In my day cheating at university was part of the experience. It was never on a big scale. There was the time when someone got a hold of previous Accounting 101 exams. Sure enough our paper had many of the same questions with the numbers changed. The university only found out because too many people got 100% on the multiple choice section and we all had to re-sit the test. So in fact the whole of first year accounting was punished because the professors were too lazy to come up with new questions.

Likewise we always had old fuddy-duddies supervising our exams. The idea was there was no chance of collusion with lecturers etc. The truth was these retirees were after the $50 for the two hours. They went through the motions but there were plenty of ways to get around the rules. For example, no programmable calculators. OK then, we all took in HP17BII financial calculators which are fully programmable, but use a menu system. So unless you've seen it before you cannot tell. We all had all of our formulae plugged in. Did it help? A little, but there reality is rote learning was the easiest part of these exams. Using the right formula, getting the right result and manipulating properly, that's what they were really testing. That's why we always dreaded "open-book" exams; that just meant you were going to get questions you had never seen before. God damnit, they expected you to think!

But these happy days I fear are gone. There are now services like this in operation. No more copious copying of each other's notes, or using Google to get that assignment done that's already a week late. We didn't have the net in the same way when I was at uni, but really, this is big brother gone too far.

If you cannot learn how to cheat at university, how are you expected to learn how to get ahead in your career?