If a liberal arts student did some superficial changes to a copied document as he penned it down he'd get off scott free.

Programming projects, however, are digitally submitted, graded (except for style points), and statistically analyzed to detect cheating. If other departments started collecting more assignments digitally and ran plagiarism detection software on their essays and assignments, I'm sure CS would be one of the smaller slices of the pie graph.

This article is equivalent to saying the probability of being diagnosed with cancer is higher in a country with a better health system.

Dear IT Students:

If you have been wrongfully dismissed or penalized for using ethically-creative approaches to complete your course requirements, we have jobs (and a top-notch legal defence team) waiting for you! Your moral standards may match our corporate ethical guidelines to a tee, and you could be just the new recruits we are searching for.

Please apply in confidence to:

www.careers.microsoft.com/quasimoral

E. Bernays
Director of Ethical Reinterpretation
Microsoft Corporation

This is perfect training for them. So when they go out in the world they can manipulate it freely as a team and hide how they were actually interacting. It's all part of the bigger picture.
Does anything with the name Standford have any honor associated with it?

In a culture that esteems and rewards financial success, more or less regardless of how it is achieved, you can confidently expect huge and growing amounts of cheating and all sorts of dishonesty, both legal and illegal.

A similar syndrome has affected professional sport. Now that careers and multi-million dollar fortunes can depend on results, professional fouls and gamesmanship are just part of the winner's armoury. True, there are some real champions who manage to prevail while retaining their honesty - but they are more and more in the minority.

Granted, I'm an engineer and not a techie, but what I was taught in college was, "good programmers write good code, great programmers copy good code."

Most of the computer experts dont even seem to use computers so teamwork doesnt even come into it.
'Most computer experts just pass on press releases' would be a better phrase.