The Shocking Truth about Cheating in College

In this video I talk about cheating in college. I talk about something that occurs when you cheat that nobody ever discusses. I also give 3 reasons why this occurs. I finish the video with some concrete examples of cheating and hopefully a positive message for everyone. I also pose some questions at the end. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on cheating? If so, please leave a comment below.

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[Youheardwhatisaidho]

"It's better to do things the right way and fail" I agree. But the main issue with this in academics at least, is failing is going to cost you upwards of thousands of dollars and likely put you behind. It's not a "fall down and get back up" kind of thing. It's a "fall down a cliff and try to claw yourself back up while carrying a bag of bricks on your back" kind of thing. It's devastating. I know it's not the fault of professors. It's more just how the American Higher Education system has grown into a corporation after money like everything else in this country.

[everything-has-a-handle-now]

Honestly the main reason I cheated on some tests was because the risk of cheating was lower than having to tell my parents I failed the class.
Funny thing is the classes I cheated are actually the things I'm best at now in my discipline.

In my opinion if you want students to stop cheating it should be made clear that *it's okay to fail.* Both from the school and parents.

[Ariminua]

"When Students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning." Neil deGrasse Tyson.

[noahlindenberg]

A 3 credit hr class costs ~$7k at my university. Learning by failing is great and all but it’s not a privilege most students can afford. I think a lot of professors lose sight of that and think about their class in a purely academic sense. Also, from what I can tell, the high ethical standards go out the window once you hit the private sector, especially if you’re wealthy to begin with.

[JuanFelipeCalle]

I taught English at a community college for decades. Here is my experience with plagiarism, the most common form of cheating in my discipline:
1. As a new professor, I heard some of the more experienced professors laugh about plagiarists and take great joy in finding them, failing them, and reporting them. They took plagiarism personally. I never mocked people or enjoyed the process, but I thought I had to take a zero tolerance approach to plagiarists and either give them a zero for the paper or fail them for the entire class.
2. As I became more experienced and I had conversations with the students who plagiarized, I began to understand why students plagiarized. Some felt overwhelmed or unsure of their own writing. Some felt like they were too busy to complete an assignment. Some were not yet skilled at properly paraphrasing or summarizing sources, even after a few lessons in class.
3. So I began to set up my class to reduce the incidences of plagiarism (as did many of my fellow professors, more or less independently). We started the semester with low-stakes assignments, broke important assignments down into smaller assignments to allow us to pinpoint problems before they became big, and, for my part, I gave students who plagiarized a chance to rewrite their plagiarized paper.

Some students would take that chance and write a great paper, others would take the chance and write a terrible paper, but it was their paper, and if they were doing well enough in the class otherwise, they still might pass, and others would just stop coming and fail the class.

Once I made those changes, I never had to refer anyone to a dean for plagiarism.

PS. We can easily spot plagiarism even without Turnitin.com. The benefit of Turnitin is that it speeds up the process, helps us find evidence, but if you are good enough to plagiarize without getting caught by your professor, you are basically paraphrasing well, so you may as well add the proper citations and not take any risk.

[SequinBrain]

There are also schools & teachers who cheat students by: 1. Putting any form of a trick question on a test. There is no way to answer these unless by probability you happen to get it right. 2. Putting something on the test that IS related to the subject, but was covered nowhere in the text or lectures, and 3. Putting something on the test that isn't even related to the subject at all, was covered nowhere, and their excuse is a flippant "you can google it." All these are methods for the ever popular and growing trend of forcing low grades which is 180° from instructive education and as such is cheating the student out of both the education they signed up for and their futures.

[julianbell]

I’m an electrical engineer with a bachelors and masters degree. There is so much horseshit and bullshit in academia. You learn so much stupid shit that is a total waste of time. I don’t care if you cheat. I cheated a little bit during my first year of college. Look at it this way, there are classes that are pre requisites for other classes, if you fail one of these classes it will set you back a year. That’s thousands of more dollars of student debt. If I came to you and said “if you fail this test, it will cost you $10, 000, ” you might fucking start to sweat a little bit. You might start thinking that cheating just a little might be a pretty smart thing to do. This is the reality of a students in America. Cheating is never discussed in this context, it’s always discussed in some bullshit, hyper-moralistic, virtue signaling way.

[nickstoltz]

Straight up, in Engineering school, I have never met someone who never cheated in my entire life. From copying assignments, to using online or a friend's resources from past semesters, every. Single. Engineer. I've ever worked with has cheated at some point in their academic career. And it's almost to be expected at this point, the profs increase the work load to even out the bell curve to account for the average student cheating. It means more work for everyone, especially those who chose not to cheat.

[ViciousTheDesolate]

Cheating went down in my math program when professors started to encourage people to work together versus work alone. Professor led a discussion in starting a study group and awarded a 5% credit in our final grade for students who showed up. Scores dramatically improved in the class.

[shaneyaw]

In real life, when people get a job they are expected to: copy their peers exactly; look up the answer on google if they do not have the answer; redo the problem until a correct solution is found; work in groups. Thus, the academic view on cheating is outdated. In fact, this outdated view does not level the playing field but favors people who can afford to pay for a tutor and/or pay for test preparation classes. Hence, it favors the rich.

[FreshBeatles]

I get too much anxiety if I feel like cheating, it's much easier just to learn the material.

[OleJoe]

As a retired high school math teacher, I've run into students cheating quite a bit.

There are a few measures that a teacher can take to reduce the occurrence.

One is never make any one quiz, project, test, etc worth something like 50% of a student's grade. Keep each individual test, quiz just a small morsel of the overall grade.

Expect students to "cheat" on any kind of take home exam or homework, by using the internet, library etc. Plan accordingly.

Encourage group work for problem sessions.

Stuff like that.

One of the most devious cheating was the "you lost my test" scam.

You give a test, the student knows they will fail and can't answer the questions. They pretend to work on the test and when everyone turns their test in, they don't.

You grade and record the tests and pass them back. They raise their hand and say, "Where's my test? I was here."

Sure enough, the attendance records show they were present, but you don't have their test. Then they claim you lost their exam.

This has even gone so far as to end up in the Principal's office with a pissed off parent and a smug little 9th grader claiming you are an incompetent teacher.

One way out of this, is to number all the tests. If 30 went out, 30 must come back. About 5 minutes before the end of class, you declare the test over and collect them.

If you are short one or two tests. Keep the students in their seats and go through the tests one by one by reading off their name and checking the roster. If you call their name they can go. Eventually you're left by default with the offending student or students.

Usually however, the rest of the class doesn't want to be detained and will start in on the cheater by pointing them out and yelling at them to turn in their test so they can go.

[nathandavis]

The sad reality is that cheating is a biproduct of an educational system that is built on competition and the purposeful exclusion of the lowest acheivers. The purpose of tests, grades, GPAs, and diplomas is to give employers an easy way to exclude applicants, because there are more people applying for the job than available positions. My goal as a student was always to learn the subject. I didn't care what my grades were, and as a result I never had any interest in cheating. I only cared about things that helped me learn the subject. As someone that wants to learn, the grading system and cheating are a pain in the ass! I don't want to waste time figuring out how to cheat on a test just like I don't want to waste time taking that test. Both of those things take away from my ability to learn. I often saw other students cheating, but I never bothered stopping them. That would just waste my time, and there is no "unfair" advantange when you don't care about the grade. Their goal was to get a grade. My goal was to learn. Their cheating didn't affect my learning, but having entire lectures devoted to discussing cheating and its consequences did take away from my abiltiy to learn. I also value teaching. So everytime I couldn't show someone else my work, because that is "cheating, " really bothered me. This is purposefully limiting an opportunity to teach and learn for the sake of a broken system. I hate that. It is inherently anti-knowledge. I think the educational system is broken. For most people in it the focus is on the competition not the knowledge. (Teachers are the main exception to this, but they have to bend to the system too.) I wish the system could be made better, but I can't see how to do that. And it seems like no one else knows how either. Until the world is a very different place than it is today, the best we can do is work through this system, but that doesn't make it is a good system. All of our greatest achievements have been from people that value knowledge. Valuing grades only produces better tests and better ways to cheat them. Humanity's potential will be greatly improved the day that we can abandon the current educational system and move to one based on knowledge rather than competition.

[surrealistidealist]

In a way, when teachers and administrators let cheaters get away with it, it's all the other students that are cheated. If you're the only student in the class who isn't cheating, then that can really throw off the grading, rankings and ultimately the scholarships, grants, financial aid and selections for admissions elsewhere, including job hirings.

[knexfan]

At the university where I studied compSci, lots of the courses, especially the math-heavy ones, allowed students a handwritten "cheat sheet" of a certain size(like 2 or 4 pages on A4 paper, depending on the course).
That way the playing field was (more) level. The exams were designed with this in mind. To me it felt like we weren't being tested on our memorization skills, but rather on our fundamental understanding of how to use the concepts that were taught.
Everyone had their "cheat sheets" checked during the exam to make sure noone printed them or had more pages than was allowed. It felt like a very fair system to me as a student.
While I of course can't be sure noone used additional resources, it seems like it's both more difficult to do (because every student's desk was manually inspected) and less "rewarding" because you could already, with no negative consequences, bring your condensed notes.

[MidwestSirenProductions]

Personally I believe cheating would decrease if the general operation of exams changed to reflect the times. As a future engineer, you’re not expected to have EVERYTHING memorized (coming from prior internship experience, definitely the case; lots of online lookups and peer-to-peer interactions!). If professors allowed the use of notes during exams, it would not only reduce the number of students that cheat, but also encourage better note taking and peer interaction!

This past semester I took the hardest top-level course in the mechanical engineering curriculum. Unlike almost every other professor before, she allowed all quizzes and exams to be open book open note. Granted the made it abundantly clear that cheating via online homework helpers would not be tolerated, this helped me greatly. If more professors would follow in her footsteps then the notion of cheating would be so up front or “all of nothing” for those that cannot afford to drop or fail a course.

[rabidmoose]

My disagreement is actually with the definition of cheating. In every hobby and work project or task I've worked on, I've never been required or expected to rely solely on memory, nor have I ever been discouraged from collaborating or asking for help from others, and often I am not restricted to a single attempt to learn to do something. Personally, as an autistic person with ADHD and lifelong depression, I find it fortunate that the real world generally works this way because I would otherwise be completely unemployable.

The idea that things such as utilizing reference materials, collaboration, etc., are considered cheating, as well as the expectation that you may only use what you can recall from memory seems to be exclusive to academia. Additionally, these requirements inherently rebut the "equal opportunity" argument that is used to justify their enforcement: many individuals with depression, ADHD, and other common mental health issues often have impaired cognitive function and working memory either coincidentally or consequentially and forcing such individuals to rely on their impaired memory necessarily puts them at a significant disadvantage from the start.

[jordc]

I also think that professors get it wrong. Ive witnessed professors falsely accuse someone of cheating. Only for the student to replicate their answers in front of the teacher and class without looking at any notes.

I think sometimes professors dont report the cheating and claim they "know some of you are cheating" because they have a feeling the students are cheating but cant actually prove it.

[watcherofzideozeszz]

But in reality the virtue of “its better to try honestly and fail than to cheat” doesnt save your scholarship thats the only reason you can afford to go to college in the first place.
If the choices are cheat and maybe get caught vs definitely fail and have to drop out its an easy choice.

[zackiz]

If you are under 25-30, you are still in the process of building the habits you are going to have for the rest of your life. Life is mostly about habits and we mostly do what we are in the habit of doing. Changing habits, especially after a long time, is really hard. So if you get into the habit early of cutting corners, cheating, being lazy, then you are gong to have to try REALLY hard to change that later.

From an older guy, trust me, it's MUCH easier to learn the correct way from the beginning, even if that isn't easy, then changing something that wrong later on.