My students cheated... a lot
Quite a read, indeed.<p>As a student witnessing the amount of cheating going on, I was always surprised about the noise raised by teachers on it: I always felt that my score was my own, and didn&#x27;t care about comparing against others.<p>Perhaps that&#x27;s why I didn&#x27;t care?<p>Another thing is that college is voluntary, and everyone takes the courses for some perceived gain. If it&#x27;s just a diploma with high GPA, I let them be.<p>There are also plenty of ways to legitimately score a high grade without really engaging with a course (basically silly ways to study just to pass), which in the end result is not much different from simply cheating (there was no appropriate engaging in the material) — while the main difference is in fairness, that&#x27;s a moral value that&#x27;s beyond some random teacher&#x27;s ability to teach adult students — so I don&#x27;t see why bother.<p>The main question I have for the author is if they would have offered the same get-out-of-trouble alternative syllabus if they had 10% of the students cheating? Basically, how influential was the proportion of students to be failed in their huge investment in reworking the course?<p>Obviously, they did a bad job with the original syllabus in promoting exactly the behaviour they didn&#x27;t condone, but one should never discount the thrill humans experience in engaging in risky behaviour (like figuring ways out to cheat which is sometimes more work than studying, but more thrilling — and helping others along the way adds a nice cherry on top).