It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it.
I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well.
* Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.
Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams.
I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently.
The worst part was the lazy faculty that did nothing. I built a bit of a reputation around publically reprimanding students in class when they acted like brats. This was not my job and it alienated me from much of the of the student body.
Unfortunately I had to do it because my class would have never moved forward. So I guess it's not just my school? Professors have lost control all over and simple things like cheating have some kind of grey area?
FYI: Mostly Americans at my school.
There are significant problems with cheating in UK universities too, particularly (but not only) with international students [1].
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/4...
Also, the population ensures that there aren't enough resources for everyone. So, everyone learns to share. A lab project? Share!! You want to do a survey? Form a group and do it. Want computing resources? Share it with others in that time slot. Participating in competitions? All of them are team based competitions.
This is a cultural difference. Nothing else. Also, it's not like all the Indian kids are homogeneously helping each other. They all have their own cliques and many students don't want to share their solutions with other students (Indian or not). Many want to find a better solution.
The solution is simple (something the CS reps in my school implemented with great success). Make homework and (some) tests incredibly hard and encourage team work.
Some of the programming projects we had were so complex that the class had shared forums where we would solve problems right under the nose of the TAs and the prof with full visibility. So, while the code would be individually written, problem solving in the abstract can be a team effort.
An example of how to make them harder would be to deliberately introduce bugs in a codebase that you deployed for a homework. This teaches them how to find solutions and debug.
Sure, some students will chill until the last moment and try to gather answers from friends. But, most students who worked their ass off would never share their solutions (mostly to get themselves up the bell curve). A lot of students will try to make their solutions better by improving on the shared common answer but never revealing it to anyone but the grader.
For exams, we had open book, open laptop, full internet access tests. In those tests, all students would log into chat box to discuss answers. But the questions were tricky and needed speed to solve. So, being on the chat just made sure students are wasting time. The only people who could finish those tests were students who knew what they were doing.
I know this is not ideal in the US. But its a strategy (if used sparingly) that works really well. To be honest, it makes students be super prepared and study real hard so that they can complete tests faster, yet know that they can rely on their friends to get them some info if they happen to forget it.
The person who gets it 100% right generally scores the highest. If you are some who does it a little differently by thinking and working your way through the course, you can be silently penalized for trying to be smarter than everyone else.
In the US you could often sit anywhere you liked in exams and have anything on you (cheat sheets were allowed for many exams, which I thought was an interesting concept to say the least).
In the UK, at least at my university, you had to leave all of your belongings by the side of the room and were only allowed a pen (and whatever else you needed for writing). Even your pockets had to be empty. It was also in a massive room with empty desks around you and a massive amount of space between every student as well as a handful of supervisors walking around making sure nothing fishy is going on. It definitely felt like a much more serious event than any exam I ever took in the US.
Oh and South African Indian students (in the country for generations, and affluent relative to the rest of the population) are amongst the biggest cheats. A BCom (commerce) degree held by an Indian graduate from the the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is something to be viewed with great suspicion.
Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.
Cheaters, whether American or Indian or Chinese, ruin the educational experience of college. Universities really should take it much more serious than they currently do.
They don't blow any curves necessarily but they do appear to be smarter or more able, and that impacts everything from teaching assignments to thesis committee solicitation.
I wouldn't be surprised if college instructors start doing this as well-make exams tougher to compensate for cheating, rather than dealing with cheating head-on.
In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work as a big team, and it didn't matter whether it was homework, quizzes, projects, tests, or even their theses. They didn't consider it cheating at all, even though it absolutely was (except the homework, where partnership was usually encouraged). Everyone else knew they were cheating, but in the absence of professors willing to confront the problem, what is an honest student to do? Do you maintain your integrity at the risk of lower grades, or do you cheat, too, and ensure a high GPA?