Most students don ' t cheat on uni exams , but fuck those who do . For some majors e . g . nursing there are a finite number of people who get accepted to the major . For every cheater that gets in , that person takes the place of an honest person that would make a better nurse . But beyond that , it is just fucking stupid . Grades are intended to reflect mastery of the material . That way professors know who will make a good employee or a good candidate for graduate school . If grades don ' t mean shit a side affect of widespread cheating the smart and honest suffer at the expense of the stupid and dishonest . Frankly , I want my engineers to be good engineers and not good cheaters . I want my physician to be a good physician and not a good cheater . If you don ' t have what it takes to earn a degree , then don ' t cheat . Drop out of college and find jobs that don ' t require a degree and be proud that you have some ethics . As a professor I have no fewer than 4 proctors keeping an eye on students at all times during an exam . You might think students would figure out that cheating will be detected in such a situation . And yet every damn semester I have to catch a cheater or 2 or 3 , fill out a bunch of paperwork , and fail that cheaterthose cheaters . All that paperwork and bullshit eats into the time that I use to conduct research and prep the best damn lectures I can come up with . Lastly , if I catch a student cheating then there is no letter of reference coming from me . I don ' t care if you have a 4 . 0 . Honesty and integrity trump grades . An employer doesn ' t want a dishonest person and a graduate program doesn ' t want a dishonest doctoral candidate . Edit since I am raging out here , let me also express my dislike for professors that make it stupidly easy to cheat . You know who you are . 1 The prof that uses the same questions from semester to semester so that the students with good connections get a chance to see the old exam but the students with fewer friendsconnections don ' t . You might as well just skip lecture and exams and just give the popular kids As and the unpopular kids Cs and be done with it . 2 The prof that just ignores blatant cheating in an exam because I am an educator , not a police officer . One aspect of a good professor is making sure that grades reflect mastery rather than cheating talent level . If you don ' t police your students then you suck as an educator . 3 The prof that assigns written work and doesn ' t spend any time at all using web tools to search for evidence of plagiarism . If you skip this step because you are not familiar with the internet yes there are plenty of technophobic profs out there , then talk to a prof who knows how to scan for plagiarism . If you skip this step because you are lazy , then just quit . If you aren ' t willing to do your job , stop taking a salary and give the institution the opportunity to hire someone that takes the job seriously . not a faculty in a school of nursing , just used that as an example .