> Cheating most often affects the cheater, if anything, because when they need a skill they pretended to have, they'll fail at real-life tasks. But nobody else

> Cheating most often affects the cheater, if anything, because when they need a skill they pretended to have, they'll fail at real-life tasks. But nobody else is affected by cheating. Except the people standing on the bridge designed by the civil engineer who cheated, or getting radiation therapy from a machine programmed by a cheating software engineer, or being treated by a doctor who cheated in med school. Cheaters getting degrees from an institution that's supposed to produce high-quality graduates is bad for the value of that degree, which is bad for the institution, anyone else who went there, and anyone who relies on that degree as a signal that the graduate has the skills they're supposed to have.