> Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems. Graduating these students is bad for them a

> Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems. Graduating these students is bad for them and bad for the institution. I've always wished that more students could be made to see that the goal of assignments is not to produce something (a paper, code, proofs) but rather to get the experience working through producing the thing. All too often they seem to think of the situation as like a job where the instructor (boss) tells the student (worker) to do something and then they do it because that's what the instructor wants. With that mindset, it's easy to see why they think they're getting away with something when they plagiarize, when in fact they're mostly cheating themselves. What universities should be doing is communicating more clearly to students about the nature of the activity that they're paying four years of their lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in. Another point: especially in courses where the grades are magically adjusted to fit some curve, allowing cheating is extremely unfair to honest students. Even if there's no official curving going on, it's hard for the instructor to accurately gauge what students in the course should be capable of when a bunch of them are cheating. I've seen the effects of this firsthand as a student: one result is inflation in the difficulty of assignments. Finally, even when neither of those two concerns apply, it can be demoralizing for students who work hard and have a fair grasp of the material to get Cs or Bs when their know-nothing classmates seem to be breezing through, snapping up As.