Kids cheating seems to be an universal behavior, it happens in very different educational systems (US, Europe, Eastern Europe).
I remember when I was a student, cheating didn't seem that much of a crime, to me, or to my peers. We mostly understood that if you cheat you might (or not) have problems later because you just basically wasted time in that course. So it was an assumed risk.
It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically fighting against (kids) human nature.
Also, snitching on cheaters was unthinkable. And not because of retaliation, but it just felt like very scummy behavior. In a way, like how criminal law in most places doesn't require family members to snitch on other family members who committed a crime.
> It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically fighting
against (kids) human nature.
Yes you're absolutely right. Wars on symptomatic abstractions like
"drugs", "terrorism" and "poverty" are always failures and become
ad-hominem, as wars on addicts, wars of terror, and wars against the
poor.
As surely as thieving loaves of bread is a response to starvation,
cheating is just another symptom - as you say, a naturally human
response - to an unjust and impossible circumstances. That doesn't
make it "right", but the context at least offers us some
understanding.
People will stop seeing "selfishly gaming the system" as acceptable
social behaviour once our systems resume serving the fullest interests
of the people instead of trying to control, manipulate and limit them
to the benefit of the few.
I remember when I was a student, cheating didn't seem that much of a crime, to me, or to my peers. We mostly understood that if you cheat you might (or not) have problems later because you just basically wasted time in that course. So it was an assumed risk.
It feels to me that the fight against cheating is basically fighting against (kids) human nature.
Also, snitching on cheaters was unthinkable. And not because of retaliation, but it just felt like very scummy behavior. In a way, like how criminal law in most places doesn't require family members to snitch on other family members who committed a crime.