I'm claiming that encouraging plagiarism artificially punishes the "I can do the work but I freeze up in a high-pressure/high-stakes do-or-die situation like an interview" crowd - because it means that that's the only tool I can trust to weed out the people who've just coasted on bullshit their whole lives.
The high-ness of the stakes at the college level seems to depend on if you have scholarships or similar - I've seen those be pulled, but haven't seen people I've known personally be actually expelled. So if you're fully dependent on them, it's bad, otherwise, it's no big deal. After college it depends on the type of job - some bigco or government orgs seem perfectly happy to carry a bunch of dead weight around.
Pre-college is mostly a super-low-stakes area for kids these days, but complicated by something 'tcfunk points out in a sibling comment, where authority figures lie about that - claiming everything is dire - but the kids also know their teachers/administrators are full of shit. My friends and I were very good at finding out which rules we could break with impunity - having too many rules, if anything, watered down the seriousness of the important ones.
So where you see problems are e.g. kids who could get away with anything suddenly running afoul of drug laws, or losing their scholarship over rules that didn't have teeth in high school, etc. Of course, the better off you are, the more easily you can weather that stuff - but to me, the root is that we're very opaque with our kids about what you'll get into real trouble over or not, and it changes in a very lumpy manner.
I don't know, I don't really see a parallel between a writing assignment and a high-pressure situation like an interview. The latter is essentially impossible to cheat on with anything resembling plagiarism.
What the parent means is that when cheating isn't accorded a serious enough response, the signaling value of a degree is watered down, so parent must rely more heavily on the interview, which is unfair to those who perform poorly in interview enviornments but are otherwise good at their job.
The high-ness of the stakes at the college level seems to depend on if you have scholarships or similar - I've seen those be pulled, but haven't seen people I've known personally be actually expelled. So if you're fully dependent on them, it's bad, otherwise, it's no big deal. After college it depends on the type of job - some bigco or government orgs seem perfectly happy to carry a bunch of dead weight around.
Pre-college is mostly a super-low-stakes area for kids these days, but complicated by something 'tcfunk points out in a sibling comment, where authority figures lie about that - claiming everything is dire - but the kids also know their teachers/administrators are full of shit. My friends and I were very good at finding out which rules we could break with impunity - having too many rules, if anything, watered down the seriousness of the important ones.
So where you see problems are e.g. kids who could get away with anything suddenly running afoul of drug laws, or losing their scholarship over rules that didn't have teeth in high school, etc. Of course, the better off you are, the more easily you can weather that stuff - but to me, the root is that we're very opaque with our kids about what you'll get into real trouble over or not, and it changes in a very lumpy manner.