It's horrific for morale of students who are trying, and it's dispiriting as an educator to have no accurate idea of how your class is doing. And it starts a race to the bottom where cheating is normalized and everyone cheats.
My answer above has nothing to do with what cheaters get out of it, but instead the harms it causes non-cheaters in the same class...
They get higher scores relative to their honest peers, satisfy their parents of having learnt material that they haven't, and erode the culture of doing the work in the classroom. They also leave their instructor confused about how to best address the class. (And, it's dispiriting, as a teacher, to have teed up a lesson based on an assessment that shows your students have this down pat, and then to find 2/3rds of the way through that they didn't actually learn that material at all).
I realize we're talking mostly about undergraduate relative to the article, and I'm a middle school/high school teacher so it's a little different. Still...
> They get higher scores relative to their honest peers
This is predicated on the assumption that, as an educator, you provide formal assessments of your students' capability, intended for third-party consumption. I keep saying this shouldn't happen. It makes no sense to assume, in the world where it doesn't happen, that it will nevertheless happen anyway. The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.
Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.
> The assessment should be done elsewhere, by someone who is not responsible for educating anyone.
There's room for both educator-offered assessments and third-party assessments. As I said before, educators need assessments anyways. We have a fair amount of effort that graded assessments from educators predict future performance better than these third-party assessments, too (of course, the best predictor is both together-- e.g. SAT plus grades).
> Under this structure, it would be possible for cheaters to mess up the teacher's assessment of their proficiency, and by extension the overall proficiency of a group of students. But it is strange to assume that they would do this, because -- I asked this above -- what benefit would they derive from doing this? If this action had any effect, that effect would be to move the curriculum onward from material they don't understand to material they understand even less. That is a harm to the cheater. The problem just doesn't arise.
No one looks at middle school students' grades except the students and their parents-- well, and for eligibility for participation in athletics. Still, there's rampant efforts to cheat, with the negative outcomes I described above.
You're attributing a whole lot of foresight to a short term selfish decision. Yes, cheating may eventually bite you, putting you into a class you're unprepared for. But it provides a lot of short term apparent benefit, so...
Funny, given that I teach in one! The middle school example was just to refute your point. Namely to show, despite the lack of degree-granting/admissions/pecuniary incentives to cheat, students still will cheat for short term perceived gains, with negative effects for everyone in the process.
I'm a-gonna go now, because I feel like you're being willfully obtuse.
It's horrific for morale of students who are trying, and it's dispiriting as an educator to have no accurate idea of how your class is doing. And it starts a race to the bottom where cheating is normalized and everyone cheats.