Has anybody observed cheating?
steveplace: I went to a very large public university. The engineering program was so-so, and they valued ABET over actual learning.Senior Design was known as the "gauntlet," not necessarily due to the actual building of something, but for the 100-page research paper that they required. They assumed that if each member of the team writes about 25 pages, then they must understand the underlying concepts.This didn't affect me as much as it did my team. As you can tell, my long-windedness knows no bounds when behind a keyboard. My team however had the collective grammatical know-how of [insert punchline here].It was my job to proofread the paper. It was straight copy and paste. Utter bullshit.And I understand that it was my ethical obligation to correct this, if not report it. But it was clearly stated at the beginning of the class: "if one fails, you all fail." I was not prepared to deal with that. So I compromised my standards and just finished the assignment.I knew that there wouldn't be repercussions; all they do is count the number of pages, make sure there isn't too much whitespace, and that there's no more than 50% of space devoted to pictures.What can be done? With this particular example there was a large discrepancy with the overall goals that should have been, the goals that were, and the metrics that they measured it.