> Recently, we have held contests, giving away <$100 prizes to people. I
> should have known and warned everyone, but I'd forgotten what I'd seen of
> similar contests in the past. What happens is, no matter what the prize is,
> even if it is a totally idiotic "badge" to put on your blog saying you won,
> people freakin cheat. It's trivially easy to do so. As others in my org
> pointed out, they've seen cheating happen when there's nothing at stake but
> winning a game of internet checkers. It'll be trivially easy to set up a
> robot to cheat at the voting, just as contestants set up a cheatbot so they
> could win a photo caption contest.
I've been teaching English in Chinese universities. Cheating on exams is rampant, as is plagiarism on assignments. I'm told by people who've been there that Korean students are worse; they cheat more and less obviously, so they're harder to catch.
Sometimes they cheat on trivial things. There's an exercise I use where a reading passage is stuck up on the wall. One student goes up, reads a bit, comes back, tells another who writes it down. Dumb, but they're practicing all four language skills -- one kid reads & speaks, the other listens and writes. Then they swap roles with another passage. Also introduces them to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the two passages I use.
They cheat like mad on this. Stand by the passage, just copy it. Or go up, get a bit, come back and write it down.
The one that really cracked me up, though, was catching a lass photographing the passage with her cell phone.