What fascinates me is that everyone always separate into just two camps:

1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.

2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?

For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:

What the actual fuck is going on here?

Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.

This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.

Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

In my particular case, this was not an issue.

I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).

Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).

If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.

And now the root cause makes sense, corruption of money over what these institutions are meant to be for. Money really does taint all around it.

> Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?

This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"

It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.

While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".

> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)

Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.

> What the actual fuck is going on here?

Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.

There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.

The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.

We can lower the cost of care by having lower credentialed providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners handle the simple cases. Patients in rich countries have already been self diagnosing for years.

I think money on the scale of a lifted minimum income is not the issue here.

These people want to achieve status. Minimum income wouldn't help.

This is what we did in the Netherlands. Anyone could afford to study if they wanted to, and pay equalisation kept the gaps low. Social housing provided good and cheap places to live.

Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(

Failed? I’m surprised expulsion wasn’t on the table.

> I’m surprised expulsion wasn’t on the table.

Couple of points that I omitted.

First, I was teaching at a local community college. The students were from a nearby university. They were trying to avoid the equivalent classes at their own school and I assume they felt that I might be an "easy mark." I'm not sure what my options were with respect to reporting them to their own university.

Second, I was an adjunct at the community college. I informed the Dean of what was going on, but I got zero support. I could tell that the Dean felt that all I was doing was bringing him a problem that had the potential to mushroom into a political nightmare (no upside, only downside for him). The unspoken message that I got was, "Just deal with this on your own and don't turn it into a federal case." I don't know if the lack of support was due to me being an adjunct or whether it was due to "We need to keep our enrollment numbers up. Don't get a reputation for being a ball-buster."

Tuition-paying and academic integrity are inherently at odds with one another. If every student has earned their place via scholarship, you can kick them out freely to reallocate the scholarship pool toward students who haven't gotten caught cheating. For students paying their own way, the thought they'd get expelled for cheating may dis-incentivize them from applying even if they have no concrete plans to cheat.

A teacher failing their students involves a lot less paperwork and formal proceedings than going through the expulsion process. Given how busy they tend to be, signing up for all of that extra work isn't an inviting proposition.

Exactly, that's one of the main issues I encountered in "academia" : you're expected to play along and ignore cheating because the goal is to have more students for as long as possible, not less.

They weren‘t caught while cheating though. So maybe hard to justify if they decided to go against expulsion with their lawyers.

I proctored an exam once in an auditorium. You could kind of see over the person in front of you's shoulder even though they sat every other seat or whatever. I'm pretty sure there was a group of friends sitting in a six deep echelon formation as some kind of cheating daisy chain but I could never prove it.

I took an exam once. Guy next to me seemed to be looking at my paper but I wasn't sure, so I stayed quiet. Later in the exam, I got stuck on a problem or made a mistake, and he tapped me on the shoulder and told me the answer. Remembering that just now made me smile. This wasn't a high stakes medical school type of thing though, just a normal classroom quiz.