Why do you cheat in exams? Because others do!
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132376&page=1#.UGpU8_k6WFc
This article talks about the trend that more and more high school students and college students are beginning to cheat in the exams. Why there is such phenomenon now? In the article, it mentioned that when talking with students, students give out many different reasons. Some say that they cannot learn anything, but just learn the system. But the most impressive answer for me is: because the rest of the world does.
This actually sounds like a quite ridiculous reason and quite unbelievable. Why do you let the rest of the world affect your own decision? But I think the grading system is actually pushing a student to cheat if this student find all the people around are cheating.
Professors usually curve a exam so when a student find other cheat, he might think that he will be worse off. It’s a little bit similar to the game theory we discussed in class. Because of the curve, when a student sees other cheat, he knows that he will probably get a very low grade even if he does a good job in the exam. The students who cheat will likely to get a higher score. So at this time, this student who doesn’t have to cheat has two options: 1. Cheat, 2. Not cheat. If he cheats, he will also get a higher score. If he doesn’t cheat, he might screw up the exam because of the curve and other people’s cheating behaviors. So obviously, cheating is the dominant strategy although it’s risky. So this student will more likely to choose to follow the rest of the world.
From the analysis, we know that cheating in exam is like a chain effect. Once one person cheats, someone will follows and then a group of people will also cheat. In the end, even people who don’t want to cheat might choose to cheat because the rest of the world cheat. So they believe that they need to cheat in order to avoid being worse off by others’ behaviors.
– yz458