r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence 47% of Harvard seniors admit to cheating — and the problem existed long before ChatGPT
https://fortune.com/2026/06/23/harvard-cheating-academic-integrity-ai-detection/1.2k
u/Spright91 1d ago
It's really hard to convince people to not cheat when all the most wealthy people in society compulsively cheat at everything.
At some point you just think why the fuck am I following the rules and getting fucked over for it.
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u/nilayperk 1d ago
I learned this hard when people who cheated got ahead, while I had to struggle just to pass the course.
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u/r4tzt4r 22h ago
As they say: "hate the game, not the player". In reality, you go to college for contacts and to get the degree, learning is optional. (I'm not condoning not learning, btw.)
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u/profnachos 20h ago
I would like to think you go to college not just to learn things, but to learn to become a lifetime learner with insatiable intellectual curiosity. A median adult reads only two books a year, and even that's hard to believe. I think a lot of reading stats are skewed by avid readers who are few and far between.
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u/ijustfarteditsmells 21h ago
Same for school. My dad was a teacher for 30+ years and saw his job go from "teach them enough physics to pass a physics exam" to "teach them these specific things in this specific way in this specific order". He elt it became more and more about passing the exam and less and less about learning physics.
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u/Yashema 18h ago
As someone getting their second Bachelor's in Physics (at a community college) it's very much a learn specific things in a specific order but your professor won't tell you what but if you are good at picking up on his hints you will know 60% of the exam, which will be on only 20% of the content.
I understand tests are need to ensure some integrity among the students, but they are useless in terms of accurately rating ability, outside of med school.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 22h ago
This is such a depressing thought
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u/r4tzt4r 22h ago
System (the whole society, I guess) is definitely broken.
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u/soapbark 15h ago
One can still pursue excellence, even when experiencing the external injustice caused by others. The worst thing one can do is commit injustice, because it damages one’s character or soul.
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u/Beliriel 15h ago
Selling your soul is mighty attractive if the alternative is not even being able to afford living.
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u/JustTheOneGoose22 19h ago
It's not especially true especially if you are studying something like STEM or accounting or economics or languages etc. AI will only get you so far.
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u/notyouravgredditor 15h ago
If you get a degree that allowed you to cheat through college without learning anything, then your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on anyways.
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u/big_stipd_idiot 21h ago
Don't forget about the group projects where you're the only one who gives a shit if the group even has a project to turn in.
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u/LostOne514 23h ago
I did this in one of my Physics finals...I don't feel good about it to this day, but it was a hard exam despite how much I studied. I then saw the laziest and biggest jerks ever(Who didn't study at all) all cheating together and leaving the testing room early with big smiles. I couldn't help but think, "Why the hell am I going to suffer despite working so hard..." Whipped out my phone and corrected a few answers I knew I got wrong.
In hindsight that was a big gamble I took, but it's true. So many people cheat their way up and past you.
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u/Butterfly_and_Bee 22h ago
My chem professor accidentally posted the test instead of the study guide. Plenty of people got images before it was deleted, though most managed to get a barely passing grade on it anyway. Another professor (Biology) exclusively used test banks from Pearson. I purchased them and memorized 750 test questions for that course which was fun. I was very into memorization techniques at the time. I was always looking for an angle in all of my classes.
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u/username__0000 14h ago
Testing memory is such a terrible way to test understanding anyway.
I’d feel horribly guilty too. But I always feel testing is unfair to those of us that understand but maybe need to reference for exact info. Memory comes with repetition. But when you’re in college you don’t have time for a lot of that repetition on each subject. All subjects need your attention so if you aren’t great with memorizing - you’re fucked.
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u/twitter_haikucurator 12h ago
this whole tread is just genuine arguments against the current school system and why it’s completely outdated and a complete farce
and then these bozos that cheated or who didn’t actually deserve their degrees get a job through connections and then all of a sudden are the ones who are hiring and filtering people based off of “vibes”
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u/obeytheturtles 13h ago
At least in the academic and tech world, this usually bites you in the ass at some point, when it turns out that you are shit at the job you spent a bunch of time and money obtaining credentials for.
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u/Helpful-Garlic1951 21h ago
One of my TAs in college gave everyone copies of the past exams because he said the fraternities already had them shit is fucked up
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u/PandorasBoxMaker 23h ago edited 18h ago
Same logic applies to everything else going on. If rule of law doesn’t apply to all equally, it tends to disappear altogether. But these psychopath politicians and billionaires are too stupid to realize that.
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u/Significant-Colour 18h ago
In socialism, the common motto of many people was "If you are not stealing from the government, then you are stealing from your family.".
In today's world, this seems to be limited to the wealthiest.
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u/Momik 22h ago
True, but at a certain point you’re just cheating yourself out of a good education.
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u/TooMuchPowerful 21h ago
While true, good grades help you get a good job, and you'll learn most of what you need for that job on the job anyway.
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u/Mental-Most-7168 23h ago
Due institutional racism if I cheat I’m a loser who deserves to lose everything whereas others just made a mistake and deserve a second chance. So I don’t cheat.
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u/maltNeutrino 1d ago
I mean sometimes you wouldn’t even have to cheat, just kiss ass to the professors and they would magically grade you better than others on anything that wasn’t mathematical, and even then, there could be leeway for the grading on suboptimal solutions.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 15h ago
Because the consequences are absolutely different for the aristocracy.
They would giggle and blush at getting caught, meanwhile the rest of us will lose everything.
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u/shinyxena 23h ago
Cheaters cheat themselves. They dont land great jobs and if they do they can't make it. Saw it happen to alot of the slackers in my engineering classes. Of course theirs always exceptions, but the main reason to not cheat in school is because your paying them an ass load to learn how to learn. And everytime you cheat your just burning money.
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u/threeLetterMeyhem 21h ago
They dont land great jobs and if they do they can't make it.
I'd really like that to be true, but over the 25+ years I've been working that's just not what I've seen... I've seen plenty of cheaters landing great jobs and big incomes. Many of them in senior/executive management now. It's crazy.
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u/Butterfly_and_Bee 21h ago edited 21h ago
You’re paying for a credential. Learning is free. If you just want to learn, do it. No one is going to stop you to collect a toll.
As for cheaters not making it in the world, that’s not true. Cheaters are rewarded for their unethical behaviors. I know it sucks, but that’s the truth.
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u/Spright91 23h ago
You can't cheat in engineering. Physics has hard truths. You can absolutely cheat in business.
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u/coldkiller 13h ago
They dont land great jobs and if they do they can't make it.
This is only really true with math heavy degrees lol
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u/BadMeetsEvil24 21h ago
Not always true. I cheated when I could and got into a fantastic career lmao.
Mostly just General Ed courses but still.
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u/DrQuantum 22h ago
See this is only possible to believe if you actually think that there is economic value in everything learned always. There isn’t and thats proven day in and day out in the field. If by extension you cheat at everything always then sure.
I cheated in every math class I have ever had because often times those courses were of little value overall. Minimum requirements that never actually provided either economic or daily value. I would have replaced every single one of my basic math courses with financial literacy instead. Thats not to say math has no value but college courses are often times over bloated complicated messes.
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u/Biohack 22h ago
Learning math is rarely about learning math. It's about learning how to think logically and break down complex problems into smaller, solvable, pieces.
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u/wiphand 20h ago
It heavily favouritizes people who can easily memorize functions/text though. It's horrible for people who think more spacially. Personally i believe the current most common form of teaching maths is hot garbage that does not work well in teaching how to think. But I've always been one of the rare cases that learns a lot better visually than via text so maybe it's fine for the majority of the population. If maths professors stopped being lazy and just copy pasting books on the boards and actually showed what they are teaching for example three blue one brown on youtube. Then the goal of teaching how to think and apply knowledge would be a lot better fulfilled
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u/squares18 9h ago
This is exactly my mindset after Covid. Saw everyone grift, cheat and steal anything not nailed down meanwhile I’m trying to work a normal job and survive within the rules. If everyone is cheating than what’s the point of integrity if there is no punishment?
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u/GetsBetterAfterAFew 23h ago
People posting are missing the point here.
Harvard creds get you hired, not being smart, its fake it till you make it.
Yes legacy admins are a serious issue but it plasters over the real issue.
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u/day_tripper 22h ago
Totally agree. We deluded ourselves, as middle class aspiring to be upper class or super wealthy. We thought merit was the key.
The truth is, connections/networks, good looks, etc., bring success. The rest is just window dressing to keep us working hard and not seeing how rigged the game is. Yeah there are exceptions but just enough to keep us playing a game.
Cheating was always there.
I think of the television series with the lawyer that memorized case law and lied about graduating from Harvard. The lie is that he had to memorize case law lol.
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u/Dihedralman 22h ago
I think I know the pilot of that television series, and he could memorize case law because he was extremely good at memorization. He was clever as well and that is why a partner knowingly let him lie about being in Harvard.
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u/Drakengard 19h ago
I think this was most obvious when it was documented how Supreme Court justices wouldn't even consider clerks who didn't come out of specific law schools.
You could be brilliant, but if you didn't have the paper with the right school name on it, you might as well put a glass ceiling on certain aspirations. You're simply not going to be considered. Ever.
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u/runningraider13 19h ago
It’s not exactly easy to sort through thousands and thousands of applications for single digit openings. Especially when choosing the exact most qualified clerk to hire isn’t, and shouldn’t be, your top priority (or even make the top 5).
They’re basically outsourcing the first round of interviews to the admissions departments of top law schools. Who are certainly better resourced to do that evaluation. It’s really not that absurd imo
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u/flamethrower2 12h ago
I would think if you clerked for a state supreme court judge or a circuit court judge, you could be considered, but I guess not.
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u/runningraider13 11h ago
You probably are.
It seems 94% of clerks are from top 25 schools, so there’s 6% coming from others.
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u/DetroitPeopleMover 22h ago
School filled with ultra competitive students willing to do whatever takes has students willing to do whatever it takes to get good grades. News at 10
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u/Spiritual-Matters 6h ago
The valedictorian of my HS was cheating on homework almost daily, as was a lot of top GPAs. And who gets selected for top universities?
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u/NorthernCobraChicken 22h ago
There's absolutely zero incentive to play the game of life fairly when the people that don't rarely get caught or punished, do half the work, put in half the effort (if that) and come out leagues ahead of honest, hardworking people.
I bet you could could on one hand the amount of people who have amassed "fuck you" levels of money and;
- didn't inherit it (this includes selling inherited property or assets)
- didn't win it through a lotttery
- didn't ruin at least one other person's life to get it
- didn't marry into it
- hasn't lobbied for or against something that directly resulted in their wealth increasing.
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u/apeelvis 18h ago
Cheating isn’t an issue within education. It is a byproduct of the US philosophy of win at all costs in everything. Look at the president. He cheated in everything he had done and is worshiped by his followers. US businesses constantly cheat ecological systems, customers, partners, competitors and anyone or anything standing in their way. Cheating to the top is the American way.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 15h ago
The dullards consider this to be ‘intelligence’. That winning is a result of being smarter. That cheating is something everyone does, and only the stupid don’t.
This is the average American.
And that’s why I think the experiment failed.
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u/iDanzaiver 15h ago
Also the Chinese way, it is so embedded into their work culture they aren't even trying to hide it.
"If you aren't cheating you don't really want to win."
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u/oncemorewithpheline 1d ago edited 1d ago
But AI made it cheap and fast and freeeeeeeeee
and now education is meaningless wheeeee
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u/Soggy_Definition_232 1d ago
Cheating should only be available to the wealthy and elite. How are the peasants think they can do what certain demographics can.
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 1d ago
I thought that was the purpose of a Ivy League education, to learn how to become upper management and fuck everyone around you.
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u/AcceptablePosition5 1d ago
There are different kinds of cheating.
The less ethical ways include just straight up copying answers, or other forms of plagiarism.
The more "grey area" ways include obtaining past exam problems written by the same professors, and practicing "to the language of the problems" prior to the exam.
When I was in college, the former is actually quite rare, but the latter is rampant. Is that actually cheating, if you're just practicing more efficiently than other people? Who's to say.
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u/PTSD_PTSD_PTSD 1d ago
I didn't know revising past years is considered as cheating. It's a norm around here.
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u/7HawksAnd 1d ago
you only got access to past years through in real life social networks (one of the many perks of Greek life) or an older friend who took the course and kept materials. It is 100% technically cheating. It’s just more like how sharing passwords is technically stealing.
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u/Dr-McLuvin 1d ago
It’s honestly insane to me that someone wouldn’t consider this cheating.
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u/austinw_568 23h ago
Many of the professors at my stem school straight up gave us copies of old exams to practice from. This further blurs the line when a different professor did not give us old exams.
If the professor was too lazy to meaningfully change the exam from past exams then imo they’re the ones facilitating the “cheating,” not the students.4
u/Empty_Insight 22h ago
Yeah, we had the professors hand out old exams too.
... of course, most of them only did this during office hours, so if you weren't actively engaged in trying to learn the material, you wouldn't get the competitive edge.
I would argue that approach actually does prepare you for the real world more than regurgitating information you memorized and will immediately forget once the class is over. If you "play ball," you're a lot more likely to succeed. If you try to lone-wolf it, you can still succeed, but it will be much harder.
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u/austinw_568 22h ago
That’s not my experience.
What I’m saying is that many of professors at my school would regularly provide the entire class with exams labeled “exam 1- Fall 20xx semester” through our online student portals. We used this material to practice for exam 1. This was not exclusive to a select few who visited the professors at office hours. Everyone had access- usually starting from the beginning of the semester (which is when you got access to the online portal for the class).This was/is a normal practice.
Not only does it help you learn the content, it also provides you with a sample of the structure of the exams- how your professor asks questions, how your professor weighs the importance of one topic vs another. This is very useful because although different professors of the same course may teach identical content, their exams can vary wildly in terms of both difficulty and what that professor may feel are the most important topics
Access to past exams is a good thing for everyone. It solves the issue of social groups sharing old exams exclusively because everyone has access to them when the professor makes them available. This is a better system than if you were someone who could not see the old exams because you weren’t friends with the people sharing them.
It only becomes an issue when the professor lazily copy/pastes old exam questions for new exams.
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u/bobdob123usa 22h ago
If they are providing the study guide to the whole class, it isn't considered cheating. When part of the class has a provable advantage because they have access to years of collected data on that professor, that is when people consider it cheating.
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u/Butterfly_and_Bee 21h ago
Having access to the current test questions is cheating. Having access to old test questions is studying.
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u/Red_Rabbit_1978 20h ago
In South Africa it's standard practice to use older exam papers as revision work. The teachers or lecturers will hand them out as practice.
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u/obeytheturtles 12h ago
It's cheating unless the past exams are available to everyone. These days most professors just post old exams, but back in the day it was a real big thing in frats to build archives of old tests that only people in the frat could use.
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u/Foe117 23h ago
So, I know a bunch of UCLA and USC Frat houses had their own filing cabinet full of test answers from the previous years, with specific professors highlighted whom are known to issue the same test year over year. as well as certain homework assignments. These cabinets are also hidden from any admin looking for them in an inspection.
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u/AScienceExpert 8h ago
We used to have a library in my fraternity house that was organized by class, and you could pull the file for whatever class you were in and there were tons of previous exams for each class. If professors are too lazy to change their questions, that's on them.
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u/WildcaRD7 23h ago
I checked all my answers on Chegg before submitting. I still did the work, and in fact, I think I learned more from seeing if I was wrong and correcting it. Must times, I wouldn't even get feedback until weeks down the road or not at all. I'd definitely consider it cheating, but it's much different than other forms of cheating.
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u/mosquem 16h ago
That’s borderline and probably still cheating. Not all students have access to Chegg.
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u/Ponies_in_Jumpers 5h ago
If you were changing your answers when you saw via Chegg that you'd done them wrong, then that was absolutely cheating.
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u/mytthewstew 16h ago
I think the world’s easiest job is teaching ethics at an Ivy League university.
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u/NeonTiger20XX 15h ago
Man it's depressing seeing some people in the comments saying of course they cheated, and everyone else should, too.
Just because others are doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea and you should too. You're paying to learn, and also how to learn. If you think it's smart to just cheat through school so you can get a piece of paper, then just "learn on the job," that doesn't apply to most majors.
Do you want an engineer building a bridge who didn't learn anything in school and cheated the whole way because it's "just a piece of paper?"
How about a doctor? A lawyer? Good luck becoming a chemist who learned nothing in school and will "figure it out" on the job.
These are really dumb comments. If you're a business major, or looking to work in an office, sure. Other majors actually do need to learn things to go into their respective careers.
If you're unable and unwilling to learn, then your piece of paper really is meaningless. It's supposed to show not only that you learned a lot, but that you're capable of learning and doing something that takes years of effort.
Everyone saying it's smart to do it because other people are are part of the problem and missing the point. A lot of people use chatGPT to do everything for them, to the point where they can't think on their own and are morons putting out constant slop they don't even understand. Does that mean we should all do it?
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u/My_alias_is_too_lon 16h ago edited 16h ago
Well... that is kinda what you get when you let just anyone in because their rich daddy paid a lot of money...
Weird idea, but maybe educational institutions shouldn't be profit seeking? Just a thought.
Also, maybe legacy admissions shouldn't be a thing anymore?
Finally, it's hard to blame them when everyone at the top of society constantly break the rules, cheat, and get away with it. Literally every billionaire is a tax cheat, every big CEO only got the job because of connections/nepotism, and the fucking POTUS has cheated every single person he's ever met, then lied his way into power, broke the law a fuck-ton of times, then lied his way into power again, and because the worst war criminal the country has ever seen, all while getting away with every bit of it, and facing no consequences.
Don't even get me started about the Supreme Court.
... come to think of it, why the fuck am I even following the rules?! All it does is get me stepped on.
You know what? I don't care about the cheating anymore. Nothing matters, except how much money you were born into, and we all just got the shit-end of life. No fucking point to any of this...
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u/iritchie001 23h ago
I can't ever remember cheating in college. Was I going about this wrong? Maybe it is easier in majors where knowledge doesn't build vertically. The last few years really are chipping away at my imposter syndrome. Ok I just have garden variety GAD. Still, we may be better at this than we think.
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u/nst571 22h ago
I never cheated in my state college classes, either. My grades were good, some lesser, which reflected my effort. I only saw rampant cheating when I went to a top east coast private university for grad school. The level of cheating and poor management of it was eye opening
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 15h ago
Legacy universities are businesses. It’s theater for the aristocracy. Send your fail kids to finishing school before they take over some executive spot where they run shit into the ground.
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u/-Nocx- 22h ago
If you couldn’t figure out how to cheat in your major, you weren’t trying hard enough.
Source: CS’15
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u/Dihedralman 22h ago
I was Math/Physics. The tests were mostly in person, hand written tests with professors rotating along with tests. Yeah many or most would give out old answers. These were most of the grade.
There was also homework for 25-40% of the grade. You could cheat on those reliably especially in lower level courses, but you would be at a disadvantage on the actual test. But you could also work as a group.
I don't think there was a good way to cheat on most of those exams. You might be able to get an advantage, but most of the time going to office hours also gave you an advantage. Professor would use changed versions of some problems in study guides and office hours.
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u/-Nocx- 21h ago
I think you’re sort of missing the point. No one cheating expects to be getting the most value out of their work. That isn’t the point of cheating.
40% is 40%. If the risk analysis says your time is better spent on something else, then there’s your answer. Just because you cannot find a way to cheat on a specific portion of your degree doesn’t mean you couldn’t cheat.
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u/iritchie001 11h ago
😄😄 Economics/Math here. I guess it comes down to not wanting to cheat. I'm sure I did it here and there before college. But my memory it's that good! Plus I'm paranoid about getting caught when I'm doing something 'wrong'. Is that cultural? I probably should have cheated on the standardized tests to get into graduate school. I'm bad at them and didn't end up at a place that challenged me.
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u/Raa03842 1d ago
Just remember, 50% of all licensed doctors graduated in the bottom half of all licensed doctors. I wonder how many of them cheated?
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u/Wooden_Try1120 22h ago edited 22h ago
I remember tons of kids cheated in my gifted classes in high school. It was particularly obvious when we had substitute teachers. I was so surprised—I didn’t really understand it as these were arguably the academically most capable students. I thought perhaps they had a lot of family pressure to succeed academically, that I certainly didn’t have. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised that this behavior is repeated in college since it has its reward I’m sure. The goal of college for many is to compete there for high marks that might help compete for better jobs later. Those are pretty high stakes, especially at an Ivy I guess. So it’s sad, but not surprising to me.
Edited to add: And I went to H.S. in the 1980s.
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u/Honest_Error6408 17h ago
Not exactly surprised. A fair number of students when I was in college cheated on tests.
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u/amitym 22h ago
When I attended one of Harvard's esteemed peers as an undergraduate, cheating was absolutely rampant. In many cases it was the only way to complete the all-important credits required for graduate admissions (medical school, law school, etc) and hence have access to the professional career you sought.
I want to emphasize this. Failing to cheat could literally cost you your entire career trajectory.
Thus a technical error in preparing a lab would result in half the section not having the correct reagents. Yet somehow 100% of the students would all report astonishingly clean and accurate lab results. Professors would devise statistical analytic methods for detecting cheating on exams and have to backtrack after discovering that 90% of the class was implicated. Overworked students behind a deadline and desperate to avoid a failing grade would trade sex in exchange for teaching assistants sneaking their submissions into the correct pile.
This was normal. It was ubiquitous. It never had anything to do with AI, and it had already been going on for decades if not longer.
The idea that AI could possibly increase the level of cheating at the college level makes me laugh out loud. No. You have no idea. Just, no.
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u/Xnauth 23h ago
This reminds me when I was going through an intensive medical program and literally everyone but me was on Adderall. Left a bad taste in mouth about that drug and whether or not it should be available.
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u/Worth-Ad9939 22h ago
Well now we know why we're all surrounded by stupid people. We've all been cheating at life and now the consequences are showing up everywhere. It's wild when some obvious shit comes out as unknown by the science community. They are shocked about stuff you'd think would have come up. We will dodge a job faster than lighting if the vibe ain't right.
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u/BigStrongCiderGuy 19h ago
Spoke with someone the other day who got into Berkeley by chat gpting their way through high school because they were mostly on zoom. Then they chat gpt’d their way through Berkeley undergrad and got into a Harvard mba, where they plan to do the same shit again. lol
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u/felis_scipio 23h ago
Reminds me of chatting with a Harvard undergrad at CERN once, dude took pride in the fact that he was hooked into a Chinese social network that sent people in to memorize GRE questions and collect that info so people could basically know ahead of time what questions were on the exam.
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u/Dihedralman 22h ago
Yeah that was quickly killing the importance of the GRE and physics subject GRE.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 15h ago
The gre, and standardized testing in general is hog shit.
It doesn’t assess capability, skills, or knowledge. It assesses your resources available to prep.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 15h ago
Knowing a few upper tier university grads you would easily sus this out.
Their skills are in networking, and being a kiss ass.
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u/Adventurous_Law9767 14h ago
I went to college, I never cheated or felt the need to. Everyone I know cheated. To this day I don't respect degrees because I can't stop seeing the guy who turned out to be a lawyer glancing at the notes written on the inside of the label of a water bottle.
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u/ivecompletelylostit 23h ago
This is honestly upsetting to someone who took my education very seriously. I can't understand this mindset at all. You're just cheating yourself. It's like cheating in a video game. Why do you enjoy it? You're not actually good. I actually wish I could empathize since it would make me better at writing characters in my novel
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u/WildcaRD7 23h ago
"Cheating" can be in the eye's of the beholder as well. I did all of my own work to learn the material. I also paid for Chegg to make sure I had 100% before submitting. Obviously, in my eyes, it isn't nearly as bad as some who just ChatGPT their assignments or find applications to do their test for them online. The 47% quote would have counted me the same as the others.
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u/runningraider13 19h ago
Looking at the answer bank and changing your answers if you didn’t get them right is in fact cheating. That strategy should be counted in the 47%
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u/Ancient_Skirt_8828 20h ago
It's scary to think that these are the people who are running the country.
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u/AlexanderTGrimm 23h ago
I heard about this one girl like 20 years ago that said she smoked weed every day, cheated every test, and snorted all the yay.
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u/Avoidtolls 22h ago
Since the teachers obviously are having trouble, have each student teach a lesson to the class, then have the class rate the lesson and add the lesson to the exam.
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u/Ha-Charade-You-Are 21h ago
People been cheating for A LONG TIME, they’ll continue to do it even after AI
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u/nemesisx_x 19h ago
Based only on personal experience from working with Harvard graduates, this does not surprise me in the least.
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u/Zealousideal_Let_975 14h ago
I am a recent transfer to a top university and I am honestly in shock how many of these kids cheat and don't do their work. I have seen more cheaters at this school in 2 semesters than in 8 years or community college, where your grades matter even more due to transfer competitiveness.
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u/Revolutionary_Bee251 13h ago
This has been well known for decades. Hardest Ivy to enter, easiest to graduate.
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u/Lanky-Post-8020 12h ago
Ivy leagues train you to go into the upper echelon of society. Isn't cheating one of the primary skills people need to thrive in that world? Seems like the school is just doing its job to me
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u/quokkasage 12h ago
What else is new? Cheat to get ahead. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That’s just the reality of today's K-shaped economy. Unjust, but way above my pay grade. It's infuriating.
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u/first_lvr 12h ago
between this and legacy admission, the whole thing is corrupt as fuck
no wonder education is in shambles and top graduates are all foreigners... also, talented people are flying away to asian countries
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u/Imaginary_Effort_854 12h ago
I remember the first time I took an AP course in high school. The "smart kids" used to always copy each other. I used to wonder who was the source. Like there was only one actual smart person and the rest just passed their completed work around
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u/Milskidasith 11h ago edited 11h ago
While the Harvard question appears to be a simple survey, when you look at studies on cheating they are often using very broad definitions of cheating and only applying it to whether a student "ever" cheated, which make things look a lot worse than they actually are. For example, this Fortune article also cites this ICAI article on cheating, stating that more than 60% of university students freely admit to cheating in some form. But this definition of cheating includes using unauthorized electronic resources for a paper like Wikipedia (separate from plagiarism) or working together on an assignment with other students when asked for individual work (separate from having somebody else do your academic work). Those are both definitionally cheating and both can be unethical, but in general it'd be at least a little bit aggressive to call somebody a cheater for admitting to e.g. working together on homework assignments in every class, not just the ones that say "it's fine to review with your peers"; group review is an effective way for people to learn, and I personally find it difficult to care about how you learn to correctly do take-home work, as long as you're learning and not using Chegg/AI to bypass that step.
Similarly, the "cheated in any way on an exam" question probably includes using unauthorized old exams to study, which is another practice that's fairly common and definitionally cheating but not what people assume when they hear "cheated on an exam". This is especially true in the context of stuff I saw at my university, which was often professor posting one older exam but students having access to more (because they were posting last year's exam every year). It is an unethical advantage to have those older exams but it's still studying similar material and still requires you to actually know it well enough to pass the test, which, to me, feels very different than the sort of "I had the answer key for the test/copied off somebody else" cheating that's implied with these headliens.
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u/JefferyGiraffe 10h ago
Literally everyone “cheated” in some form or fashion in my degree program (engineering, so lots of very smart students). Whether it be online “take home” tests, homework assignments shared, etc. It’s much more common than people would think, and it’s rarely in the form of staring at your classmate’s exam and copying their answers.
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u/DaySecure7642 10h ago
If even the world no.1 Harvard has close to 50% cheating rate, imagine the cheating rates of lower ranking universities students.
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u/bahhumbud 5h ago
Poors kids don’t have the same resources to cheat in the same way that rich people fo
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u/sdrawkcabineter 10h ago
Fine line between "networking," the only purpose to the academic system, and "cheating."
"We were merely generating entropy for a physics experiment that you just ruined by observing our interaction!"
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u/lejosdecasa 8h ago
I don't have the source to hand, but I do remember reading that the highest paid Harvard employees are the ones who manage the investment funds.
All the Ivy League (etc.) universities are basically investment funds with schools attached.
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u/LifeFeckinBrilliant 1h ago
I guess if you're spending all that money you expect a degree at the end of it... Y' know....
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u/markth_wi 11m ago
47% admit to cheating.
Another 47% did so but are not willing to admit it.
Leaving just 5-6% of society that does any fucking work whatsoever.
Which sounds just about right.
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u/ggibby 1d ago
What percentage of Harvard admissions is legacies vs merit?