Cheating can take from others.

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).

Yes, precisely!!!!

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?

Well, if that’s how you feel, why the hell are you going to school in the first place? It’s expensive as hell, you are wasting tremendous amounts of mommy and daddy’s money, as well as wasting the one and likely only time in your entire life in which you can basically work full time improving yourself for 4 years. If you’ve already given up on improving your value through knowledge, I don't know what else you think you’re bringing to the table. Anyone can lie about themselves, it’s not like that’s some unique and marketable skill (for anything worth doing at least). If you’ve got a trust fund and can just fail through life with no consequences, good for you I guess, but then you’re hardly offering meaningful advice for people who actually want to do something with their education.

1) your own personal ethics, and 2) the fact that being caught, especially in a college environment, has consequences.

[updated my comment, apologies for the poor wording]

Learn. Which is the whole poiny of education in the first place.

devalues the value of the qualifications and hurts those that didn't cheat.

Agreed 100%.

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.

>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.

A results-only education system would be preferable and would make some forms of cheating irrelevant. But it suffers from practical cost and scalability obstacles. We're already struggling to adequately fund public education. Are politicians willing to budget for additional teachers to evaluate student projects rather than relying on cheap and simple exams?

If you think the only important part of your children’s future is their ability to get hired, then you’re already setting them up for a life of misery and disappointment.

If you think the only important part of your children's education is what happens inside the walls of schools, then you're already setting them up for a life of mediocrity and servitude.

Why not do both? Learn your amazing life lessons outside of school and couple them with learning everything you can inside school. Why limit yourself? Why go out of your way to diminish your own value? It doesn’t make sense.

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.

Thanks for sharing, and for pointing out that it's ultimately about self-improvement. I'd upvote you more if I could.

except he didn't say "all that matters to me" unlike your overblown hyperbole

Of course the point of schools and college isn't the final exam, it's the years of learning you benefit from while being there

At least it should be