Does EVERYONE cheat, to one extent or another, in grad school?

[TheLonelyPhoenix]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus

Originally posted by: Tomato
One of my girl friends is in medical school, and she openly admits to me that if it weren't for two of her friends whom she cheats off regularly when it comes to homework and exams, she'd fail out of med school. She claims that EVERYONE cheats, and the only way anyone gets through med school is to cheat... she doesn't think it's a big deal at all, and her reasoning is "you learn everything you need to know through residency, not exams or homework".

My fiance is a computer science PhD student, and he says that almost all other PhD students work together on homework assignments and projects (even though this is explicitly against academic policy). He has friends in the CS program but not in any of his classes, and he does everything entirely on his own - homework, projects, studying for exams, etc. I feel bad seeing him work so hard and only pull off a B on assignments, missing only 2 or 3 out of 25 problems but ranking poorly because so many other students turned in homework that they've collaborated on/compared answers with. It just doesn't seem fair, but of course he isn't going to rat on anyone.

Is this the norm in grad school?

Just what we need. Doctors who cheated their way through med school...:roll:

Your friends suck.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

 

[Heisenberg]

I'm in grad school, and while we frequently work together on homeworks, nobody I know really copies. I've never seen or even heard about anybody cheating on a test either.

 

[MrX82]

the syllabus in all my classes explicitly states what consititutes as academic dishonestly and i know many students break those rules.

i feel the same way your fiance feels, i work my ass off doing homework, readings, etc to see fellow classmates "collaborate" together asking others for answers. If you're in grad school, you gotta learn how to fly on your own. I'm also USC engineering, not CS though. GO TROJANS!

 

[WhiteKnight]

I'm in grad school. Everyone pretty much follows whatever rules the professor sets out. Most say that working together is allowed, even encouraged, but that no written notes should be carried away from such meetings. This is pretty much how we do it, a few of us start the work ourselves and then get together discuss any tricky points, then actually write it out on our own.

 

[z0mb13]

working together is not the same as copying/cheating

 

[EmperorIQ]

i'm an undergrad, but i can honestly say that whenever i work with others in classes, i get at least half a grade higher than if i worked on my own. But when i collaborate i don't compare answers or anything, we don't share code, we basically talk theoretically about how to approach problems (not how to code them), and improve on them with each other. I don't think this is cheating. I have never showed my code or looked at anyone else's code. I think what actually makes it cheating is if you directly copy off of each other and do not learn anything at all. When you are claiming a work as your own, that's just wrong, and i hope none of that happens around here (CS) because that would just piss me the hell off.

 

[MrX82]

Originally posted by: z0mb13
working together is not the same as copying/cheating

unless explicity stated by the professor

 

[white]

there's a difference between working with a group of friends on a problem set and directly copying somebody's answer in the middle of an exam. in my experience, people routinely work together on homework sets but they don't copy answers during a written exam. those two examples are pretty much black and white. the gray area is when people use previous year's course materials including the previous year's homework solution and midterm. many professors only change a small part of their old exams. is it cheating if a student studies the previous year's exam not knowing whether those questions will be asked again and seeing them on the actual exam? only some students have access to them and they have to get them from people they know. is it fair if one student knows more people than another student and ends up having access to those materials? in one class, the average on the midterm was 98/100. someone else remarked that everyone must've had the previous year's exam.