I agree with you. Cheating was and probably still is very huge on my campus. Honor systems don't work and many of my professors didn't care.
Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes:
I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked.
The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities.
Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.
I technically cheated a lot in college and HS, but not in my weak subjects. It was an economy of time. Person A would do some parts of the assignments and I would do other parts. Combine the work and you've got twice as much done with 3/4 of the effort (I would still spend a little time deriving the work instead of wholesale copying). By the rules, I should've been thrown out of most of my courses (except CS and EE where I loved the work too much to let someone else take it from me) but I wound up with marks that put me at the top of the class. I learned enough doing just enough of the assignments to show up and get good marks on the tests without cheating.
I honestly don't think what I did should've been considered cheating, and I would do it that way again today- in fact, don't our jobs work just about the same way? But I'm all in favor of strict rules around cheating on testing or final projects. Those are where you demonstrate what you personally have learned, I don't think it should matter how you got to that knowledge, but you should have it.
I know what it is like to cheat and not to cheat: I cheated like crazy
in high-school in my weak subjects, but didn't cheat at all at
university because I was the best student in the year so copying from
others would have reduced my grades.
Why would anyone not cheat?
You forgot the most important reason: to learn. In some sense cheating
is a self-punishing crime, because the cheaters forgo the learning
opportunities that courseworks and exams offer. Indeed the only reason
universities have to have graded courseworks and exams is to put an
incentive structure in place that focusses student attention. In a way
grades are an anti-procrastination framework.
Very few people talk about what it feels like not to cheat and why students do it. So here goes:
I made it through college without cheating. My university actually managed to scare me from doing so with freshmen orientation. I focused on studying and making sure I took advantage of walk-in hours and student teachers. For a while I thought everyone was doing this. Then, as weeks passed in each semester the students got more and more brazen. During my years of school I was outright asked to share my test (sometimes during a test), I was offered payment and I was made to feel ostracized when I didn’t “help”. It sucked.
The worst part came when I would meet other honors students and find out how they got their high scores. I was surprised at how many of them cheated, to what degree they would cheat and how little they knew about their course work. This is when I found that there was no incentive not to cheat. Honors students got scholarships and were often given some very good internship opportunities.
Why would anyone not cheat? No one cares if you do. You’ll have an easier time. It doesn’t hurt your career. It also does wonders for your social life. My final two years I pretended to have low scores on tests so as not to be asked to help cheat. I kept my grades a secret and would often not look at graded papers in class. I stopped talking about any of my classes with anyone that was in my major.