| There is definitely a point at which anyone will cheat, and one time I met that threshold. There was an Econ exam that I hadn't prepared for, and I got there fully prepared to flunk it. That day there was a problem with the photocopier. We had to fill in a scantron, but they didn't have copies of the exam for everyone. The professor read the questions and answers. And I watched people's heads go down. > At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade, not feel good they didn't take the same opportunity available to others. This is an age-old question in education: are you trying to learn something, or get the credentials necessary to get a job? I wasn't doing a major in Econ, so the fact that I didn't get much out of the class put me strongly on the side of shrugging that off as "they pretend to teach me, I pretend to learn." But for most of my coursework, I really did want to learn things and get recognition for having done so. > Given that, the university then has a responsibility to make it as hard as possible to cheat. I strongly agree. I know there were guys who cheated in various ways, I watched one guy who went around the labs asking people to do his homework for him. And because universities have allowed degrees to be devalued, I've spent hours in interviews demonstrating basic CS concepts. |