<p>It was the last day of class for one of my classes, and the professor went over his rules. For life, basically. One of them was "Don't cheat, ever, and if you see someone cheating, rat the bastard out." It reminded me of one time I saw a girl cheating on an exam in his class, and I didn't say anything.</p>
<p>I started wondering. How many college students actually report someone for cheating? Much of the time, it doesn't even seem like it would go through, or maybe they weren't cheating at all. I saw a girl texting during an exam, and I couldn't decide if she was cheating, or has the inability to wait 50 minutes to read a text and text someone back.</p>
<p>So have any of you here actually reported someone for cheating? How did you do it? Thought about doing it? No, I'm not looking for tips on how to report someone discretely. =P I'm just curious because I've seen it happen, but I've never said anything.</p>
<p>Much to the contrary; I help people cheat whenever possible. I place my test horizontally so my neighbor can see my answers, I hand out tests after I have taken a class, and I’ll literally call out answers if the professor is to exit the class for a moment.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why I do it, but I assume it’s for some utilitarian purpose…</p>
<p>i know what you mean. if I see the person sitting next to me looking confused or trying to glance at my paper, i will move my answers closer to them to help them out. i mean, i feel like if i can do my part in helping someone, why wouldnt i? if i know the right answers, great. if i can help someone else out too, awesome.</p>
<p>I did. Last summer in an english class somebody stole one of my papers and copied portions of it, the rest was just paraphrased from mine, and I saw her paper and knew. I didn’t outright accuse her of cheating but I sent an email to the professor with my paper, which he had seen, and the lines from her paper that I took issue with and told him that I was just concerned and thought he should be aware of it. She got kicked out of the class. I don’t care. If I knew someone was cheating, even if they weren’t taking advantage of MY work, I would do the same thing-- just tell the professor what I saw and let him decide what to make of it. I’m sure that makes me some sort of unsavory creature in the eyes of most college students, but I don’t really care. I work way too hard to knowingly let somebody else get away with cheating. Especially if the class is graded on a curve, it just isn’t acceptable.</p>
<p>Mind you, I am not out looking for cheaters. But when it is blatantly obvious and there is just absolutely no way I can convince myself that anything but dishonesty has occurred, I’m really just not the sort of person who can bend their morals enough to let it go. Thankfully that has only happened the one time.</p>
<p>If they stole your paper and brought any doubt upon YOUR own academic honesty, then hell yes you should report them.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I feel sympathetic for alot of people so after tests, I give out lots of tips on what to study for and some specific questions.</p>
<p>What Twisted said. You don’t get treated well for cheating on your taxes, you don’t get treated well for cheating on your wife (except by hoodrats but I don’t consider them human), so why should you not be treated harshly for cheating on your schoolwork? It removes the legitimacy of what you’re doing if you cheat. Imagine if all the physicists and doctors and engineers of the world didn’t’ actually know anything and earned their degrees through cheating. All the bridges would collapse, we’d be dying of diphtheria and the Large Hadron Collider would either not exist or would have actually made a black hole.</p>
<p>no, I haven’t reported anyone for cheating. it’s the professor or TA’s fault to monitor that. it’s not really my business; I come in, take my test, get out of their as soon as I can. Don’t really care what anyone else does. the only time I would ever report cheating is if someone plagiarized my paper, because we’d both get in trouble over that. </p>
<p>in my liberal arts classes, our tests are usually essay questions in the little blue book - And in my math, physics and chem classes, there’s usually long problem sets where you have to work through the problem step by step - you can’t just write down the final answer. So how can you copy your neighbor’s entire essay or problem set? I guess if you take a lot of multiple choice exams, it would be easier (in Bio we have a lot of those)</p>
<p>In physics and chem, we “work together” on HW all the time, meaning one person does most of the work and other people copy…same with lab questions. I don’t consider helping people with HW or labs cheating. Finals/midterms/papers are another story.</p>
<p>In response to TwistedxKiss’s post, although I did say I help people out during tests, plagarism is a completely different story. Stealing people’s ideas and work is wayy different than just getting the answer to a question.</p>
<p>HS student here, but yeah I don’t turn anyone in for cheating. I have to agree with the “I help them” comments. Especially if its multiple choice or something. But I did grapple with the issue for a while. When I took my SAT, there was a kid who blatantly cheated during the breaks. Essentially, he had an extra say 20 minutes for the SAT because he did this. I thought about turning him in, but then I thought about how it might actually affect his life. If he was a senior and this was his last chance at it, I could potentially have screwed him out of college. So I decided against it. </p>
<p>Then, in a class of mine, a kid went over to the teacher’s desk and took a picture of the open answer key. Him and two other students (one of them being me) got 100s because all we did was copy the answers. I felt like a piece of sh it after that though because the other kids in the class took it for real and some did not so well. Anyways, I kinda wrote off academic dishonesty as something that happens and don’t care anymore. Like I won’t do something like I did in that class again, but I won’t report anybody for anything either even if its horrible academic dishonesty. Essentially, I came to the conclusion that its your life. Choose to cheat your way through high school (or college) and you will face the consequences someday. Plus, I would feel like a piece of crap if I caused someones GPA or something to get hit that hard for a mistake (something everyone does in life).</p>
<p>"In response to TwistedxKiss’s post, although I did say I help people out during tests, plagarism is a completely different story. Stealing people’s ideas and work is wayy different than just getting the answer to a question. "</p>
<p>How do you figure? Plagiarism is passing off someone elses work as your own. If YOU know the answer and your neighbor doesn’t, and they get it from you and get credit for it, how is that any different?</p>
<p>I wonder if all of you are so nice when classes are graded on a curve, as they often are in college. You realize that, in that case, you are directly screwing yourself, right?</p>
<p>Wouldn’t turn someone in for cheating unless it somehow negatively affected me. I mean come on, all the person is doing is hurting themselves i guess in the future. Who really hasn’t cheated on a test here? Its easy. You get a calculator in some classes and in a lecture full of 100-200 students, what are the odds no one is cheating. IDK I feel like you have to know some stupid **** in gen eds so cheating isn’t really a big deal.</p>
<p>If someone directly stole stuff from a paper that I wrote, and we’re in the same class, then yea, I’m going to say something about that since my grade would be in jeopardy. Otherwise, I really don’t care.</p>
<p>There’s one specific instance that I can think of that occurred this summer where I could have easily called someone out but chose not to. During the last day of class before exams, some girl was going around asking everyone in class who typed their notes if they could send her a copy. I was actually the first one she asked and I obliged since she said that she had missed a day or two (the class condensed a semester’s long course into 3 and a half weeks, so missing one class was equivalent to missing an entire week during the regular semester.) After sending her an e-mail, I noticed that she was still going around the class collecting e-mails from other people who typed their notes. </p>
<p>At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but the day of the final, she utilized two different strategies to cheat: her friend, who sat in front of her, continually passed answers back, and she also printed out all of the notes that she received via e-mail and very carelessly opened a folder containing all of them during the test when the professor wasn’t looking. I guess she realized how cumbersome and stupid the folder method was, so after her friend left and she and I were the only two left in the room, she started trying to glance on my paper. I wasn’t going to play a part in her dumb scheme to get herself caught, so I just gave her a look that broadcasted the thought of “w-t-f are you looking at me for?” and she pretty much got the message. </p>
<p>Could I have told the professor? Of course, but that’s not really my nature and I don’t care what she does with her life.</p>
<p>In the end, I made an A+ in the class and that professor and I still have a very good relationship. In the end for her, she’s still a college student with no study skills and is most likely an airhead due to the fact that she doesn’t know how to cheat effectively (there were so many better ways she could have done it) and because she still has a folder which has pictures of all of the rappers that she thinks are “hot” on the outside covers, in a similar fashion to a high school freshman. No need for me to be the catalyst for her expulsion when she’ll more than likely get caught for the same stupidity eventually.</p>
<p>I’m kinda shocked. I mean, I wouldn’t stand for plagiarism and that’s not what I had in mind when I created the thread, but to actually help people? Call me bitter, but if I studied my ass off and knew the answers to something, and someone else doesn’t, tough for them. Why help someone who can easily help themselves? Seems just… stupid. </p>
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<p>Where do you get that mindset? No. You wouldn’t be screwing him out of college, he would do it to himself. It’s how life works. If you kill someone, the witnesses who say it’s you don’t put you in jail and ruin your life. You did that yourself.</p>
<p>And yes, I just compared cheating to murder. Obviously two very different situations with different consequences, but I’m trying to make a point. You could argue that we all make stupid mistakes and maybe cheating was his stupid mistake, but if there’s no consequences to the action, it’s not really a mistake. A worthwhile one, anyway. But in the long run, I suppose there’s consequences…</p>
<p>Although clearly I don’t rat out cheaters. I wouldn’t know how to if I wanted to, I wouldn’t want to falsely accuse someone, and I don’t think I notice most of the time, because I’m too busy concentrating on my own test. It’s true, too, that most of us here have probably cheated. We just didn’t get caught.</p>
<p>I can understand the notion that it is more or less the job of the professor/TA, though.</p>
<p>This thread somewhat reminds of when I was falsely accused of cheating in one of my classes (I guess my book was underneath the test or something, but I wasn’t looking at it and the book was closed). I’ve never really understood though how you can be bitter enough to call someone else out on that when the cheating isn’t a clear-cut case. I mean there should have been some doubt on the part of the person that reported me, and yet she/he risked ruining my academic career over it. So yeah, sometimes reporting it is probably okay, but clearly some people are plain self-centered.</p>
<p>I’ve in generally told professors they might want to watch a class more carefully because cheating was rampant, but I’ve never turned in one person. I also get annoyed when people try to cheat off of me. One, they have no idea what my grades are, I could be an idiot for all they know, and two, I worked too hard to let people have my answers.</p>
It’s true, too, that most of us here have probably cheated. We just didn’t get caught.</p>