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've personally never witnessed any cheating, heard any friends or students even allude to doing so, I never cheated myself and I can't even comprehend how you would cheat at most of the coursework I did in uni in Sweden.

Sure you could copy your friends code, but you still had to present it to a TA who would certainly get suspicious if you couldn't answer to what you had written. Ditto for exams and essays/reports.

Cheating, or elaborating on how to cheat, just wasn't efficient use of my time as a student, disregarding the morality of it. Frankly, it seems to me the way these students are being tested is not appropriate as it's easy to abuse and creates incentives for students to cheat.

> I've personally never witnessed any cheating, heard any friends or students even allude to doing so, I never cheated myself and I can't even comprehend how you would cheat at most of the coursework I did in uni in Sweden.

For most of my life I would've been frightened to even say so, or risk accusations of being a "swot", "teachers pet" or as the Aussies call it, "a tall poppy".

But the attitude that it's "normal" to cheat is common within US/UK/AUS culture now. Truth is I always considered cheating beneath me and was simply _WAY_ ahead of every class I ever took - but you can't say that in "polite" US/UK culture - one cannot be too pious and clean-cut, one must seem little bit like "everybody else" - even if everybody else is not really like that, if that makes sense.

So actually I've taught at universities in Sweden (Stockholm) and Finland (Helsinki) and notice similar attitudes to those you say. But those cultures aren't without dirty hands either. Here's the weird thing: Tall Poppy Syndrome is culturally closest to Jante Law [1], a Scandinavian ethos of "Don't think you're better than anyone else" which is precisely the corrosive culture that means people cheat because everybody else is cheating and causes a downward spiral or race to the bottom.

       "When you've done your very best
        When things turn out unpleasant 
        When the best of men take bribes
        Isn't it the fool who doesn't?"
   -- Human League 1978

It wasn't until I became a professor that I even knew this dynamic existed, but now I see it everywhere, not just in school.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

To clarify, I'm not saying I would never cheat. Rather that cheating meant more complications and risks than completing my coursework in the way it was intended.

If we were given take-home multiple choice forms to be judged by I'm certain people would cheat. But I've never seen that, possibly because it feels like a pretty lousy (and lazy) way of evaluating and educating students.

What was the average number of students in your classes, and the average number of TAs?

IIRC 150 students and maybe 6-10 TAs per class

I'm curious, what changes in governance and funding to higher ed institutions would you change? What did you teach/study?

Thanks for asking. I am an international visiting professor of computer science (specialising in DSP, signals and systems). I'd submit that's given me a fairly wide experience of higher education at least around the north-western hemisphere over three decades. Enough that I write regular and quite popular features for the Times. Any sincere answer is surely the contents of at least one whole book, so my response here would disappoint you. Instead please read my more positive commentary here [1] and here [2].

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/author/andy-farnell

[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/authors/andy-far...

Also, how would that impact cheating? I don't see the connection.

Cheating is a consequence of unfair values that push otherwise morally upright, hard-working people to transgress. Governance determines the values of a system. Therefore rampant cheating may be seen as symptom of a failure of governance, so improving it would reduce cheating. Hope that helps you to see the connection.