Do You Cheat?
Do you cheat in classes?
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I never have, at the end of the day you mostly cheat yourself out of an education.
However, given how rampant it is everywhere, perhaps education should be re-tooled away from rote memorization and toward more challenging content. We all know the rigor of the open-book test - go ahead and use the class resources but good luck under the time frame if you haven't studied. Phone/computer collaboration should be strictly banned - when I TA'd an undergrad Accounting course you had to check your backpack at the door and from a high vantage point it was quite easy to see if anyone was using their phone. Teachers need to ramp up enforcement or switch their style.
Agreed. I'd venture to say most professors don't care what they're teaching. Certain senior level classes could provide very useful skills and knowledge, but the opportunities are squandered by the style of teaching.
Combine this with the fact that employers dont give two shits what classes youre taking, how difficult they were, whether or not they were honors, and just see a GPA number and decide whether or not youre smart
Is why I cant take classes with the awesome professors who grade harsh but teach you a lot. I wish I could take classes with them, but companies just see a lower number
Cheated in the sense of having/studying past tests from old fraternity brothers, copying homework from classmates and things of that nature. Once or twice had wandering eyes on a test. Never tried to sneak the cell phone, computer, writing on hand, etc....too much of a pu$$y
If everyone else has the resources, or a significant portion of the people do, fair game, especially if its on a curve. If Lance Armstrong didnt win the Tour, the next juiced up cyclist would have. Having said that, making an attempt during an exam is way too risky and easier to prove than having access to test banks, old tests, hearing about questions on the test beforehand.
Lance is the worst example. Dude is a total sociopath who went out of his way to destroy anyone that dared speak ill of him.
If by cheating you mean reaffirming my answers, hell yea. I also never admitted anything to my RA in school when questioned about being clearly drunk at 2 am returning to my dorm/drinking in my room and always slow up and allow DB's to "run into me" if the QB throws a duck pass in my weekend football league. Firm believer in finding the very edge of the rules and leaning over as hard as I can.
+1.5bn if I could
You played in a weekend football league that actually called pass interference? SMDH...
Yea it's an actual flag football league with refs and shit, which I know isn't helping my cause any but....
Reaffirming your answers isn't leaning shit. Just euphemism for trying on your own before cheating.
Remember, we're on a finance forum. There are more of them here.
Go on...
I prepare ridiculously well for every test, and I do sometimes write notes down on a blank paper right before taking the test to ensure I don't miss any key points. If you know how dumb you are already, you prepare well.
I'll be honest- if teachers are naive enough to give quizzes and tests to be completed online, cheating is almost encouraged.
I would just read the answers ahead of time, so when I took the test I had them memorized. Never got caught either.
Was it a test copy that you got ahead of time? If not I don’t even see how it’s cheating.
No. It's pathetic.
Bryan Caplan published the recent book The Case Against Education where he makes a point about cheating in college. He points out that if college were actually about developing skills, there would be no incentive to cheat--students would only be hurting themselves and the "market" for cheating would disappear. But college isn't about developing skills; college is largely about nothing more than earning a piece of paper to send signals to future employers about your intelligence/diligence/other qualities.
I've always--heck, you've always--intuitively understood that college is pointless with regard to developing tangible skillsets, despite the propaganda that the college industrial complex (CIC) sells to the public. Since the CIC is so intellectually dishonest about college, I've always felt just fine about cheating, and I cheated all the f*cking time. If the CIC was right--that college is about developing life skills--I would have been screwed. In fact, I do pretty darn well financially and I excel--more or less--at my "9-5" job, revealing the lie that is pushed by the CIC.
Forget the Verbatim quote but it went something like "Students tend to cheat when the school system values grades more than a student values learning"
The further I've gotten along in undergrad, the more this has become a reality. I wish it were different, but it isn't.
I could not agree more.
Your last sentence is proven true with any successful individual I speak to. For the most part, I hear about people who were goodie goodie students, never cheated, and aced every test, but when it came to performing practical duties in the work environment, they were dysfunctional.
It takes "street smarts" to be able to truly be successful, and I think when you are faced with a broken education system, you need to do what is necessary to get the results you need, and sometimes the way classes are structured, cheating is necessary to achieve this overarching goal.
In high school, I would often do time-consuming things to cheat like typing notes into my calculator or printing notes and taping it onto my water bottle or drawing tiny cheat cards in the tinitest font. And almost every time, I'd find that I had the shit memorized by the time it was text time just from tediously transcribing cheat cards
I've been involved in it.
While in college I did papers and projects for money. I had no interest in taking out loans to cover living expenses so it's how I kept myself afloat during the Fall and Spring. Scholarship money alone wasn't enough to get by on.
Only in gym class
Yeah definitely. I actually feel like most kids are willing to at least talk about a take-home test or something like that even if you aren't supposed to..
If a teacher gives a take-home test and doesn't expect students to collaborate (even if he tells them not to), then that guy is an idiot
Kids I wrote papers for would cheat a lot. Little did they realize that if they put that much effort into occasionally studying then they wouldn't have to cheat in the first place. It is so true though that for all of the times that I had answers beforehand or made some plays to get an edge on an exam, I never felt conflicted from a moral standpoint. Not only is it all just for a number out of 4.0 at the end of the day, but it's been reiterated above that only a fraction of what you 'learn' in school will be applicable post-grad. However, I do believe in 'The Struggle' to some degree. You learn how to dig in when you have an exam coming up in a few days for a subject you hate with a professor who sucks and material that was hardly covered.
i cheated on a test once and the person who i copied their test was accused of cheating off my exam. bit of a cluster but didnt do it again
Don't cheat on exams. Don't cheat when there is an honor code. Homework has always been a little fuzzier. I'm not going to ding anyone because some anal prof cracked down on people for collaborating on homework (unless the school is really anal about its honor code and not collaborating is part of the culture), especially if half the class got caught doing it.
I'm not going to be a Dwight Schrute about people who break the rules if no unfair advantage is being gained and nobody is getting hurt. This is coming from a guy who got caught doing 110mph in a 45 with his Yamaha on a deserted country road late at night.
For an exam, even a take-home exam with no collaboration, please please please don't cheat. If you get caught cheating on an exam, when the rules are pretty clear and obvious, I can't work with you unless I see a clear change in behavior over the better part of a decade. And this is in QR where it's a lot harder to imagine situations where you can break the rules (besides maybe spoofing).
In IBD, the analogue to cheating on a closed-book exam would be tipping your friends about a merger-- or having them trade in their account for you. Except the penalty here doesn't involve some sort of academic honesty panel and potential suspension-- it involves compliance if you're lucky, FINRA or the SEC if you're unlucky, and the NY Atty. General (whichever nut is in office) if you're really really really unlucky.
So for your sake, please please please don't be the guy that cheats on closed-book or no-collaboration exams-- where the rules are obvious. Even the guy that cheats but doesn't get caught. Learn to confidently compete without an unfair edge or learn to take a B- on occasion when you're outgunned. (And I hire guys with 3.5 GPAs-- I was a 3.5 GPA. I expect you to be good, not perfect.) Because the stakes are a lot higher and a lot more painful as a professional.
Just... try to play by the rules, at least on the black-and-white and material stuff, even when there might be an advantage to cheating. It will serve you better in the long run.
But you teach/taught a hard science/hard skill. If people cheat in your class they are literally just cheating themselves. If your class is an important class then cheating is its own punishment. If your class isn't worthwhile then cheating won't matter--students will walk away with no meaningful skill or knowledge either way.
I was never a prof and it seems like your counterpoint basically boils down to nihilism.
My point is agnostic to the game theoretic and motivations to cheating. If you're willing to cheat for a grade, you're probably willing to cheat for cash. At least if you don't think you'll get caught. And that can land you in much more serious trouble as a professional.
At the foundation of cheating, you'll find problem solving.
I've never cheated myself when I was in college. However I didn't mind others who did, they're taking a huge risk so why not let them play their odds.
I was a 4.0 student all the way from high school through college. I cheated all the time lol.
I TA'd a course in grad school. There were so many cheaters but it's very hard to actually catch anyone unless you take drastic measures. The couple of idiots we did catch were a guy and girl who were passing notes to each other by writing on the desk in pencil, covering it with their arms so that only the partner could see it, then erasing the note. This was really stupid because a) we checked their desk afterward, and the pencil marks were still faintly visible, and b) THEY WERE SITTING IN THE FRONT ROW!!! Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to cheat while sitting in the front row???
It's easy to catch. You find the same mistakes and errors while grading the exam.
The errors and variable names on a take-home exam that does not allow collaboration should always be uncorrelated. And if you detect some three or four sigma correlation it may not be hard enough evidence for academic discipline, but you know it's going on. And if you're really ruthless you can get the hard evidence next time without tipping anyone off. Of course a lot of academics sign up to be academics rather than police detectives and regulators, so they aren't always that motivated or ruthless to catch cheating. But if they're willing to put the effort in, it isn't hard to catch it.
Again this is why cheating is so stupid. It's easier to catch than you think. And not all of the instances of people getting caught are public. Having been a grader, knowing what I know, cheating isn't just unethical-- it's riskier than you assume.
I can't speak to the soft disciplines but anytime there's computer code or a proof, you tip your hand in all sorts of ways you don't realize.
This is what I meant. You may know/think someone is cheating, but it's very hard to get the smoking gun.
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