Having grown up in America and moved to Czechia for college I have to say that I was absolutely shocked by the level of cheating both by Czechs as well as those from "farther east" like Ukraine and Russia. Just brazen obvious sheeting like taking notes into exams and hiding them. Cooperating during exams. Even collaboration to distract the teacher during exams. When I was at college in the US getting caught cheating once meant an instant fail for the course. Twice meant you were kicked out of school and you'd have a cheating mark added to your credit transfer paper so you couldn't move your college credits elsewhere. In Czechia, getting caught cheating meant having to re-take the test. Nothing bad happened to cheaters and they cheated rampantly.

I'm gonna have to go with scarface on this one. While your statements could very well be true, it is dangerous to make cultural generalizations without the data to back it.

What kind of "data" would you accept for this? Crime data by demographic?

Scarface just said "can't generalize to everyone" which is true and not the original point made.

This contradicts what we read here about cheating being very often tolerated in higher education institutions in the US, because money.

Usually I try including at least a few links, but in this case I think anybody who has read these threads right here on HN should remember those numerous posts and discussions? I remember comments from educators who wanted to do something but the higher-ups prevented it, for example, or reversed the decision. Unfortunately I don't know what to search for to find these kinds of comments again.

EDIT: Found one very quickly after just a little cross-reading of one cheating related thread, the reply to this linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533086

Quote:

> The amount of cheating was insane. He started academic dishonesty proceedings against many of the students but the department pressured him to "work it out."

It's not just the students either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2019/06/21/americas-l...

Two things can be true at the same time. There is a lot of cheating in america, but nowhere near as much as in low-trust countries.

fwiw - I think Americans value integrity a lot more than most other places, and academic cheating is not nearly as common.

> Two things can be true at the same time.

Of course, but the commenter I replied to made a specific statement, first sentence, making it sound to my reading - and I don't think I'm reading something into it that isn't meant to be there? - as if it's a lot less in the US. But even a little bit of searching, and every single time the topic comes up here, which usually is for higher education so I'm not making any statement about anything below, ends up with a lot of comments, and no opposition to them, saying there is a lot of cheating there.

Examples:

https://academicintegrity.org/resources/facts-and-statistics

> McCabe’s original research and subsequent follow-up studies show that more than 60 percent of university students freely admit to cheating in some form.

https://proctoredu.com/blog/tpost/5dk67zrns1-academic-dishon...

> The level of cheating in high school according to statistics is extremely high. One of the most thorough studies, carried out by Dr. Donald McCabe, reveals that about 95% of polled students (both undergraduates and graduates) admitted to having cheated in some form.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031255390/reports-of-cheatin...

Therefore, it surprised my that the original commenter made such a strong statement.

thx for clarification and added links, will read up.

Cheating might be tolerated more in the US if the student is wealthy, which might be a US student or far more likely the scion of some family in a foreign country. It has not been tolerated anywhere I've attended though.

As someone born and raised in Romania, I can 100% confirm what the above poster was saying for Romania as well. Even if cheating may be widespread through corruption and other means in the States, it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.

The worse penalty possible for cheating (IF you get caught and IF the teacher/professor even cares, which was not by any means universal) is getting a grade of 1 (out of 10) on that specific item (exam, project etc. ).

This is even true for the national country-wide exams you take in 8th and 12th grades: if you are caught cheating, you get a 1/10 on that specific exam, but can still take all the rest, and will be forced to re-take the one you cheated on in the next session.

The only thing treated more seriously were bachelor's/master's/PhD theses, where you could face plagiarism charges. But even this is mostly theoretical, especially for the bachelor's, since only some cursory verification was ever performed, at least at my university (one of the biggest ones in the capital).

> it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.

My impression from reading HN, where the topic came up numerous times over the years, was that that is not so. See the link I presented as example, I saw a lot such stories, right here in the discussions, but also in some articles. Not just the US, I also remember similar anecdotes about management preventing punishment from Canada even when a professor initially tried to do something.

If it is not representative I apologize, I go by what I read mostly here, and it was a lot over the years.

There certainly seems to be an official stance against cheating, e.g. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=201609211...

It's just that I saw so many stories from or about educators who tried and it went like in that link I included, especially when many students were caught.

"Why Professors Don’t Do More to Stop Students Who Cheat" - https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-professors-dont-do-mor...

> Some who have tried say that administrators, fearful of lawsuits, don’t back them up

> “In the majority of cases of trivial cheating, I think most professors turn a blind eye,” says Donald L. McCabe, the associate provost for campus development at Rutgers University at Newark, who has studied the issue. “The number who do nothing is very small, but the number who do very little is very large.”

I did say theoretically. That in practice corruption and various power games make it difficult to apply the theory in reality is very different from there just not being any punishment in the rules at all (or only very weak punishment).

There's a very well studied decline in trust in America over time. Despite your snark no one claimed we never cheated etc. It's just getting much worse

Nobody claimed that americans never cheated, yet the blame of things getting worse is put on GP on those coming from “low trust” societies.

It’s a xenophobic lie, like if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”

It may be xenophobic, but whether it's a lie is separate from that and it may or may not be. Unpalatable assertions can still be true.

For what it's worth, "fake it till you make it" is far from being universally seen as positive, and (car) salesmen are seen as one of the most untrustworthy and least liked professions (just above telemarketers and members of congress). [1]

1: https://thehill.com/business/3812900-here-are-the-most-and-l...

Do you have an alternative explanation? Or is your stance that it just couldn't possibly be immigrants?

Maybe academic cheating is related to people pursuing a degree more like a passport to riches than a vocational pursuit.

I mean, the whole reason why people also lie in other areas. Which also explains why people of “low trust” societies might lie more rather than “it’s in the culture of those dirty foreigners”.

> if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”

Most Americans that I know don't consider those phrases to reflect positive values at all. They're used disparagingly against people who really think like that.

Either you live in some bubble or you're just lying lol.

Well, we all live in bubbles, don't we? That's why it's interesting to have a glimpse into other people's bubbles, and be reminded that our own experiences are often not representative of the whole.

Ya true, just some bubbles are smaller than others.

Fwiw I've usually seen "fake it till you make it" in 2 contexts: 1. Disciplines in which skill development requires overreaching beyond one's current skill level eg musical improvisation 2. In reference to confidence eg many software developers experience imposter syndrome and have to pretend to be more confident than they actually are in order to be taken seriously, even if they are the most skilled in the room

Similar experiences have been reported by people who came from these places

I guess “trust” was at an all time high when there were literally laws against Black people being in the same section as White people, sundown towns in the south and laws against black people marrying white people?

Not every facet of society is related to racism. Saying I prefer the days of a single income being enough to survive on doesn't mean I wish black's and women had less rights. It's an orthogonal point. Wages are gone because manufacturing moved overseas in the same time period, etc...

Those were the same days…

I assure you that “the good old days” weren’t so good for my still living parents growing up in the segregated south.

As far as “not everything being related to race”, tell that to my parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s when everything was related to their race.

They literally weren’t “trusted” to drink out of the same water fountain, go to the same schools or swim in the same pool.

Different issues, unrelated

We are talking about “trust” receding in society. The majority didn’t “trust” the minority enough to even allow them to be a part of society. It’s only a different issue to you because your parents can wax poetically about the “good old days”

Are you implying trying to increase societal trust would increase racism? You aren't making an obvious point. Trust and racism are inverses?

I’m not implying anything. I’m stating very explicitly that people who say trust is lower now than sone mythical time in the past is the same time period when the US has laws explicitly targeting “others” because they didn’t trust Black people (Jim Crow laws, laws against miscegenation, redlining), Japanese (internment camps), etc.

The only people who long for “the good old days” when “trust” was high are those who benefited themselves or whose parents benefited from systematic and de jure discrimination.

The good old days when you could live off of one income came about because Europe was recovering from a war and we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.

I wonder if Americans' history of seeing cheating as dishonorable grew from our roots in Puritanism, where principle always trumps pragmatism. If so, then perhaps our ongoing devaluation of principles (and our rising mistrust in others to act honorably) is caused by the erosion of those roots as the American middle class has fallen on harder times, concluding that "the rules of the game have changed" and the old mantra of guiding one's life by principle is now delivering diminishing returns. So when in Rome...

It's not Puritanism, but Judaeo-Christianity. In the Bible, God is always described as telling the truth, so any form of misrepresentation is moving yourself towards the opposite of God's character. Cheating is basically a form of misrepresenting yourself; commandment #9 prohibits false testimony about your neighbor, which presumably also includes false testimony about yourself. The New Testament also prohibits lying, as does the Talmud. In fact, the New Testament describes Satan as the father of lies, which presumably reflected Jewish traditions at the time. Imitating the devil would hardly be honorable for either Jews or Christians, and Paul even explicitly says we are to imitate Christ. (Since Paul was a rabbi applying the current Jewish thinking in the context of discovering that Messiah = Christ = God, presumably the Jewish thinking was that we should imitate God)

The Old Testament also offers an approach to dealing with rampant cheating in society: trust in God to provide you with what you need. It's not an exact match for classmates cheating, but David had to deal with a literal existential crisis by a king who believed falsehoods about him, and dealt with it by trusting God and refusing to kill the king (that is, using the king's methods to secure himself). Many of the psalms appear to record the emotional process he went through.

It also says invade a country and kill all of the men, women and children and take their land…

https://www.bible.com/bible/1359/1SA.15.3-23.ICB

Even with David, when David sent one of his soldiers to die on the front line so he could have the soldier’s wife, God let David’s baby die.

The Old Testament God wasn’t exactly the loving and forgive your neighbor type.

Does this correlate with the increase in polarization? I know Jonathan Haidt has spoken about his research on the increase in polarization is America.

If that correlation exists, it may point to an alternative hypothesis to the GP claim that the issue is rooted in those coming from "low trust" societies and due to an internal mechanism.

This gets back to my other statement where people seem to ignore Jim Crow laws and the segregated south. How much more “polarized” can people be than literally being forced by law to do everything separately?

So you’re saying we are less polarized? How do you square that with Haidts research?

He completely ignored Jim Crow laws and segregation where one side wanted to be treated as equals and the other side wanted to keep them segregated ?

By definition, being forced to drink out of separate water fountains is putting people on the opposite side - ie opposite poles.

His analysis was within the context of social media driving polarization, so why would you expect it to look at the Jim Crow era? It seems like you’re starting with a conclusion and working backwards.

Americans cheat at earth-scale by bringing about into existence of intricate systems that benefit them immensely.

Agreed, and it's also hard to consider the US as on some kind of general decline from high trust to low trust. American honesty has always been highly contextual. All it takes is a look into how we treated written agreements with Native Americans to see how small the radius of this value extends. Native societies were "high trust" in the sense that they had no ability, at least initially, to comprehend that settlers would sign an agreement with the full knowledge that they would renege on it as soon as the conditions had favorably changed. This is much more in keeping with a game theory style decision making process than anything related to an adherence to a higher moral virture or whatever. Native peoples experienced this process one by one, and eventually none trusted the word of colonialists ever again.

High/low trust at root refers to how you behave to other members of your nation, not foreign peoples. Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations (e.g. who gets the land, resources), and all existing nations today continue to do so. Native American societies may have been high trust internally (within the tribe, clan, nation boundary) but certainly screwed over other Native American societies (e.g. the Haida and Tlingit practiced hereditary chattel slavery of foreign tribesmen for hundreds of years before European contact). What I'm getting at is that there effectively is no such thing as "high trust" in international relations so your example isn't cogent.

Point taken, but consider the context of where we are in this thread: discussing immigrants and foreign contract workers cheating in interviews and on their resumes for positions within the United States. Perhaps your point is more applicable to how the idea of high or low trust cannot apply to workers operating in a culture foreign to their own.

The example of inter tribal slavery doesn't actually apply to what I'm talking about. Slavery, and highly destructive, unprovoked raids which sometimes concluded with massacres of women and children were normal in the Americas. Is enslaving a member of another band or tribe a violation of trust? Is engaging in unprovoked war raids a violation of trust? These practices would not come as a surprise to anyone living within raiding territory of a warlike people. Trust can only come into play when a party to an agreement, whether tacit or explicit, has an opportunity to violate what was agreed upon.

Saying "Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations" conceals that there were actually vast differences in the way colonialist powers conducted themselves in relations with Native American tribes. The (at the time British) Canadian government honored treaties much more often and in better faith than US authorities.

When you're getting colonized, I don't know if it really matters whether the colonizers honor their promises more or less. Consider the Maori, the gold standard for a colonized people who managed to get a full treaty with the British very early on, even securing representation in government in the mid-1800s. Are they meaningfully any better off as a result of these agreements, relative to other indigenous groups? Not really, and in recent times they even seem to have slid back on many important welfare and quality of life metrics, despite changes in NZ policies towards Maoris that should have had the opposite effect. Sure the Maori may have built up "trust" in the colonizers' treaties, but since they were an out-group it didn't affect their day-to-day interactions, so they didn't reap the benefits that go with being part of the high trust society.

My point is that in-group relations is not the same as out-group relations. High trust is about how you treat members of your in-group. Enslaving foreign people is most certainly a "low trust" move (how can I possibly enter an agreement with you when I know you might just show up one day and enslave me?) but it's fully possible and consistent for the perpetrator to belong to a high trust society.

I think you'd be surprised by just how possible it would be to enter into a successful and good faith agreement with a warring tribe which has enslaved or massacred your people. Spanish colonists in New Mexico did so with the Comanche despite the Comanche holding hundreds of captive New Mexicans who they had kidnapped. How did this work? The New Mexicans honored their treaty, and the Comanche established a degree of personal trust with their governer, Juan Bautista de Anza. This treaty was signed in the wake of massacres on both sides, and the captives were not returned. The Comanche continued to raid and kidnap in other regions of New Spain after the treaty was signed. Part of the reason you might find something like this hard to believe is because of your own cultural attitudes about war and slavery, but these are not universal attitudes.

Your example of the Maori is perfectly analogous to what happened in Canada/ But regardless of how things turned out, why did the British honor treaties when they had no incentive to do so? How do you account for this difference in a world dominated by purely rational decision making when interacting with those outside of your culture?

Why did they honor treaties rather than just continuing with open conflict? The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. In general you only fight a war when a) you're being attacked or b) there is something to be gained by doing so that, in expectation, is more valuable than the cost of the war. If there'd had been mountains of gold in Canada to be won, or if the indigenous peoples had put up less of a fight (imposed less of a cost), you can bet the British would not have signed any treaties. Same with New Zealand.

Yeah, I mean one thing that's interesting about the world is that every country cheats, but we all cheat in our own ways. I don't think there's anyway to get around it.

That said, I don't really want American culture to continue down this "if the ends justify the means" trend that we've been on. We're not cut out for it! We'll get our lunch eaten.

America, as a country, is "dollar" wise and cents foolish, which is a good thing to be, if we invert the meaning of original phrase.

America has been "going down the road" of ends justify the means since WW2. What exactly was the massacre in the Korean war and Vietnam war if not. And sanctions to starve citizens of numerous countries. Etc etc.

Bretton Woods was an own goal by Europe because they couldn’t stop killing each other for centuries. America benefited because immigrants who leave are typically quite bright and willing to take risks.

The perfect storm of incompetence created the system we inherited from our forefathers. It benefits Americans, but maybe the wealth is also killing us due to massive obesity and sedentary lifestyles on top of a greedy litigious society.

No system is perfect.

One thing I've noticed is that many Americans have a blind spot here. You can get away with a lot of corruption and dishonest behaviour if you're the right kind of American because admitting it would be to question the idea of honesty here.

That's usually why the first port of call when some corruption is detected is Finding What's Weird and the second is Not Like The Rest Of Us.

San Francisco's city government is hopelessly corrupt and visibly so for someone who has lived under other obviously corrupt governments. But that is not even apparent to faraway Republicans who are the only ones who will say it is.

But those people are similarly ignorant of the massive corruption of their own local government.

It has taught me a new path of success for corruption: that of hiding in plain sight among those of your identity.

If he corruption is institutional it’s not seen as cheating

All successful systems sow the seeds of their own destruction.