Academic integrity

Sometimes I want to put on my resume that my GPA is an "Adderall Free" GPA...

Somehow, I do not think recruiters will think it is funny though.

Here's some delicious irony for you. The NFA required anyone who had a Series 3 license to take an ethics examination after 12 months. I aced mine (that's not the ironic part, but...). About 8 months later, one of the guys I had been training was studying for his ethics exam. I happened to walk by his desk and see him memorizing my ethics exam as a study guide.

I asked him what the fuck and he told me upper management had given it to him to study with. I found out at that point that it had been given to everyone as a study guide pretty much immediately after I had taken the exam. Unbelievable. It didn't occur to a single one of these jokers that cheating on a fucking ethics exam might not generate the best karma.

Awesome article. Awesome quote:

"As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life."

There's a fair amount of cheating going on in my school, though it seems to have dwindled somewhat since freshman year. We took a poll in a class about how many of us suspect someone of cheating, and about 40% of us thought so.

I'm at a point in my life where I can honestly say I've never cheated on anything. But when you see a kid get up to "go the bathroom" four or five times with his BB, you get a little suspicious.

Those that cheat get B+, those that take the time to do the work get A's. What kills me is the people who ask, "Hey dude, can I see your homework to check mine?" This is code for, "Hey dude, I'm a lazy ass can I copy the work you spent 12 hours on?" Cheating comes in different forms, all of which are rampant on every college campus. Cheers to Braverman, it comes down to what you'll do when no one's watching.

Yeah, I agree. Cheating doesn't give you the core understanding of a topic. Either way you are just screwing yourself.

On one hand, I think those students are just cheating themselves. I was a very lazy high school student, but I took college (and grad school) pretty seriously. Over that time, I've greatly improved my ability to analyze, learn, communicate, and a whole host of other skills. I'm truly confident that these skills will help me be more successful career-wise than a lot of my lazy peers. As a wise man once told me, you only get out what you put in.

On the other hand though, I wonder if I'm just telling myself what I want to hear. Maybe plenty of those cheating students go on to be reasonably successful in the workplace, precisely because most of what we learn/do in lecture/assignments is highly impractical for the "real world."

There is a certain amount of pride involved. The shit you turn in while in school has your name on it. I personally don't want to turn in something that I didn't come up with on my own as that work is reflective of my intelligence, work ethic, etc. The people that cheat may very well be 'reasonably successful' but that doesn't change the fact that they're compromising their integrity for a B instead of the D that they probably deserved.

happypantsmcgee: On a personal level, I totally agree with you about the pride/integrity thing, as I also like to take pride in my work. All I'm saying is that I think our education system really sucks. Teachers don't usually have much incentive to teach well, student don't have much incentive to learn, etc. A lot of the information is useless for real world work, and even many of the skills they really stress are mainly useful in an academic setting. It also encourages learn-and-dump studying, as opposed to real understanding. I could go on-and-on, but all I'm really trying to say is that the more educated I get, the less convinced I am with regards to the benefits of "formal" education. (I'm a huge fan of learning/education, and think there are plenty of things you can learn to improve your life. I just think colleges are lousy environments for this actual learning to take place. In the end, I think it's more about signalling to employers that you could graduate, and is often more of a rat race than anything.)

I completely agree. College is dumb. Very few of the classes that you take are important, and only small proportion of those important classes are useful in life. Could I care that someone cheated on their Sociology of Greek Women in the 1940s during World War 2 paper, of course not.

Yeah, I don't feel all that strongly about cheating. Most of college is just a hoop people have to jump through in order to enjoy a relatively decent life and knowing all sort of bullshit about ancient Greece or Chinese imperialism really isn't needed for most people. Besides, if the professors themselves actually care about cheating and not coasting till tenure they have all sorts of avenues open to them - in class blue book exams, oral exams, requiring students to meet with them for 5 fucking minutes to talk about they're paper. The real answer here is that profs don't give a shit - just more "fuck you, pay me".

I could personally never cheat like that. The way I view the world, no matter how "pointless" or "worthless" a class or subject matter may be, it all helps contribute to your education. Maybe directly a 20 page paper on the underlying causes of WW I won't help a prospective monkey, but learning to read critically, work long and hard hours, check and recheck your document, and yes, bullshit a little as well? Or the critical thinking, out-of-the-box shit you can get from philosophy classes if you do the readings and put in a little effort to actually think about things for a minute? Priceless.

As far as my friends and classmates cheating, yeah it happens. And they do get screwed for it, pretty royally. One of my roommates likes to take advantage of my natural brilliance (okay, okay, it's a joke) and pick my brain for answers on online quizzes for his business class. Because I quite frankly despise him, I oblige. Wait..what? You hate him and so you help him cheat to get a good grade? Where's your head at moranges? Well, the little things easily cheated on amount to 10% of a final grade, so woohoo you get all 10% of it. But when you cheat to get there, you fail to learn what you need to, and so on the final which is worth 50% of the grade, you bomb it. Oops. Instead of failing the practice quizzes and taking a 5% or so hit on the final grade, there you are with a C, maybe worse. Boom. Retribution.

So, maybe some people get away with cheating in the short run and get boned in the long run. Maybe they do fine through the rest of college too, great for them. To the best of my knowledge, which is limited, you can't copy someone else substantially in the workplace. In the end, boom, you're dead anyways.

Where I went to school, cheating was the norm for business/liberal arts majors. But only the dumb engineering and sciences majors cheated. There were more adderall junky business/liberal arts majors too.

Easier majors attract more dumb/lazy students but it's OK because these students are just shooting themselves in the foot. You can slide by in school but not at work and definitely not in life, at least that's what I would like to believe...

mhh on the hard soft point, that might be because people studying hard majors enjoy a challenge and aren't mentally retarded or lazy

Now being dumb or lazy in itself is not bad and totally fine, what annoys me with these liberal art ppl is this arrogance, like studying some bullshit subject at a good uni makes you someone lol, a lot of these ppl genuinely think they have intellectual capability when after 30 seconds of speaking to them you realize all they are capable of is regurgitating pseudo intellectual bullshit.

There was quite some cheating in my school (I'd say 35% of the students were regular cheaters and 3/4 would cheat at least once per course per term). What shocked me the most wasn't that the brightest students were the ones who cheated the most. It was in fact that teachers knew it and didn't care. Last week I was hired by the top student of my class to do some really trivial things. He paid 3digit sum per hour for my "consulting work". When i asked him if he was too busy, he answered that he wasn't. That he just didn't learn anything in college because he cheated in every single course.

In my experience in both target and nontarget schools, target school kids definitely cheat a lot more.

good students are bad students that never got caught!

puhlease with the whole, "your only cheating yourself" line...personal integrity is an important thing but cheating on a college test and not learning a couple of facts that you will forget ten minutes later is not going to come back to haunt you later in life. Unfortunately, in school as in life, there are not always consequences for people who do wrong and success is not always doled out fairly or to those who work hardest and are the most intelligent.

That's pretty hilarious that after all these posts only 1 person admitted of cheating in College. Let's be honest here, 75% of College students cheated somehow (it really does not matter how, but cheated).

I think the system has failed. The recruiter is looking at your 3.5 GPA, not whether you cheated, and the student knows it, and if you have never cheated and finished with 2.5 GPA and your school curved the grades, you will end up in a bad job and may get stuck there forever. Please tell me about learning growth when you are in a dead-en job.

I think the best way would be to have to standardize tests throughout, students would have to understand and know the topics to pass, thus would pay more attention in class, do their homeworks etc.

This is quite interesting since I'm a freshman in college now. From what I can tell, cheating increases as one gets older, ergo, freshman hardly cheat at all and seniors and juniors are looking for every shortcut they can.

I'll admit to having cheated a time or two jeremydos. But I gotta say you can't do that in math classes where the grade is based on an in class written exam. The problem sets we were encouraged to work on, and we ALL technically cheated, I guess. They were worth 10 percent and it was understood that even with a group of 6 people all sharing work the odds you could get the assignment done in time was slightly above even. I'm talking weekly assignments that would take me 10 fucking hours. God those sucked.

I was an idiot in college and one class i really liked.. i had the rep of a jock in college.. would come late, do min then study balls for test and made good grades..did nothing extra... well this one class i liked a lot.. we had a 10 page paper.. so i wrote it and was very very happy with it.. i turned it in and BITCH said i bought it off line...

I went to a non-target liberal arts school which still sent a decent number of people into banking/consulting each year, and I only heard about isolated incidents of cheating. It didn't seem very widespread.

I was in hard sciences, and there was cheating that went on. In CS courses, our project work was usually a large percentage of the grade in the 40-60% range, and there was out and out cheating that occurred, though a lot of those guys got caught. There was a much much larger grayer area where we would work together on problem sets which was certainly against the rules, but not cheating as we would actively work together to come to a solution, and everyone would understand the solution when it was found. There were a few slackers who brought nothing to the table and were just mooching, but those guys weren't invited back. We would also just hash out the main concept, not sit there and work out every detail, we did that on our own.

Similarly with engineering or CS projects, we would often talk about problems we were having, and help each other with areas we were particularly stuck on. Considering how this is standard practice in industry, and sometimes you really just need a second set of eyes to find a problem, I didn't consider this cheating either, though according to the syllabus it was.

In match/science/engineering, everything builds on subjects that came beforehand. Problems and projects are meant to enhance your understanding and build skills. Its not like some humanities subjects where "The impact of WWII on the womens rights movement in South Africa" will never come up again. You are only screwing yourself in the end.