I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful t

I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too. Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams. I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently. [0] http://www.olin.edu http://www.olin.edu