My students cheated... a lot
This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual.<p>I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating<p>Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).<p>The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren&#x27;t caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don&#x27;t cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they&#x27;re teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc<p>imo this is why people shouldn&#x27;t cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren&#x27;t getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn&#x27;t be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle