Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!
If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.
The point of taking a course isn't to get an A.
No, but sometimes an A makes the difference between graduating or not.
It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat.
No, but if cheating in the class is common, then it's likely that the difficulty of the class material is artificially inflated to account for students' artificially high performance. If you know this, the professor doesn't know this, and you need an A, then it may be that the only way to get an A is to cheat.
Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?
I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.
That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.
If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either.
I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.
Personally, I interviewed about 30 college students last year for internship and full-time positions; I didn't even look at a single GPA.
Scholarships, honors, Dean's List, general praise, etc. And students who get bad grades are given the stink-eye no matter how clever they are. In general, students who get good grades are just treated better than students who fail. Is that not your experience?
This case is actually a good example of the phenomenon. The students don't appear to have been punished for not learning. According to the story, they didn't copy any answers — it just looks like they discussed the subject matter. It may well be that these students learned better from collaborating than they would have from working separately. I know I usually did in school. But because it gave them an advantage in the grading system that the school didn't want them to have, they were punished for it. Learning doesn't appear to be the primary concern here.
(I don't mean to say that I think they should cheat. I'm just pointing out that they may well have learned better than they otherwise would have, but that doesn't matter because learning is not the overriding concern here.)
I'm sure that students are praised for getting 'A's, but are they men and women, or are they golden retrievers? I was mostly an 'A' student as an undergrad, but I certainly never felt that I was "given the stink-eye" on the occasions that I earned a 'C'.
To be clear, I'm not saying that 'B' and 'C' students are better off than 'A' students; I'm just observing that in my experience, they are also generally no worse off at the Ivies.
I agree that there are silly incentives to get 'A's. We should probably do something about that. But that doesn't make it unreasonable to expect the alleged "best and brightest" to be able to see past those silly incentives.
Without necessarily absolving the students of responsibility for their actions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that rampant cheating represents a failure on the school's part.
The surest way to get most of your students to cheat is for the cheaters to get ahead of the class. The non-cheaters will eventually crumple just to keep up.