Has anybody observed cheating?
gambling8nt: A roommate of mine from college graded papers for an introductory astronomy class (a class commonly taken to fulfill a distribution requirement for those majoring in the humanities); one of the students in the class (after, apparently, not going to class between the third week and the midterm), copied his entire midterm exam from the person sitting in front of him, almost word for word.It's not that the content of Physics classes makes it harder to cheat (although this might be true); students cheat when they don't love the subject (and believe that they will get away with it).  This is why you see much higher rates of cheating in disciplines people often learn for money rather than curiosity (business, engineering, law, computer science, and medicine).Unfortunately, people aren't likely to love these fields any more any time soon.  Nor are they likely to stop pursuing them despite their dislike for the content (as long as the resulting job is respected/pays well).  Which only leaves making it clearer that they won't get away with it, or making the penalty for getting caught outweigh the advantage of doing it.  The former is a topic worthy of active research.  The latter is probably not helpful, since (at least at the university I went to) the penalty is already so severe that I can only assume that people cheat purely from a lack of expectation of getting caught.