Students cheat because they're paying tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that becomes more valuable as their grades increase. Or even, if they don't pass, they might as well just be pissing tens of thousands of dollars away into the wind.

College seems to be mostly focused on passing tests and getting grades and you've got like 3 months per semester to learn an entire subject well enough to pass said tests, not to mention your entire future is riding on this.

I didn't cheat in school but I knew people who were constantly stressed about their grades and wouldn't have hesitated to cheat if they weren't worried about getting caught.

Eh. I teach introduction to web development at the college level. All of the assignments are project-based (each week the students build a web page starting out with just html, then adding css, then adding JS, then AJAX, then some simple server-side code, etc.).

Yet, cheating is still rampant.

They are clearly not interested in the subject. Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money in IT or is it peer pressure? The problem can possibly be solved if the root cause is studied

> Why are they there? Are they just taking this class because they are pursuing the money

Yes. Having a piece of paper makes you more qualified when competing against thousands of people. Of course you can do other things to make yourself stand out by showing off your projects you've worked on, but that's a lot harder than gaming the system to get good grades.

As it stands now, a college degree is just a qualifier that tells companies "this person is willing to play the game that current society has established, and will make a better employee than those that aren't willing"

You know your class better than I do, but the main guy I learned project-based learning from, Chris Lehmann, differentiates between a project, which is open-ended and no one knows where it will lead, but starts with the student creating it, and a recipe, where you know the result. He talks about these things in his TEDx talks http://joshuaspodek.com/inspiration-in-education. I hope I'm not asking too directly, but are you assigning projects or recipes?

I was an art major. I was also a biology major.

the biology courses were all sit down and listen to a lecture and write a test.

the art courses were very hands on and I had to initiate what I wanted to do within the confines of the assignment. And most importantly there was critique.

I think what makes a project a project is the ability for it to be critiqued by your peers and the instructor. It’s also much more engaging than sitting down and being quiet and watching an instructor say words for an hour or so.

I graduated with both degrees, but remember wishing more of my biology classmates had the experience of being in classes where there was the element of critique.

I think cheating is _especially_ rampant in CS courses with a practical component like programming psets.

how do you grade? If my professor was grading based on picking a random PR/commit and asking me to talk through the problem and changes, I don't think i could pull off cheating

You raise an interesting question about the Kenyans' work, whether it is cheating. I normally wouldn't ask people what they intend to do with work they've commissioned from me, unless I suspect they intend to do harm with it, but that still leaves a lot of grey area.

If someone asks me to write a 10 page paper on the causes of the civil war... I'd suspect that it was for cheating. Then again, what if someone asked me to write, say, a sample python notebook showing how to run a k-means clustering on some data and do a color coded scatter plot of the various points and groups. I dunno, there's a chance it's an assignment, there's a chance they were told to do it for their job, there's a chance they just need some tech work done. In this case, I'd certainly feel fine doing the work without sticking my nose into what it's for.

Yeah, how much of an ethical obligation do you have to act on your suspicions? It's an interesting question... Anyway, whatever the case case, this is more of an abstract interest to me, we could probably find something to debate here, but in terms of how I feel about it, nah, this is hardly like some Death Star schematic, my feelings of judgyness toward the Kenyans are pretty close to zero here.

One of the main benefits of being educated and one of the defining qualities to being considered educated is the ability to think in the abstract. What you suggest in your first paragraph is apt for vocational training.

There are plenty of reasons why people cheat, but I'd say one big motivation is when grades and test scores decide who wins and loses in a zero sum game.

Medical school is a good example - there are a fixed number of med school slots, and slots at the top schools are more valuable. Law is similar, but more skewed, it's easier to get into a low ranked accredited law school than an accredited med school, but you do still generally need to attend an ABA accredited school, and spots at top schools are far more likely to lead to high paying jobs. Another interesting factor is that attrition rates at top law and med schools are typically below 0.5% (not a typo - yes, that's one half of one percent). As a result, just getting in is critical. No, you can't succeed in med school if your grades and test scores are an artifice and you have no understanding, but I think the whole thing is set up for low attrition rates, so a B student who cheats and ends up A grades will be fine at an elite med school. I think this is also why high achieving students are (no cite, this is what I've read) no less likely to cheat than low students. You might think, why would someone with a 3.7 in pre-med cheat? it's because things are wildly competitive, and the selectivity is actually higher than what is needed to establish basic competence, people are essentially outcompeting each other for limited spots in a cartel.

Interestingly, programmer jobs generally is less like this. If I learn to program, that doesn't mean someone else doesn't get to, if I get a degree in CS, that doesn't mean one of a finite number of spots can no longer go to someone else. I suppose we do all compete with each other as workers in some sense, and top schools do give an advantage, but we don't place a hard cap on the number of CS grads or programmers who can be employed, there's no formal accrediting body that can act as gatekeeper, and there's no credential with high barriers to entry but a vanishingly low attrition rate once you get through. If you cheat on your data structures and algorithms test, google is still going to make you find all matching subtrees in a binary tree at a whiteboard in your interview (I have this sneaking suspicion that the whiteboard exam at google may be an unnecessary exam, and that people who fall a bit short of this would probably be absolutely fine once at the company, so it may be more of a med-school style situation, even if there's no government-backed gatekeeper). If you go the startup route, well then, nobody's going to care one way or the other if you got an A in data structures instead of a B or even a C+ (they might note the degree, I suppose, but even that would be secondary).

If the value of an education is what you've learned, rather than the measurement of learning, then cheating will be far less prevalent. If the measurement is more important, then yeah, there's a huge incentive. And let's face it, platitudes like "you're only cheating yourself" are silly when turning a B into an A means you get a coveted spot on a track to earning $375k on a 40 hour workweek as a dermatologist. People often cheat because it often does work, and often does pay.

Then, of course, there's the extremely insidious situation where some degree of cheating is so common and tolerated that not cheating places you at a severe disadvantage. I read that students at one university rioted when they discovered they were going to e prevented from cheating on an exam. This seems bizarre and appalling (and it is, appalling, in a general sense), but it makes more sense when you realize that a culture that broadly permits cheating, but then clamps down at a subset of test sites, has in fact placed the non-cheating students at an insurmountable disadvantage. I think this may also be the case for some highly competitive sports - I have nothing to do with cycling, but much of what I read during the Lance Armstrong scandal suggested that people who refuse to cheat have essentially conceded and chosen not to be elite pro cyclists. In many ways, to me, what was so damaging about the story (re Armstrong) wasn't the cheating per se (though that's bad), it's how viciously he went after people who reported or questioned his cheating.