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Never went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did. It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctor

• VladVladikoff 1mo ago
  Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.
  • bananaflag 1mo ago
    Have you heard of cheat sheets? Or looking at your neighbor during exam? Passing pieces of paper?
    • sampullman 1mo ago
      Many of my tests after a certain point were open book, or at least explicitly allowed a cheat sheet. It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.
    • econ 1mo ago
      We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it. End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year. We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again. I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.
      • buildsjets 1mo ago
        In late elementary school, I had an extremely large vocabulary due to the volume of reading that I did on my own free time. However, I was failing vocabulary tests, which were usually a fill-in-the blank worksheet where you were expected to regurgitate that weeks list of approved vocabulary words. The problem was that for each approved word, I knew several more appropriate synonyms. I found that using a very sharp pencil, I could microprint the weekly word list on a piece of matte scotch tape / cellotape. Then I could put that bit of tape on the side of a white Bic pen it it would be nearly undetectable. I could normally write with the list of words facing my palm, and just rotate the pen so the list was visible when I needed it. It's has been close to 50 years so I assume that the statute of limitations has long since expired for cheating on a 6'th grade vocabulary test. I don't feel bad about it at all, so there.
        • econ 1mo ago
          I had to much great stuff of my own to think about. Made great effort keeping their earthly matters out of my head. I could see how others changed into one of them which for many was an improvement. Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt. In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore. The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her. In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that. It apparently works across time!
    • deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
  • jjice 1mo ago
    Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam. In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far. Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days. It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.
  • pvab3 1mo ago
    that's what I did. I could usually pull out a C on the final exam. That is certainly something I would do differently now, as a non-teenager. I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade
  • monster_truck 1mo ago
    I stopped short of flying out to do these for them but that is absolutely a thing too
• mc32 1mo ago
  In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.
  • cpburns2009 1mo ago
    There was a Pakistani cheating ring at my wife's school. The administrators knew about it but did nothing.
• watwut 1mo ago
  > 's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.
• jimbo808 1mo ago
  Graduated with highest honors from a top engineering school and never once considered cheating
  • tzs 1mo ago
    "Top engineering school" probably makes a big difference. I too went to a top STEM school (Caltech). Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well. Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.
• dmazzoni 1mo ago
  No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did. In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.
  • OroPla 1mo ago
    > In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.
• glenstein 1mo ago
  >It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.
  • mrguyorama 1mo ago
    I think most people have done "a bit" of cheating of some kind. Asking older friends about what to expect from tests. Asking older friends about how to approach a difficult assignment. Reading older assignments to see how they got their grades. Looking up an answer in the bathroom while taking a test. Getting carried on a group project. Sharing answers for a busywork assignment. But there is massive disparity in who cheats and how. In high school, my fellow APUSH students all shared their weekly "write the definition of these 100 words" assignment (yes really, that was a regular assignment) because they thought it was stupid. I didn't cheat on it because I thought it was trivial. Those same students did not cheat on lots of other tasks and much harder assignments, and they eventually were caught and penalized for that cheating. Many of the engineering students at my college had access to a shared folder with a crowd sourced collection of all assignments from many students, and sometimes people would just resubmit these older assignments. They did this because at least one professor was a Grade A asshole, whose philosophy was "If you do everything I asked exactly right, you get a C. To get an A, you need to go far above and beyond" which of course meant he just graded everyone on a curve to get his stupid desire for most of the class getting a C. Those same students did not cheat on other assignments, including much more difficult ones from classes that weren't part of their core degree. If I ask a fellow classmate for their implementation of a function on an assignment, is that cheating? If I find that my class is itself borrowing it's curriculum from a (open) MIT class and in fact several students of MIT have published their assignments as Github projects, is reading those cheating? Was it cheating when my mother was the French Teacher so I could ask her way more questions about assignments than other students? I think a lot of these things are "Light" cheating and I think a lot of people have done some of those things occasionally. However, almost nobody was ever doing these things as much as they easily could! People were willing to choose to not cheat even in the face of it. That's very different from what seems like a lot of people who say "Everyone cheats" and by that they mean they haven't done any of their own work in a decade. I think these people, at least formerly, were only a few percent of people. It's actually fascinating how it has evolved though. Online translation was an option for my mom's students for decades, but only with the advent of LLMs are students doing it in large number. Is this because it's harder to catch LLM cheating and therefore you are less likely to be punished? Did we build a society that exclusively rewards cheating and young people see no value in learning legitimate skills anymore?
• slackfan 1mo ago
  Guess I was a sucker because I didn't cheat. Much was learned today.
• senkora 1mo ago
  [dead]
• tombert 1mo ago
  Tangential, a million years ago I made a YouTube video on how to do the heat equation PDE. I got a YouTube DM from someone offering to pay me a fairly significant sum of money to do their homework for them. I was very broke, so I initially accepted, and then about a minute later I felt guilty and backed out and made up some excuse as to why I "can't" do it. I'm glad I ended up doing the right thing, though it does concern me a bit that I accepted it at all. It's one of those moments that made it easier to empathize with people when they do the "wrong" thing.
• nitwit005 1mo ago
  Periodically there's some event that reveals how many people are cheating in some class, and it's never everyone.
• cpburns2009 1mo ago
  Oh doctors, as in med students, absolutely cheat. Don't think they're above that. There are cheating rings that administrators turn a blind eye to.
• nosioptar 1mo ago
  I never cheated in university. Before I went, I also made money selling essays/code to lazy students.