> Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly".
I knew a few people who cheated and gamed the system at every opportunity through high school, all in the name of getting into the best universities.
They got absolutely crushed in college when their old tricks stopped working and they had to actually do the work. One of them got caught cheating and had a wake-up call when the university threatened him for it. He eventually put in the effort to grind it out and graduate a year late, but graduated nonetheless.
He's mentioned that he could have saved himself a lot of pain and suffering by just engaging in school the first time instead of cheating.
This idea that you can cheat your way into a job and then just coast doesn't really match reality. It may work for some people who get into weird jobs that don't fire people, but the idea that it's "optimal" to cheat your way through life until you're handed an easy job doesn't hold up in practice.
In your anecdote, the person who cheated got into a well-regarded university and graduated (albeit a year late). That's likely to have a better long-term outcome than not cheating at high school, and going to a lower-ranked school.
Some of them didn't want to make the time commitment-- or partied. But a lot of smart students make then had old answers to tests especially in hard majors like the sciences. I think that counts as cheating.. they probably figured out they were giving canned answers or suspicious they arrived to answer right away.
I did this accidentally once at uni. Previous years tests were posted online (intentionally, by the person running the class) so I was doing those while studying to make sure I knew the material.
I sit down in the actual exam and lo and behold the questions in the test were exactly the same as one of the previous years I'd been using to study, I guess the professor got lazy.
I knew a few people who cheated and gamed the system at every opportunity through high school, all in the name of getting into the best universities.
They got absolutely crushed in college when their old tricks stopped working and they had to actually do the work. One of them got caught cheating and had a wake-up call when the university threatened him for it. He eventually put in the effort to grind it out and graduate a year late, but graduated nonetheless.
He's mentioned that he could have saved himself a lot of pain and suffering by just engaging in school the first time instead of cheating.
This idea that you can cheat your way into a job and then just coast doesn't really match reality. It may work for some people who get into weird jobs that don't fire people, but the idea that it's "optimal" to cheat your way through life until you're handed an easy job doesn't hold up in practice.