One of the results of cheating is complicated rules and regulations that one sometimes has to deal with (not necessarily in a school context). Many such rules and regulations need to cover every possible situation to prevent what the writers consider to be “cheating”, but allow what they do not consider to be “cheating”. Of course, if the writers are corrupt, they may write the rules specifically to allow something that most others would see as “cheating”.
Wow, BB. It’s one reason just being able to say you "read it " somewhere isn’t good enough. (And boy, how that applies to CC.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget
Still blodgeting on…
@droppedit Same here. My senior D17 says its so bad the kids just talk about it out loud…how they cheat on homework (find it online) and tests. She is so disgusted she thinks they shouldn’t even hold Academic Awards because the majority don’t deserve it.
@MaineLonghorn who
@Ekolin, look up the high school that Drew Brees (a good guy!) attended, then maybe you can figure it out. He was a classmate of Calvin Schiraldi, who also played in the majors (blew the '86 World Series for the Red Sox, unfortunately). So my class had two guys who made the majors. No wonder we won the state baseball championship!
@MaineLonghorn Kelly Gruber. I’m a baseball fan and know baseball history pretty well but I’ve never heard of him. Looking at his career, though, he actually did pretty well (4th in MVP voting one year) so most people from the late 80s and early 90s probably know him. Was he that bad of a guy in high school?
Let’s just say not my favorite person.
Sometimes, it can be real.
Found out recently from a fellow HS alum friend that a HS classmate’s father known for being highly arrogant and entitled on the basis of his then status as a bigshot banker* ended up fleeing the country to avoid a Federal indictment over attempting to rip off pensioners who worked hard for the deposits to unjustly enrich himself and his friends.
Only the timely intervention of the Feds prevented him from pulling a Bernie Madoff on those pensioners some years before Madoff’s actions became news.
The classmate himself was very much like his father though not nearly as clever as he effectively bankrupting himself in the process of attempting to rip others off. According to the alum friend, he’s now completely dependent on his father and also can’t return to the states as a result.
- Witnessed this firsthand when volunteering at parent-teacher conferences as a translator.
The notion that karma always takes care of cheaters is wishful thinking.
How about the radiology test scandal?
I wonder how many college app essays either get written outright by someone other than the student or in a more gray area get edited to death, with the final essay reflecting the talents of the editors more than the kid.
I completely agree Nrdsb4. The thought about Kara is a coping mechanism for those of us who have been or know someone who has been wronged or been surpassed by cheaters. It makes one feel better to think that " they’ll get theirs."
Unfortunately, the cheater or wrongdoer often liives “happily ever after.”
@roethlisburger I think that happens a lot, and for that reason, IMO the weight of the college essays shouldn’t count for much at all in the application process. I think colleges can get the information needed re the interests, accomplishments, etc. of the applicant in a series of short answer questions and the EC portion in the app - supplemented by the students academic records of course. For the reason that it’s so easy to cheat on the essays plus why should an applicant have to be an excellent creative writer to be successful in 95% of white collar careers? This just strikes really close to home for me because I never was talented at all at creative writing, but spent most of my career writing perfectly acceptable technical reports and manuals. And the process is stressful enough without the kids having to write one or more supplementary essays for each college they apply to.
And re post #23, I agree - my kid also tells me that cheating is is rampant at her school - she knows some students that divvy up the work for homework assignments and then share the answers with each other. As for getting answers online - that’s a gray area for me. My kid has a really inexperienced teacher in one of her AP classes that just flat out doesn’t know much about the subject she is teaching, so my kid has to go online and search for the answers for assignments. She has done google searches that have provided her with material that is almost identical to her assignment, but I don’t see how she could complete it any other way since the teacher isn’t teaching the class and the textbook doesn’t provide the answers. For example, she had some questions about ocean currents and their relationship to el nino and la nina. She found a site that answered in detail the exact questions asked on the assignment. But she was able to learn the concepts she was supposed to - so is that wrong? Is it wrong to look online for instructions on how to do math problems? - my kids have done that too - and have basically only needed to change the numbers in the examples found online. Not real sure they learned the concept in that case though. I do believe however, that because of the resources that are available online, my kids are much better educated by far than I was in high school. And they don’t HAVE to cheat by getting answers from smarter friends (like I admit I did a few times during my high school career) when they can do their own research and find the answers themselves. If a kid is cheating on homework by copying from friends these days, it’s just out of pure laziness.
Then, finally, I read something on CC the other day that surprised me. Apparently some parents were trying to help a student who was having trouble in a difficult college course and they suggested that he get copies of the professor’s tests from students who had taken the same class in an earlier semester and study those. Again, I admit doing the same thing in college, but it was done by everyone and I never thought at the time there was anything wrong with doing that (I think I remember that greeks had “test files” for that purpose), but now that I’m older and wiser, I know that doing it was not fair to other students who didn’t have access to the tests. I remember that the tests I took were never exactly like the older tests I studied, but they did cover the same material most of the time and in a lot of cases were just worded in reverse. So where does one draw the line?
The kid who led the math and science cheating ring at my second HS is now a doctor. I refused to participate so my math and science grades weren’t as good. I became a lawyer. I tried telling our physics teacher, who lived in my building, but he didn’t want to hear about it.
S17 says that kids will ask other kids what was on the test. He thinks it’s ok to find out if the test was easy or hard. It’s grayer if a kid says hey the teacher didn’t mention x in the review but it’s on the test. He agrees that finding out actual questions is cheating. When people asks him, he pleads his lousy dyslexic memory.
As for working online, I encouraged my son to do online ap review. If he found a problem that was identical to a HW assignment, I considered that a failing of the teacher. However, I encouraged him to solve the problems his own way and only look at the answers online to check his work or his arguments.
Wait, WHAT??? (Translation: there are so much better ways to cheat now.)
- Has to be Bill Buckner??
In my state there was a mom literally attending nursing school for her daughter…
When I was teaching a film class a few years back, I went to go grade an essay and the movies were not the ones we watched… turns out s/he (i don’t even remember) bought it online from another student who had previously taken the class.
I went to the prof and all he did was tell her to rewrite it. 
The gist of why? Because parents throw a fit with not only him but his superiors when he fails them or even gives them a zero on the assignment.
That is just unfathomable to me. Honesty is huge in my family. Honesty to a fault. I can’t even imagine how my parents would’ve reacted if I did something that stupid.
I am glad I am in the humanities. I can pretty easily prevent looking for the answers online by changing essay topics from semester to semester.
I don’t believe in karma anymore. Too many people who I know cheat and lie get far in life. But I don’t waste energy on it… I don’t have the energy to expend on being bitter about it.
Re #33 and old tests
Some schools and departments make old exams publicly available to eliminate unequal access to them and force instructors to write new tests. Old tests are also helpful for new frosh who want to check how well they know the material in the course that they can skip wit AP credit.
If only SAT and ACT would release all old tests and not reuse entire old tests, some of which have been leaked or stolen to enable cheating.