
than others? A 99%ile LSAT score actually does increase your chances of
getting into Yale law school over a 97%ile LSAT. A 3.95 GPA in the sciences
really does increase your changes of getting into UCSF med school over a 3.7.

It gets even worse when students are aware that their peers are cheating. I
remember reading about a cyclist who admitted to doping and regretted it
deeply. His discussion of why and how he came to cheat was interesting - he
said that he could have accepted losing as a non-doper if he'd believed that
the people besting him were competing honestly, but that when he realized they
were going to win because they cheated and he didn't, he cracked and started
doing it too. And of course, once he's doing it, then even more people realize
they'll lose if they aren't doping. Eventually, it becomes endemic. Sure, that
sounds like a rationalization, but it also provides a very clear illustration
of how a large population can essentially corrupt and cheating can become
widespread.

My guess is that cheating is less common in environments where the measured
outcome of learning has little bearing on your opportunities afterwards. In
other words, in environments where you need to meet a standard of competence
to graduate, but people aren't especially interested in what your grades were,
my guess would be that cheating is far less common.

------
ruby_on_rails
Some of the best GPA's in my college graduating class (class of 2012) were
known cheaters. They went on to prestigious jobs at companies such as [large
american aircraft manufacturer] and [large american defense contractor]. Those
of us that left with less amazing GPA's (say 3.0-3.5/4.0) are working dead end
jobs making minimum wage.

Though as far as immoral/unethical/illegal activities go, cheating was really
the tip of the ice berg for my particular university.

