My university flunked cheaters with an X instead of an F, a mark that carried onto their official transcript. By the time kids are in college, I think it's fair to be so final with judgements in respect of integrity.

When I was at university I happened to be 'fluent' in 68000 assembly language, so I was able to do that assignment within minutes of the task being set, no cheating needed. I actually understood what I was doing and wrote an assignment that was not cribbed from the work of others.

I thought this was going to be marked well, passing was expected. However, when the results came out a 'see me' was on the board. The lecturer was angry at me because I wouldn't say who I 'copied my work from'.

But then I remembered showing my code to a colleague in the minutes before handing in the assignment. Mine worked perfectly the first time but when I ran it again it failed. I realised I had cleared a 'byte' instead of a 'word' and changed my work accordingly before handing it in. Nobody else had this change, just my work. That one byte of real difference showed I knew 68K assembly when nobody else did.

So it turned out that my original 'done in ten minutes' code had been fished out the bin and typed in by someone else, they had then spread this around and everyone on the course except for a few mature students that were out of the loop had copied my stuff.

Now this was just one incident, as well as that there were other problems with groupthink which is not the same as cheating. I was behind on one project and submitted a simple diagram. Everyone else submitted reams of stuff, all returned with red pen on most of the pages. My assignment had just the one tick for perfect mark. Had I huddled with my colleagues in depressing group think panic sessions and done my own version of the 70 page assignment they were doing then I would not have got that perfect mark.

In my opinion plagiarism is just scraping the surface, beneath that there is a bigger problem of original thought and problem solving. Most people go along with what everyone else is doing.

That's hilarious. It's crazy that there was so much fallout from a case of cheating.

Is it Youtube's job to enforce morals? Is it Youtube's job to prevent anything that might hurt education? If it was determined that memes hurt education (by distracting students from studying) should Youtube ban memes?

Wrong frame. YouTube’s ethical responsibility is dictated by their ethos and that of society.

It’s Youtube’s ethical responsibility to not have videos which promote academic cheating products.

Today we are repeating debates addressed by 1A and its surrounding laws, by virtue of the fact that private companies aren’t currently subject to 1A.

It’s a healthy debate to have, but we should be aware of the pitfalls - namely that the introduction of 1A upon the old “town squares” freed us from tyranny. Failure to do it again for the new town squares will invite tyranny, and would inevitably bring it back.

This includes the laws which restrict 1A (“shouting fire”, etc.) which cover the old town squares. For the new town squares these are the “content moderation” policy cases online venues struggle with.

The first thing which needs to be done is to bring 1A and the surrounding legislative framework to the new town squares. Then we have the task of crafting laws in that framework which address cases special to the information era: IP, impersonation, disinformation, incitement ...

Unfortunately, the law is behind the curve.

Now before people dismiss such out of hand there are far too many who believe what is presented here because like many they are guilty of believing stories that reinforce their beliefs.

> "Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a "lemon". Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon < pavg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since ppeach > pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop."

Anyway you just specified an implied though not supported downside, while ignoring my point that cheating has some minor upsides. Demonstrating that cheating is a dead loss for society is not enough you need to demonstrate it has absolutely zero redeeming qualities allowing for such simple syllogistic reasoning to apply

A major NYC blackout resulted in a bunch of looting. That looting is supposed to have resulted in a bunch of new musicians getting their hands on good equipment. Those scofflaw musicians invented new musical genres that revolutionized the artform. Sounds a lot like reducing the friction inside a rigid system.

Basically, while we might prefer to have people raise integrity to the highest priority, life is complicated and it's sometimes hard to say a wrong thing is 100% wrong.

I mean, hell, look at SOX. Look at the various anti-money laundering requirements that banks are subject to. The de jure approach here in the world today is to force the corporation to police its own staff and customers.

We only think it is because it's drilled into us from a young age by the educational system. But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter. e.g. nobody cares if you took wrote the software yourself or got it from someone else's library, as long as the software product works.

If cheating happens, it is the responsibility of: 1) schools to deal with that accordingly (withhold degrees according to pre-written rules, etc) 2) employers to interview people instead of looking at credentials (something they should be doing anyway).

Well, morality isn't an objectively-verifiable property of the physical universe but one about which different opinions exist and where even if a “correct” answer exists it isn't demonstrably so, and in that sense nothing is morally wrong in a fully general sense, and moral values are very much shaped by socialization, sure.

OTOH, academic cheating involves violation of agreements and obtaining things of value by false representations, which is fairly broadly considered to be morally wrong generally, not just in the specific case of academic cheating.

> But there's really no equivalent of "cheating" in real world industries where it's the results that matter.

Pretty much the entirety of the law is about defining the what is cheating in seeking “real world” results, in the same way as academic codes define what is cheating in academic contexts.

Particularly, delegating assignments to third parties outside the scope of authorization by those giving the assignment, or using materials prohibited by those giving the assignment when completing it, is cheating in the real world, and not just the academy. (The reasons assignments have those kind of restrictions may be different, of course.)

You cheat on your test and become a lawyer, I may end up in jail because of your cheating.

... Or, you become a teacher, and my education is harmed.

... Or, an activity worker, and I fall off a climbing wall.

... Or, a scientist, and I waste time and resources repeating an experiment because you didn't understand what you were doing and lied to cover it up.

... Or, become a shop worker and I get short changed.

... Or, make sandwiches, and kill people because you don't follow basic hygiene and cheated to get your certificate.

... Or, a million other possible scenarios where people trust you to represent yourself so they know whether you're capable of carrying out the tasks you're set.

Or if you generalized cheating from "copying answers" to "producing answers that look right to your employers", you get a whole range of dishonest behavior you can get away with for years (careers?) while causing serious harm to individuals, companies and communities. Using unsafe materials which superficially pass inspection, outright faking studies so that it looks like your drugs work, fingering a likely suspect in a criminal investigation and lying on the stand to get them convicted.

I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but there is sometimes a logical appeal.

* It taught me how to learn difficult things quickly.

* The parts I do use were drilled to being second nature by the advanced courses I don't use anymore

Real Equivalent cheating:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.

He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his jo

Here's the real problem: leaking private info:

> And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.

> "Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.

> Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.

Same concept taken to its extremes.

Actual real world industries are full of possibilities for cheating: lie on your estimations, then lie to avert blame after those estimations are not met. Convert safety margings into profit margins and use that to outbid competitors who don't with prices they can't match. Real people die under collapsing structures that would not have collapsed had the safety margins been there.

They do if you are in violation of a license...

You can argue that cheating puts you ahead of students that work in good faith, systemically, though it's still a bit different. Stealing has implied intent of taking something away from someone, cheating doesn't. You're just trying to get better grades.

Merit scholarships are given based on class rank. If the #11 student cheats to get to #10, then they took scholarship money that someone else actually earned. This is a very real problem in my school district.

Additionally, if you cheated to get good grades and got into a good university because of them, then you probably took the seat of someone that didn't cheat and was not accepted but would have been.

Also, (some?) universities internally rank high schools by the performance of the students they accept. So, if School A sends a bunch of 4.0 students that all flunk out, then future students from that school get their 4.0 weighted lower than a 4.0 from School B where students regularly graduate from the university with honors.

So, if you are cheating to get a good grade and you get into a good school (taking the seat of a student that didn't cheat) and then you get caught cheating, or just end up doing poorly because you were never that good of a student, then future students from your high school will be penalized because of the poor choices you made (and because the school was unwilling or unable to deal with those choices).

The system is. broken. to. begin. with. And not just with cheating, with a number of different factors.

What incentive, as a student, do I have to NOT cheat if I won't get caught?

We only think cheating is only "wrong" because it goes against how the people who set up the educational system intend for it to work, e.g. they are short circuiting the system. It has no counterpart in the real world, and cannot be compared to murder and theft. If it were up to me, I'd make the school system results-only -- i.e. it's about how well you can build a project and explain it, not how well you can write up answers.

People who think otherwise need to wake up from their K-12-university programming.

And in case anyone thinks I'm an uneducated redneck, I am an Asian American overachiever with two engineering degrees from world-renowned universities.

.. and as cheating isn't wrong in your personal ethical system you're happy to lose your job to someone who claims to be better qualified than you but is just cheating to get ahead?

I don't know what engineering you do but I don't think society should value engineers as highly who know something is wrong but can't explain it and so don't get it fixed. "Soft" skills matter.

That’s how people end up in lives of mediocrity and servitude- they make self-destructive life choices that they rationalize by wrapping them up in some sort of bogus heroic narrative that they literally only came with to make them feel less bad about themselves. There’s nothing wrong with failure, right up until someone decides to not learn from their failures, and enshrines them instead because it’s a lot less work and it feels better. I’ve been there and it sucks. There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

At least it should be

I'm a math major, and something I've noticed is that my exams aren't helpful for actually learning math. I don't cheat on the exams because I want to learn as best I can, and I want to say that my good grades really are mine, but in all honesty my degree isn't useful in the future because I have the ability to get the right answer by hand on a carefully constructed math problem-- it's useful because of mathematical thinking, and because I now have the awareness of the mathematical tools at my disposal and their known use cases.

But really, cheating isn't more "wrong" than any other category of thing some people wish didn't exist but does. If there's a loophole and that loophole gets you where you want to be all things considered, then take the loophole.

I agree that, for some people, cheating is ultimately harmful. For example, if you're a comp sci major and know nothing about computers going in, you're gonna want to do it the way the university wants you to do it, or you should drop out and learn a different way if that suits you better. But otherwise, just consider the costs/benefits and cheat with awareness. Our most innovative and important achievements as a species were obtained by finding loopholes.

An example: Suppose there was an obscure rule that said professors must pass anyone who had taken the class three times. Some people take advantage, enroll for the same class three semesters, don't attend at all and still receive a passing grade. That would be a loophole. Dubious and contrary to the purpose, but technically legal.

What you describe is a circumvention or subversion of the system itself rather than a loophole.

Not the paper writers and some of the students who can benefit from it.

Have you even done a shitty job? It's soul-destroying. In high school I answered an ad in the paper and ended up doing "charity fundraising" by telephone. It turned out that the charity only got ~15% of the money raised. The people working there were all sleazeballs. I'm sure had I stayed there I would have ended up a sleazeball as well.

- flexible time

- potential to earn lot of money

- sheer enjoyment of writing

- improve one writing skills

As more companies and individuals smell the money to be made off tempting students to use this form of "contract cheating", governments are considering legislative responses which could result in the creation of criminal penalties for essay mills. ( https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/21/plan-to-cr... )

Beyond any possible governmental responses, the essay mills create a large pool of risk just by collecting user data. What happens if criminals target the essay mills, looking for lists of people who may then be blackmailed? What if the essay mills themselves decide to cash in on the extortion potential? Cheating and cheating support are both dirty enough activities that people would probably not want that to be exposed. Google for "essay mills blackmail".

The more advanced a person becomes in their career, the higher their extortion value. How many future politicians, leaders, or other influential people are creating extortion/security risks for themselves? As an employer, how many frauds are in your company and what risk do they bring with them? What ethics do they bring with them or fail to bring with them? How many product failures, delays, firings, lawsuits, sexual harassment cases, violations of company policy and general anti-social behaviors are caused by the group of people who enjoy cheating for personal gain? Will the essay mill companies realize they have large lists of corrupt and corruptible people? Will other companies want to buy these lists so they can know more about who to hire or not hire and for what positions? Will credit companies start using this to adjust people's credit scores?

For all of the people with no regrets for using or participating in the contract cheating of essay ghostwriting and sales - would this turn into regret if the activity was exposed? For that matter, do government intelligence agencies already know who did what or at least have that data laying around?

The more I think about this, the more it seems like such a stupid risk. You can stay stupid by preventing your own learning, corrupt yourself, participate in the corruption of others, reduce literacy, reduce the value of institutional degrees, reduce trust in educational institutions, create an electronic trail of your cheating, and all for the low price of lifetime risk of exposure, extortion, and lower literacy.

What could go wrong?

Back in the pre-internet days, paid cheating support was hard to arrange. How would you find the person? How would you evaluate them, hire them, and get the goods in time for an assignment due Thursday? The things I knew of in school were all local, where the relevant people were under the same or related authorities. (E.g., students at the same school, or students at nearby schools.)

Now it's obviously much easier. Which makes a societal response much likelier.

If scientists could spend all their time performing experiments, statisticians did all the statistics, and technical writers did all the writing, the replication crisis might not be as bad as it is and everyone wins.

I still talk to a rubber duck when writing code that I don't have to explain to anybody (probably).

The purpose of an academic paper isn't to explain anything, it's to force the student to form an idea about a thing, then find and apply evidence to support that idea. The purpose is learning, and demonstrating to the professor proof that they have learned.

None of those boxes get ticked if you pay someone to write your papers.

And nah, Shakespeare lit 101 is not the place where you "learn how the world works" by demonstrating how you can "game the system" by paying someone else to do the work. The professor is concerned with the students learning about Shakespeare and maybe a bit about literary criticism, that's it.

My computer science courses were the easiest part of my degree. Meanwhile I was up late into the evening for my British lit, psychology, and other "soft" "101" courses. Those were the courses I'd have been most tempted to cheat in if it was possible.

So you're only speaking for your own uni experience.

Your viewpoint is basically that we should overspecialize. I believe that the more diverse skills a person has. The better they are. Would you ask a romance author to write a highly technical piece? You wouldn't.

Papers help with communication. Communication is a skill that a lot of people lack.

I don't think the issue is your disservice to higher education in general or grade systems as a whole, but to your customers, who never receive the education they were meant to, and that they paid for.

I do however agree ethics are system dependent.

The effects of unethical behavior on the system are objective however.

Further, you're just completely discounting the agency of my customers here. They knew what they were doing, and how it devalued their education experience.

Failure is arguably an important part of the process of learning.

There's a thing that happens with loopholes. There's the guy that finds the loophole and tests it out for himself. Then there's the small group that follow him in if it suits their needs, and then word spreads and a good proportion of people also follow. If the loophole threatens the existing system in any way, then the upholders of that system will attempt to barricade the loophole. A few upholders might change the system itself, but that is rare.

The one guy who first used the loophole will always be on the lookout for new loopholes, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can say it's wrong, you can say it's not fair, but it's a fact of life. And by using that loophole that one guy can create change all around him. He can change it himself, or he can open the door for other people to see the change that needs to happen. Maybe it's good to patch the loophole, maybe it's good to change the system in which the loophole was found-- either way, it comes down a great deal to our explorer friend. He learns from failure too, but his goals are different and that's fine.

grade inflation is real, but at least it effects everyone equally. cheating allows dishonest students to get ahead by paying $$$. moreover, you can adjust for grade inflation, but you can't adjust for cheating.

Stealing is usually harmful to any group, which is why we haven't seen any real change in how we look at stealing. Cheating, however, is undergoing change. What is a hacker if he is not a cheater? We have jobs for hackers now-- it's called penetration testing. An increasing number of people see many of our dominant systems as being flawed-- thus, an increasing number of people may begin to cheat the systems to get where they need to go. This is important because if those systems want to exist, they either need to change or they need to be more secure. You will see moral opinions change along with this entropic state until an equilibrium is reached which will continue for some period of time until another relevant variable changes.

> Morality is only useful when the majority agree with it...

This sounds a lot like a moral relativist stance. I hear it’s not a very popular stance among ethicists, so I don’t have any recommendations off the top of my head for philosophers to study. Basically moral relativism just means that morality is defined by the standards of a culture.

> Morality is only useful when ... the outcome of that belief helps the group in context.

This sounds similar to what a utilitarian would believe. They focus more on the result of an action and the sum total happiness it creates and they judge higher sum total happiness to be of higher morality. John Stuart Mill is probably the biggest proponent of utilitarianism.

I write a paper for someone else to turn in as their own? In a situation where I know more or less nothing about the client? The outcomes are both unknowable and in most cases impossible to tie to my act directly.

You breached academic code and, if money was exchanged, potentially the law. Given you wrote the paper and received the money, the act is quite simple to tie to you.

>potentially the law

Yeah, show me the law that tells me it's illegal to write something for someone else. Thanks.

Writing papers for someone else is not illegal. (The student presenting the paper as their own violates your copyright, and potentially other laws.) But if you market and sell your papers for the purpose of cheating, particularly with respect to students pursuing degrees they intend to use for licensing/certification (e.g. law or civil engineering), you're aiding and abetting fraud.

The ship is sinking already, so it's OK if I set fire to it.

The 'ship' that is the US higher education system doesn't seem to hold much value, imo. Set it ablaze.

Did you get paid for them? If yes, they had a market value. That's the most basic definition of a market--a buyer and seller negotiating and agreeing upon a price for a good or a service. "Market" doesn't mean commodity. Hopefully you weren't writing anyone's economics papers...

By your rationalization, it's impossible to counterfeit a painting.

"Your honor, you should not judge me for stealing. For I could have also murdered."

> is nothing compared to the massive grade inflation one sees at top universities in the US

B) Because student at top universities (For the most part) have higher GPA in high school and a higher SAT scores already. Unless your morals require a strict bell curve of 10% F, 10% A, 40% C and 40% B?

And if you don't - you could make a solid case that the extreme ends of those skills may not be that useful in general outside of academia - than do Harvard et al need nearly as much money as we throw at them today?

I'd rather give students PRoPS, which is to say "percentile ranking of passing students". But that would require some means to normalize different professors teaching from different curricula, with variations in the capabilities of their students across different classes.

Automatically failing x% of your students every semester is as cruel and pointless as stack ranking. Clearly, if a student can demonstrate a minimum objective level of understanding, independent of the performance of their peers, they should not fail the course. Equally clearly, if a section is full of geniuses with perfect understanding, they should be graded more highly than a section full of normals that can barely get it after intensive study.

If you pile up enough testing data, year after year, it would be theoretically possible to construct a mathematical model to compare with some confidence the student achievement across disparate classes, professors, and institutions, as well as to say definitively who the good and bad professors are, and whether they write difficult or easy exams.

If you get a 100% on Dr. Aardvark's CHEM220 final at Example U., that may put you at PRoPS of 80 for "organic chemistry, milestone one", whereas if you get a 60% score on Dr. Zymurgy's CHEM235 final at Hypothetical Institute, that may actually have a PRoPS of 95 for "organic chemistry, milestone one". Dr. Z's exam was simply written to be impossible, and scored very harshly, while Dr. A's exam was built to be more forgiving, and maybe left out some elements that the Example U. chem faculty prefers to save for later courses.

This will, of course, never happen. Firstly, you would have to get academics to agree on the essential elements of a given subject at a particular checkpoint in a course of study. Secondly, institutions that rely on selective admissions and political connections for prestige would never participate, if there were even a shred of possibility that the objective evidence would show that they do not actually produce the quality of graduates that they would like to claim. Imagine if Ivy Limestone Woodpanels Law cranked out PRoPS for complete J.D. from 30 to 85, and Bigcity Urban Campus Law ranged from 50 to 99. The former is selective and does a lot of networking, but then passes anyone who still knows enough to not embarrass the school in a connected job, whereas the latter takes everyone, presents a huge challenge, and quickly flunks those who can't master the coursework and get hired through sheer merit. Those numbers would be a huge blow to the former's reputation.

Grade inflation is thus a natural by-product of institutions trying to be a "top tier school". It goes right along with publishing in the highest impact journals and wheedling more money out of your alumni. Schools that benefit from institutional prestige want to keep their reputations polished and shiny.

Further, grade inflation at top-tier US schools has nothing to do with the stats on incoming students. I don't even understand why you think that would be relevant.