Why is cheating bad?

[DarthSka]

It depends on what it is.
If it's something that you need to know for your job, like say medical school for a doctor, then it's bad. If, on the other hand, it's something you won't use in your profession, then I see nothing wrong with it.

If it has nothing to do with your profession, then why are you cheating to be perceived as better than you actually are at it?

Captcha: trust me

I think they meant a situation like cheating in a class where what you're learning won't apply to your future career. For example, I had to take a programming class for my future BS in Geology. Why? I have no idea. I most likely won't use any of it in any job I'll hold and even all the professors in our department agree that it's pointless. So the argument here would be why should I risk failing a class that has nothing to do with my future career and stop me from getting my degree? I'm not saying that I agree, but it holds more water than for those that actually apply to one's major/job/career, etc.

 

[MrJinks]

I don't think I'm clever at all. I was in set 2 for Maths in school which meant I would take my official exam in the 5th year, but in the 4th year I was bumped up to set 1, which meant that I took it a year early. So I missed quite a lot of teaching in the process, but still got a B, which was a good mark. At that level of testing a lot of Maths appeared to be fairly straightforward to me, I guess it's the way my mind works (if you have two intersecting lines, what is the angle on the other side?), and I didn't cheat. The few things I have cheated at (cards, whatever) feel like a hollow victory and years later I still have that feeling that I achieved something with that Maths exam.

Edit: I should point out that I'm useless at remembering facts so stuff like history and geography were things I dropped as soon as I could.

 

[FalloutJack]

how is cheating unfair when life itself is not fair?

Allow me to put this into some very angry terms.

The first thing is, you don't get to decide what's fair and balanced in a world you don't understand. This world is one gigantic natural machine using that merry-go-round we call life as its processing power. To what end? I don't know, but it's carrying on and until God, Cthulhu, or Yoda tells me different, it has its own kind of balance by which everything is weighed against everything else. Since you are - barring some misfortune - at the top of the food chain, I deny the notion of unfairness against at least nature itself.

On the basis of human versus human, I'll start by saying that if I worked my butt off to get where I am and you cheated, I don't want you to succeed because effort is suppose to lead to payoff, and payoff without effort means that you are stealing, a dirty thief and nothing more. If your excuse is less brain-mass or less muscle, I think you'll find that they make allowances for disabled people because their lives AREN'T fair, but that's not achieved by cheating but by deserving a break, GIVEN by others. When you DO wrong, though, you are still WRONG.

Not earning your place is as to stealing as dirty business practices are to economics. How did anyone in today's business community ever graduate from college? By the nature of things, they obviously failed their courses, because they fail to understand that undermining economic futures for quick money still blows up in their faces. Short-sightedness is still that very thing no matter how much you got NOW.

 

[Angie7F]

OP said " because eventually you have to think for yourself", but i am not sure if the people who passed the exams can think for themselves.

In most cases, sure, they should be able to. But sometimes book smart people are just good at learning what is in the textbook, and are not creative.

So, I am not against cheating at all.

 

[Shaegor]

Would you be OK that the doctor who is about to operate on you to have "cheated" their way through medical school?

It's also a shame that instead of removing your appendix, you were castrated instead.

Well... That scenario would probably be more of a clerical error realistically.

 

[RubyT]

Cheating a test isn't bad.

Tests that are cheatable are bad.

Creating a multi-choice nuisance that checks how good you are at memorizing pieces of data short-term is a pointless endeavour.

The idea of measuring competence in these limited ways has a bad effect on society. I know a lot of gifted people, who are just bad at test. For various reasons. And then there are people who are not as smart, not as creative, not as nice, not as competent - but they excel at memorizing boring shit.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Let's face it, most doctors, lawyers, politicians have cheated to get where they are whether in an entry test or in some other way. As long as the system is arranged around competition it will always exist and there will always be nothing wrong with it.

Also, cheating requires a lot of intelligence to get away with so it's something that doctors, accountants and lawyers should be naturally good at.

 

[DustyDrB]

I remember in middle school (man, that was a long time ago), there was this dude who'd always glance at a test (can't remember the subject, only that the questions were multiple choice). Being the competitive sort, I just hated the idea of someone doing as well as me without doing the work. So I marked the wrong answer for every question, then waited for him to turn in the test. Then I erased everything and marked the right choices.

No one ever tried to cheat off me again.

 

[randomsix]

Cheating a test isn't bad.

Tests that are cheatable are bad.

Creating a multi-choice nuisance that checks how good you are at memorizing pieces of data short-term is a pointless endeavour.

The idea of measuring competence in these limited ways has a bad effect on society. I know a lot of gifted people, who are just bad at test. For various reasons. And then there are people who are not as smart, not as creative, not as nice, not as competent - but they excel at memorizing boring shit.

And yet studies have shown that these kinds of standardized tests (such as the GRE) do provide an indication of future success (for the GRE, in graduate school).

 

[Mr Binary]

I suppose to me it all depends on what exactly your cheating on. I see that some people are also saying that it's because people are unskilled enough to pass on their own, now don't get me wrong. I hate cheaters, but it takes a certain skill to succeed at cheating too.

 

[RubyT]

Cheating a test isn't bad.

Tests that are cheatable are bad.

Creating a multi-choice nuisance that checks how good you are at memorizing pieces of data short-term is a pointless endeavour.

The idea of measuring competence in these limited ways has a bad effect on society. I know a lot of gifted people, who are just bad at test. For various reasons. And then there are people who are not as smart, not as creative, not as nice, not as competent - but they excel at memorizing boring shit.

And yet studies have shown that these kinds of standardized tests (such as the GRE) do provide an indication of future success (for the GRE, in graduate school).

And that is my point.

 

[Gamer_152]

Yes, it may not be fair that other people are born with a natural advantage to you, but that's not something we really have a great degree of control over, the important thing is that in situations where we do have control over the world we make sure that we make things as fair as possible, e.g. Making sure that we don't cheat. Using your "Cunning" has no place in a test that isn't meant to measure such a thing, you're just misleading and deceiving for your own ends.

As for the idea of flipping burgers vs. Going to law school, you're being reductionist and ignoring vital pieces here. Refraining from cheating doesn't mean that you can't get a good education and you're going to end up in a bad job, and the people who are able to get into prestigious educational establishments don't all do so on the gifts they're born with, there's also considerable focus on how much knowledge they've acquired and how determined they've been in their work, and a system that aims to reward those who work hard and learn more seems like a pretty good nod in the direction of building a fairer world.

As for the "Cheating is unfair, but life is unfair" argument, I just don't feel like that makes any sense. If I can show you one object coloured slightly orange and another object coloured a deeper orange, does that mean the first object isn't somewhat orange? Of course it doesn't. If something's unfair then it's unfair, no matter how fair or unfair the things surrounding it may be.

 

[randomsix]

Cheating a test isn't bad.

Tests that are cheatable are bad.

Creating a multi-choice nuisance that checks how good you are at memorizing pieces of data short-term is a pointless endeavour.

The idea of measuring competence in these limited ways has a bad effect on society. I know a lot of gifted people, who are just bad at test. For various reasons. And then there are people who are not as smart, not as creative, not as nice, not as competent - but they excel at memorizing boring shit.

And yet studies have shown that these kinds of standardized tests (such as the GRE) do provide an indication of future success (for the GRE, in graduate school).

And that is my point.

I think your post may be insinuating that your point is the exact opposite of what you want it to.

 

[RubyT]

I think your post may be insinuating that your point is the exact opposite of what you want it to.

Not really. But don't be sad. You probably do well in multiple-choice tests.

 

[Nieroshai]

Cheating does one thing: undermine the point of the test. The purpose of the test is not to be "beaten" like a game, but to serve as a measurement of comprehension of the subject matter. The point is to prove how much you know on the subject. If you cheat, you've gotten a good score without knowing the subject. You won the game, sure. But you missed the point. Now you have a grade, without the skills that grade implies. Penalizing cheating on tests is important to ensure that the point of the test is upheld.

 

[Olrod]

Knowing the answers (cheating) is different to knowing how to find the answers (learning).

What happens when you're in a situation where you have to know/work something out and you can't cheat? You're pretty much stuffed.

[captcha: rack your brains]

That's the point captcha, they can't.

 

[DaWaffledude]

Because a test isn't testing your "cunning". It's testing your knowledge on the subject matter.

 

[wickedmonkey]

Because this:

http://imgur.com/oWpyj

 

[randomsix]

I think your post may be insinuating that your point is the exact opposite of what you want it to.

Not really. But don't be sad. You probably do well in multiple-choice tests.

Well let's break this down.

You said that multiple choice tests are pointless and don't show how well people would actually perform in job XYZ.

I said that there are several studies which show that performance on the GRE correlates with success in graduate school.

You said that what I just said supports the idea that performance on tests like the GRE does not correlate with success in environments like graduate school.

So you either took my words to be the exact opposite of what they mean or you misspoke.

 

[RubyT]

Well let's break this down.

Yeah, let's.

You said that multiple choice tests (...) don't show how well people would actually perform in job XYZ.

Where?