I went to school in Boston and knew lots of people of Harvard and MIT, and the amount of cheating was absolutely staggering. The "Greek"/frat network contributes to this cheating culture greatly (some houses more than others, but they're all part of it.)
Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes.
They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.
I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself)
This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on.
Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative.
As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
Not what I meant. I'm actually in favor of people working collaboratively on problems, I'm talking about computer-servers full of P-Set solns, essays, old tests, occasionally the sale of these for money, etc etc etc.
Personally, I think that some of these people are so used to being that #1 student that when they're surrounded by other #1'ers, they do whatever it takes to remain on top, or so their logic goes.
They're not the people who ever build cool things anyway though, so who cares.