personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too perfectly and t

personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project as a "reference" and ended up copying the whole thing. My college has zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of cheating, therefore the cheating student was booted out. These two seemed to be close friends and it was probably devastating to their mutual trust and friendship, not to mention one's academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident. personal story 2: I took a CS course with a Matlab project as the final project. When it was close to the deadline many of my classmates including me got an email from our TA, at least the sender's name is our TA's name, saying that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us grew suspicious that the sender's email address was a gmail account and did not end with ".edu", and the deadline never changed on the official course calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA's identity and sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their classmates' email addresses if shared. There were still some students who finished the project early and ended up emailing their project to that fake TA account. The perpetrator was never caught. (If you are from my university and majored in CS, you probably heard of this incident. It caused quite a bit of stir) As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both international and domestic students. If one's educational background does not stress the consequence of cheating, he/she is likely to cheat. In this case, some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding. Also, giving some 5.1/100 or 1/100 ratio is pointless. Wait until you get your PhD and you will know academic dishonesty happens all the time regardless of where you are from. It's just some cheating is more clever than the other.