I can't speak for college, but I cheated quite a lot in high school. I cheated "better" than the students in this post though, by copying sentence by sentence from various sources, rewriting it to make the cheating non-detectable, and reading over it to make sure the flow was good. It saved me at least 50% of the time compared to writing something from scratch, and the quality was good too.
Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely not.
It's imporant to consider why people cheat before you deem it bad. I cheated because the assignments were a waste of time. Plain and simple, a waste of time. It often felt like something the teacher gave us just so we shouldn't spend our evenings having fun. It wasn't something you were supposed to learn something from, it was something you were supposed to do because you were supposed to do it.
I should point out that that the Norwegian high school system is quite different from the American system. We couldn't choose our subjects, we had to take what the education law said we had to learn. Because of that I had a lot of subjects that I didn't have any interest in whatsoever, the only thing important was the grade I got. When you don't have any reason to study a subject other than to get a high number on a paper, it's natural to cheat. It's borderline impossible to be motivated to do something forced on you.
However, if the subject or course is your own choice, like the case with most university courses, cheating is something different. If the the only value the students get from a class is a grade and not relevant and valuable knowledge, I understand and sympathize with the cheaters.
Still, they need to separate "formative" and "summative" assessment. If a piece of assessment is easy to game, it should be "formative" - the marks you get should not go to your final grade, and should only be used as a feedback. If the assessment is hard to game, it should be "summative".
UK universities used to give a final vocal exam, after three years of study. You can't cram for it, there's too much to cover. And it's an exam, so there's a hell of a lot less cheating. Still, it does seem a little extreme.
PhD thesis (and other research-grade work) are another example, but I guess its too hard for 90% of undergrads.
Commercial quality work might be another option, but it won't assess the fundamentals that universities should be teaching.
I would surely learn a lot about the lastest in pop music if I watched MTV five hours a day for a month too, but that doesn't mean that it would be a good use of my time since I have no interest or reason for learning about pop music. A lot of the assignments I got and subsequently cheated on felt just like that.
You actually pointed of something I didn't mention in my previous comment. If you learn something, it shouldn't matter how you learned it. I actually learned the topics and passed the exam with flying colors even though I cheated on a lot of the assignments.
"by copying sentence by sentence from various sources, rewriting it to make the cheating non-detectable, and reading over it to make sure the flow was good. It saved me at least 50% of the time compared to writing something from scratch, and the quality was good too." - with those kind of skills you could become a top-notch journalist for the huffington post.
I remember once doing my assignment witch consisted of nothing but citations. it was perfectly valid by rules of writing such papers. as long as citations are proper. but that school was not very good, anyway.
"Most of us who went to American grade schools can remember long hours of copying articles out of encyclopedias. 'The abode of the penguin is a hard and difficult one.' It was called doing research. Then in college we found that it was also called plagiarism."
-- Mary Claire van Leunen, "A Handbook for Scholars"
Good point. Although, if students are cheating rampantly, which seems likely at your school, then teachers may feel they have to assign more busywork to compensate.
What you describe as "cheating" sounds more like "researching" or "studying". Cite sources for your facts and what you have there is probably a perfectly good paper.
Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely not.
It's imporant to consider why people cheat before you deem it bad. I cheated because the assignments were a waste of time. Plain and simple, a waste of time. It often felt like something the teacher gave us just so we shouldn't spend our evenings having fun. It wasn't something you were supposed to learn something from, it was something you were supposed to do because you were supposed to do it.
I should point out that that the Norwegian high school system is quite different from the American system. We couldn't choose our subjects, we had to take what the education law said we had to learn. Because of that I had a lot of subjects that I didn't have any interest in whatsoever, the only thing important was the grade I got. When you don't have any reason to study a subject other than to get a high number on a paper, it's natural to cheat. It's borderline impossible to be motivated to do something forced on you.
However, if the subject or course is your own choice, like the case with most university courses, cheating is something different. If the the only value the students get from a class is a grade and not relevant and valuable knowledge, I understand and sympathize with the cheaters.