"And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day j

"And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class." But if you need grab that BSD code in CS1, you sure as hell won't understand it. The other thing is that we can roughly equate "being caught for cheating" as "being fired for incompetency" in the workplace, so while the workforce has more lax attribution rules, the reason those attribution rules are there at university is intended to prevent the firing later on. Having TA'd undergrads in a first year programming course (with GameMaker for a CS Game Design degree), the ones that hit trouble are the first ones that run to the Internet for help. They then cut and paste the code, don't understand it (they don't even realize that variables will need changing), and their coursework grades will suffer considerably. Sadly, it's only then that they come to the TA. FWIW, my 2¢ says that the reason cheating is more rampant is because there are a lot more students who just don't want to be there; they've arrived at university because "that's what you do." They don't put effort into learning, because they're not learning for any life value, as soon as they have the degree certificate the major could have been anything. That said, it could be worse in the US than it is now. When I lived in New Zealand, the incidence of cheating amongst foreign (read: Asian) students was a source of great alarm, the figures were pretty stratospheric. It was partly cultural, as they were never taught that it was a big deal to not copy verbatim someone else's work, and it was partly because they didn't care at all, they'd been sent there to learn English and get a degree from an English speaking school. How they reached that point was academic (pun unintended).