When I first read this, I couldn’t believe it. But then I thought about it a little more, and realized that it fits a general scenario: whenever you give people a sufficiently large reason (severe penalties for failure, or large bonuses for success), they’re going to try to game the system. Always. Yes, even (some) teachers and school administrators… it’s gonna be hard for them to explain to their students why cheating is bad after this.
A lot of schools are doing various things to game the system, there’s a lot of pressure for them to do it because of the “no child left behind” initiative. The result is that a lot of education has been replaced with ways to get students, either by cheating or by extensive drilling, to do well on the tests that measure not only the student’s progress, but school-survival.
As someone who never cheated, I feel betrayed by these people. Since it obviously isn’t so wrong, I could have cheated my way through life, and gotten better grades with much less work. 😉
Oh, I agree that it’s wrong, I’m just describing what is happening and why.