Big Cheating Scandal At Harvard

[Malthus]

There was a big cheating scandal at my former law school, after my time there. Way it worked was this: the school had a policy of having midterms in first year that were more or less for "practice" - they didn't actually "count" towards your marks. Normally, this did not matter, but for a brief time law firms were so desperate for the "best" students they were hiring summer students right after first year. In order to determine who the "best" students were, all they had to go by were these mid-term marks, as they liked to hire the students before the year ended.

So they were asking for these marks ... from the students. With no official transcript to verify them.

Strangely enough, some students were getting straight A's ... at least, according to them. A rather selective memory proved to be at work. 

[Barrister]

There was a big cheating scandal at my former law school, after my time there. Way it worked was this: the school had a policy of having midterms in first year that were more or less for "practice" - they didn't actually "count" towards your marks. Normally, this did not matter, but for a brief time law firms were so desperate for the "best" students they were hiring summer students right after first year. In order to determine who the "best" students were, all they had to go by were these mid-term marks, as they liked to hire the students before the year ended.

So they were asking for these marks ... from the students. With no official transcript to verify them.

Strangely enough, some students were getting straight A's ... at least, according to them. A rather selective memory proved to be at work. 

From what I remember about that incident, apparently one professor encouraged students to report that they had received As.

I want to agree with the "if you're so dumb you get caught" argument.

I cheated precisely once on a law school test.  It was a ridiculous assignment for a "computers and law" course which was itself ridiculous.  You were supposed to find the answers to a bunch of questions on the web (as an aside - oh how Google has changed things forever.  Web search actually used to be hard).  It was finicky and time consuming and didn't teach you anything.

Your assignment had to be handed in on a floppy disk.  There was, of course, enormous copying going on.  What I did was get copies of a few people's answers.  I mixed and matched between them, and re-wrote the answers in my own words.  I think I may have even answered one of the questions by myself.  I passed.

Of course what a handfull of people did was to hand in an identical assignments.  This got caught.