rocketsinsider, you must be a government major. Most of those people I think don't give a **** about the class, just want to pass and move the hell on. That's how I was and I managed to slip by. My money really counted when I had to get serious about my major courses. When the hell would I use my government class? Basic courses are total bullsh!t.
I haven't cheated since my sophomore year in high school. Just study the material and you'll do fine. Learning is actually fun.
I hate cheaters, they piss me off. Last year when i was a junior in high school, I took 2 foreign languages so I had to take my chinese final at a different time along with 1 other kid. The techer just leaves us in the room for the test and doesnt come back. As soon as the teacher leaves, the other kid pulls out a chinese-english dictionary.
When you cheat, you cheapen the grades and, eventually, the degrees of people who actually put effort into doing well. If you cheat, you end up with the same 'A' as someone who actually studied, is actually intelligent, or both. Eventually, a bachelor's degree will be worth as little as a high school diploma is now because schools keep making it easier and easier for people to pass. But, then again, if you're just getting a business degree, or a computer science degree, or some other degree where the entire point is to go out in the world and make money, then you may as well cheat - that sort of skill, those shortcuts you take instead of actually working, will do you well if your goals are to end up in a higher tax bracket. I believe that no one in a program like that should have to take government, or history, or anything ... but, those sorts of things should be taught at vocational schools like DeVry. Your classmates should be cosmetologists and plumbers and HVAC technicians. Universities should be left to people who actually want to understand the history of ideas, and who want to learn a foreign language, people who want to know how literature shapes the world - people who are seeking understanding and knowledge about the human condition first and foremost. You know, the type of people who wouldn't cheat on an exam because their goal is something greater than just getting a job and buying a house in the suburbs and driving a fancy car. I am a TA at my university, and I caught a kid cheating this semester - he is no longer going to be attending this university. In short, he's screwed, and I'm very happy about that, because the class had a number of kids who were working hard, who cared about the subject, and who deserve the good grades they're receiving. This kid was just a stupid **** who didn't give a **** about anything other than making money.
unfortunately we live in a capitalistic society and being a philosopher or some other BS major does not help you pay the bills. Cheaters suck. If you cheat you should fail, unfortunately guys like Roger Clemens and Jason Giambi are given 100 million dollars.
Cheating these days is all about being resourceful; if you're going to go to the lengths for cheating and making sure you can't get caught then, hey, maybe you don't understand the course material, or more specifically don't feel like learning it if it's not stimulating, but at least you are intelligent and creative enough to get away with it. Cheating now has become increasingly easier; there's no reason why graphing calculators should be allowed in a class that doesn't have to do with high-level math. I know a guy who used a graphing calculator during exams in a Nutrition class. Nutrition. The hardest math was figuring out your BMI. He got a 105 in the class. In my time in college I've encountered a student blatantly flipping through 6 pages of notes in the empty desk in front of him, making a ton of noise as you could hear pages being turned (our exam was one page). All you could do was laugh at his audacity. I've also experienced professors just make announcements like in high school: "Keep your eyes on your own paper." The most creative and failsafe way to cheat that I've seen is this: <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NpQZDJ2fGnI&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NpQZDJ2fGnI&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> If you're willing to go to these lengths, then hey, more power to you. Of course you're just hurting yourself, but in college the pressure for good grades leads people to find the easy way out for what's important to them (the degree, not the course material). Honestly professors deserve just as much, if not more of the blame than students. There are a ton of professors who simply facilitate cheating, albeit indirectly and unintentionally. Their laziness and apathy toward not changing old tests and not adequately proctoring exams can lead a student to feel like the professor just doesn't care. Think about it, it's more effort for a professor to go through the prosecution phase and risk what was said earlier (liability). But further, you've got to understand that most big colleges are simply businesses. They're getting paid a ton of cash by a student, which could potentially become more later in the form of alumni donations. It's just not in a professor's best interests to go out of their way to protect the integrity of a learning environment when their jobs are reviewed by, in part, their own students' grades. Look at a place like Harvard. There has been some disgust in the past few years with professor's curving grades on average an entire grade level higher. This ended up being one the primary factors why retention at a place like that is at 98%. I'm not saying cheating occurs a lot or a little, just that a place like Harvard (and other big name schools) have turned into businesses dictated by alumni money. Essentially schools these days don't want to get into discipline, unless it's very serious or blatant (such as plagiarism). Anyone who plagiarizes is a complete moron. Those violations are taken very seriously most everywhere. It's just not very hard to either cite sources or put things in your own words without faking sources. Plagiarism will get you banished.
I'm aware. That doesn't mean all of our institutions should be capitalistic entities with the same goals as capitalism. There are plenty of people with a "BS major" who have no trouble paying their bills. Granted, they aren't out at a midtown club wearing expensive stripey shirts and ordering their vodka-and-tonic with Grey Goose instead of the well vodka, they aren't driving around an SUV on dubs, and they probably don't watch HD-DVDs on a 50" plasma screen - but, then again, they're probably not terribly interested in that sort of stuff anyway. And something like philosophy (or history, or English, the classics, or modern language study, or any other "BS major") has been taught in universities for hundreds of years (though history is only about a hundred years old as an academic discipline), while all the vocational-style majors are relatively recent developments. The reason most states require core courses, you know - all the BS like English and history and such - is to justify teaching vocational skills at universities, to at least make a token effort to encourage students to develop critical thinking and the ability to communicate well in writing, and maybe even encourage the average student to get a bit curious about why the world is the way it is. It doesn't appear to be working, really. It might catch one out of every 100 (and that's probably optimistic). That's one of the reasons I think vocational majors should be taught at vocational schools - if your only purpose while you're at university is to eek by with a 'C' and go out and make lots of money, then you should be able to do that at a strictly capitalist institution like DeVry (I have nothing against that), but you really shouldn't be taking up space in a university. I think we need MORE (strictly-capitalist) technological institutes and business schools. Like I said - cheating is a good job skill to have if your overriding mandate in life is to make lots of money. But you shouldn't be at a university, because you cheapen the efforts of those who have a different ideal.
It really isn't that complicated, or creative (hell, there are guidebooks for it) - and all techniques can be caught, easily, if the professor and/or TA are actually paying attention - which, as you noted, isn't always the case. And, if a subject isn't 'stimulating'... [insert another rant here]. I feel so old-school. I wish I had been forced to learn Latin and Greek in grade school. We're too egalitarian with education now.
LOL, a little heavy on the BS there. If you want to know how literature shapes the world and gain knowledge on the human condition, get a library card, use google, and join the peace corps. There is no need to go to college to do that. And you are crazy if you think that is really what a signifigant % of liberal arts majors want and that even if they did that they wouldn't trade that for a downtown condo, a ferrari, and a trophy wife.
The fact that you don't understand it doesn't mean that it's imaginary. There really are people out there ... and take a second to let this sink in ... who don't want to be like you. There are even people who are curious about the world! The fact that you don't understand it doesn't mean that it's imaginary. You may be right though - maybe some people get their liberal arts degree, or just settle on that because they don't like math, and then spend the rest of their life wishing for a Ferrari. Hell, I'm sure a few of them even get a Ferrari. But, then again - those are some pretty lame goals, don't you think?
Thadeus I don't want to hijack this thread to D&D territory. The library card and ferrari example was hyperbole, but I guess my larger point was that the % of liberal arts majors that care about discovering human nature and truth through literature is probably the same % of computer science and business majors that are in it for pure academic truth reasons. And you seem to think that fields of study that you are not personally interested in are somehow lesser fields of study. Learning a foreign language is not really different from learning cosmetology, you just feel that learning a foreign language is more valuable, others would disagree.
Yeah, you could be right. There really isn't a way to quantify this, other than personal experience - and my experience has shown me that, when I'm TAing a class with 150 students, and 140 of them are in chemical engineering/business information systems/etc., that the ones who end up getting an A in the class are the other 10. I don't buy this, and I'm not suggesting they're lesser fields of study - I'm saying they're vocations, and should be taught in vocational schools. I think DeVry and places like that are great for people who realize that the only reason they want an education is because they want to make money - I genuinely believe we should have MORE schools like that. And learning a foreign language is more valuable than cosmetology if you want to travel, or if you want to read in that language, or learn the history of that country - but you're right, it's totally worthless if you want to give someone a weave (unless the person who wants a weave doesn't speak English). I want to emphasize - I'm not looking down on vocational degrees (hell, I have one myself in computer repair) - I'm just saying that the phenomenon of cheating tends to be more prevalent in core courses because people who are only looking for a career don't feel that, for example, history is important to their goals - and I'm saying that's true! But, those kind of degrees should be taught at vocational schools, or (in the case of advanced degrees) at technical universities.
Something I remember from my days as an EE at UT. UT Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE): E veryone C heats in E lectrical Engineering Seriously, there was rampant cheating going on just to survive. If you don't get a C, you have to retake the class. And if you don't maintain a certain GPA, you won't get into the major sequence -> which, in essence, instills a "kill or be killed" kind of mentaility. There were a lot of FOBs in EE, and they probably cheated the most and were totally blatant about it. Now that I'm in grad school, nobody cheats. There's no point, since the worst you can do is a "B." And if you get caught violating the honor code, you'll get kicked out of the program. Totally not worth it if you ask me.
You would figure the fobs would be the smart, but they would be passing notes between each other. I don't think that many people cheat other than getting old tests to study.
This is a really interesting thread to follow. I go to Emory, a private liberal arts college that doesn't have "core classes" per say. We have a system called "General Education Requirements" in which instead of having to take a certain course, say biology, you have take a course that falls under a particular category. A relevant example is Poly Sci 101 (Intro Government) falls under the category "Social Sciences" but you can also take economics or something else rather than just Gov. People still whine and moan about being forced to take something they have no interest in but it doesn't seem like cheating is as rampant as at UT. Homework cheating is one thing, no one gives a **** about that, but cheating on a test is not something I've ever personally seen in my 4 years here. Maybe that's a consequence of being at Emory, or maybe it's a consequence of people not hating the class as much since they had some decision in its selection.
Well look at that. I went through ECE at UH, and very few people had the gall to cheat. Not that they had many opportunities to do so, anyway. To the OP, you're looking at this the wrong way. You ought to be feeling good about yourself -- you did the right thing and went through your class without joining the crowd in cheating.
It's not just the "American" way. I did an exchange program for a semester in Italy's top business university, and let me tell you, those Italians cheated like no other. At one point, the professor even said, "If I catch you cheating once, it's OK, but twice, I will take up your exam." Oh, and I graduated from UT.
