[UncleMeat]

I've seen enough engineering students cheat on tests because "it was the only way to get the grade they deserved" to not really buy this distinction. I think that there is an uncomfortably common belief that cheating is done to prevent randomness from interfering with the "correct" outcome. A bunch of people think "well, our system is great and we just don't want something weird to happen in the test that makes it seem otherwise". It starts with the assumption that your system is already good before the test is done.

[headmelted]

Just wanted to reply to this in case it gets lost in the stack of replies to say that this is incredibly insightful, and that virtually no-one has the humility to realise that they are as capable of failing as anyone else.

There is a ubiquitous bias to assume that everyone else is stupid but we’re somehow especially intelligent or infallible ourselves, which as we’re seeing here as some fairly dire consequences at scale.

[dotancohen]

That might be true of those fresh out of school. I've been proven to be fallible and stupid enough times to believe it.

It's been over a decade since I've last said "that decision that somebody else made was stupid". I've since replaced it with "I would have done it differently, but I don't know what other constraints they were faced with at the time".