Cheating

Cheating really, really pisses me off. I have caught plagiarism going on in the honors program at Western Ontario, where some students did not want to bother to actually write their honors theses themselves, in the doctoral program at Maryland, where two students were essentially kicked out of the program for plagiarizing in research papers, and in my graduate applied econometrics course at Michigan,where a student turned in my own answers on a problem set as their own.

Though cheating is never okay I do not even understand the motivation for cheating at the graduate level. If you do not like writing papers, why would you sign up for a graduate program?

Here is a post from Chris Blattman about cheating. The comments are interesting too.

Of the three places I have been, UWO was the least serious about dealing with cheating and Maryland was the most organized. At Maryland, all cheating cases were referred to a committee whose sole function was to evaluate claims of cheating and to assign punishment. It included students as well as faculty and staff; I was told by those familiar with the committee that the students tended to be the real hard-asses in the bunch. I wish we had a similar system here at Michigan.