text:
Is it okay to report classmates cheating on exams?
Is it acceptable or ok to report on students cheating?  Many times during a test or an exam, I have seen students in front of me either passing notes, or otherwise collaborating whenever the professor isn't looking.
I don't want to get into trouble, and I don't know if it's "alright" to rat on fellow classmates.  Part of me thinks they deserve being caught out, by virtue of trying to cheat their way through the course. However, I feel like I would get found out by other students if they were caught cheating.
What is the right course of action here? To be clear, I would never raise an accusation in the middle of an exam; it would only lead to me being ostracized by my peers.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Honor is doing what’s right when no one is looking. If your institution's Honor Code requires you to report cheating, I'd suggest you report the action to your professor or a higher authority. This is good for multiple reasons:

You can prevent the cheating student from gaining an unfair advantage over his or her fellow students.
If they're caught (and punished), they might realize their mistake. If you never report the cheating, this student might sail through the rest of the term repeating the same mistake.

However make sure the suspected cheater doesn't come to know who reported him/her. You can meet the professor after the exam and explain what happened. If you don't wish to reveal the person's name, don't. If you're not comfortable with talking to a professor about your classmates, you can send an unsigned letter, explaining in detail what happened during the exam and if possible, include some ideas on how to stop them next time.
Before you do anything, think of the consequences. What if the other student discovers you're the one who reported the cheating? How would you feel if you confronted the cheater directly? If you can't imagine any of these situations, I suggest you let it slide.

Note that the concept of an "honor code" does not exist world-wide.

Also... "You can prevent the cheating student from gaining an unfair advantage": this is only true if students are competing against each other for grades instead of each one trying to learn for themselves. If that's the case, I would question if the institution is actually interested that everyone learns and probably just walk away and find another place to study.

I don't agree with your suggestion to " send an unsigned letter". If the action is correct one should assume all its consequences. Allowing an unsigned letter may have drastic consequences.

"If your institution's Honor Code requires you to report cheating" -- so honor only exists where codified?

@cassianoleal: Not quite true: your grades end up in your vita. Assuming that many students (in one area) compete for the same set of jobs, cheating "just" for better grades (never mention passing at all!) is gaining the cheater an advantage.

@Raphael: Nope. That was just an example scenario. The OP seemed confused. By talking about the institution's Honor Code, I was just trying to give a friendly push. It'd help if people didn't take things too literally :)

@AmalMurali: Well, an "if" without the "else" branch has a certain meaning to a computer scientist. ;) Also, keep in mind that not every culture feels the need to write up codes of honour but rely on decent upbringing.

@Raphael: that does makes sense. On the other hand, I'd probably be wary of working for a company that choose employees by their uni grades. Maybe that's because I'm in I.T. and many of the most brilliant colleagues I had never even graduated in a related course. :)

this is only true if students are competing against each other for grades — Or for jobs.  Or for internships.  Or for grad school admissions.  Or for fellowships.  Or for research opportunities.  Or for anything else that depends on your grades.

the system is bad and requires fixing — Every system can be gamed.  Moreover, every system is gamed.  That does not imply that you should tolerate other people gaming the system.  (On the other hand, any higher-education system that requires solidarity among students against their instructors is fundamentally broken.)

@Name: "If the action is correct one should assume all its consequences." - I strongly disagree with that reasoning. If the action is the correct one, there should not be any negative consequences. The fact that in reality there may very well be negative consequences is precisely because a correct action does not guarantee a correct reaction. It is very possible that the cheaters decide to act incorrectly (again) by punishing the one who acted correctly (by speaking up about their cheating). Hence, anonymity to protect the one speaking up may be crucial.

@O.R.Mapper Let me I ask you a question. If somebody writes an unsigned letter to a judge saying that "I testify that X has killed Y". Can the judge condemn X based on this unsigned letter? Does such a letter have a value from the legal point of view?

@Name: The information found in the letter provides a hint on where to pay a bit more attention, as pointed out in various other comments and answers here, during the next similar occasion.

As an instructor, I want to know if there is an environment that allows cheating. Even if the student can't provide proof or only told me afterwards or anonymously, I can take action on future exams by better proctoring, exam versioning, and seating charts.
So telling the teacher afterward would protect individual students but improve the quality of the course overall, which is a win-win.

Also, if there are people cheating, and the exam is prohibitively difficult without cheating, if a portion of the class does a lot better than they would given the resources you have available to yourself, the instructor will not realize that the exam was not possible to do without cheating, and next time will make the exam just as prohibitively difficult, thinking that the normally high performers are just being lazy.

@JFA: I share the general sentiment, but you should probably not assume that student cheat only if the exam is "too hard".

@Raphael Absolutely. It was an if (a AND b) then: type statement :P Both conditions must be present initially.

As @BoratSagdiyev suggested, just reporting "many people are cheating" without giving out their names would likely solve the problem and would not inimicate you anyone.

@Lohoris What if the examiner then decide to scrap the exam and have it done again? You'd (indirectly) hurt n students where only k << n did something wrong.

@Raphael that would be a pretty assy thing to do, and I would wonder if laws/rules would allow him to do that anyway. If he did so then he would be sure he would be labeled as the asshole-professor and that would actually encourage cheating during his exam (or picking other exams if possible). However he could simply have a deeper oral session, in order to try spotting who cheated during the written one.

deeper/oral pun not intended

@Lohoris I'm not sure they'd have a choice not to redo the exam! If you know mass cheating occurred, you have to abide by the (written) rules. I agree that the action depends on the rules, though. (Note that students may also learn not to cheat, or to report cheaters by name if they report. It's disturbing that the only reaction you can imagine is "cheat more", which solves no problem.)

@Raphael consider you are not giving any proof. Do you really think a professor can undo an exam because an anonymous tip told him someone was cheating? If that was so, I would go around reporting all exams just to prove that this is silly.

@Lohoris If you have (targetted) suspicion, you can often identify cheaters by what they hand in. (Of course, my advice to teachers would be to create exams that are hard to cheat. Go ahead, bring all your material -- I don't care.)

@Raphael 1. you do not have targetted suspiscion: as we were suggesting, the report would not name offenders; 2. if you do have a target anyway, they you could void his exam, not everyone's.

@Lohoris Well, you were asking about proof that cheating happened. If you suspect, you can check, even for all attendees. That's a lot of work, sure, but not unknown to happen. If you find copied answers, you know cheating happened. I agree that a reasonable consequence would be to fail those that you can show cheated and live with the rest. If the ratio of proven cheaters becomes so high that you have to doubt the integrity of the whole exam, I don't know what happens. (It's certainly a gedankenexperiment.)

Have you ever cheated in your school life?

As a professor for over a quarter of a century, I can assure you that your prof would like to know if cheating is going on. When I've been made aware of such nefarious activities, I've been able to catch the culprits on a subsequent exam, by giving the cheaters slightly different versions of the test. Although students engaging in cheating are ultimately cheating themselves, it's still nice when they are caught. This lessens the chance they will make it to Wall Street or Med school, or into government, where their cheating can have serious repercussions for us all.

I wouldn't like to have you as a professor, and I haven't cheated in an exam since primary school. You seem to be more interested in punishing the cheaters than in ... well, teaching. That would certainly make me question if I want to learn anything from you at all. If students are cheating on your exams, you should probably ask yourself first what could you be doing wrong that's leading and allowing them to cheat.

@cassianoleal, are you saying that you want to learn from professors who don't mind if their students cheat?

@cassianoleal: The fact is that people attend universities that have no business being there. They start having trouble and look for solutions. Few realize they are the problem -- the others blame teachers, the system and/or cheat. That's largely independent of the didactic skill of the teacher (provided they uphold a certain standard).

@cassianoleal Proctoring exams is not teaching, it is part of our job but not related with passing knowledge from the instructor to the students. In an exam we test what the students learned so far, I don;t see the connection between catching cheaters in an exam and teaching... The only link between the two is the fact that if one is effective at catching cheaters, one gets a more accurate picture of what the students learned so far, which can actually improve one's teaching abilities after the midterms.

"lessens the chance they will make it to Wall Street..." -- and it increases the prestige of the qualification the questioner ultimately gets, if it's generally believed that cheats would be caught, not awarded that qualification. Of course there's a gulf between one particular act of cheating and the general reputation of the institution and its qualifications, but small things add up. In general if you didn't care about the prestige of your degree you'd buy it online (and if all you cared about was the learning, not the qualification, you wouldn't bother graduating after taking the classes).

As a high school teacher (briefly), I found it easier to assume some students would cheat and identified them by handing out slightly-different versions of a quiz early in the year. They get an F which doesn't impact their long-term grade (it's a small quiz), and it proves a useful deterrent for the rest of the year. Best of all, I didn't even have to accuse them of cheating, which any student would of course deny -- the F was earned by their answers.

worse, the cheater devalues the effort of everyone else taking the exam, reducing effectively the market value of a degree from that institution as if unchecked underqualified people will get a degree and the market will notice that.

I'm a college professor and I have very little tolerance for cheating. Yes, I would like to know if it's going on, and, yes, I expect students who witness it to tell me so I can take preventive action.
I also used to be a competitive golfer. In a tournament every golfer is expected to monitor the actions of the other players in his group to make sure no one bends or breaks the rules. Since tournament officials cannot be everywhere on the course at all times, each individual is responsible for protecting the field by making sure that no one gets an unfair advantage over the field. That is a responsibility that competitive golfers take very seriously.
The student, likewise, needs to assure that there is a level playing field for everyone. Reporting cheaters is one way of doing just that.

Telling your professor that he did a bad job supervising the exam is highly commendable, but takes guts. Ratting on individual fellow students is however very, very low, and expecting students to do so is no better. University is not a golf club.

@Karl "Ratting on individual fellow students is however very, very low" This really depends on the academic culture. In Eastern Europe, it'd make you an outcast fairly quickly. In the U.S., not so.

@Kubahasn'tforgottenMonica Yea, people in places where denunciation is or was politically enforced seem to grow a robust dislike for such practice. :D

Fundamentally, this is a question with no easy answer. Ethics would state that you should definitely report someone violating the "honor code" (or whatever equivalent of it your university has) by cheating on an exam. However, there are also some problems with this:

It may be difficult for the exam proctor to prove that cheating has taken place, even if you have observed the communication.
Reporting it after the exam is not really possible, because again it will be impossible to prove afterward.
Making an accusation during the examination could lead to disruptions for many students, including yourself.
If you publicly raise an accusation of cheating during an examination, this could lead to ostracism from your classmates, which may be counterproductive to your educational career (in the present class and in the future).

So I think you need to set those two issues against one another and decide what is the better alternative for you.

There's also the possibility that you aren't correct, or aware of the full situation.

On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this exam.

I had to write (and sign) this statement on almost all of my exams throughout my university career. My university had a very draconian policy with regard to cheating, as I mentioned in a comment: the default punishment for a first-time offender was expulsion, if the case came before the Honor Council. (Of course, not every case brought before the Council was determined to be an offender, in which case there was no punishment at all. On rare occasions, the punishment was something other than expulsion, usually suspension.) As implied by the statement above, it was against the university's policy both to receive (unauthorized) help on an exam and to give it: both the person passing the note and the one receiving it would get in trouble with the Honor Council, even if the former individual did all of the exam work himself. (You were not punished if someone cheated by looking over your shoulder, but they would slap you on the wrist and tell you to be more careful in the future.)
The integrity of the university was very important in that micro-culture, and I think that if you asked this question of anyone there -- student or professor -- you'd get the same answer, "yes."
This led many professors comfortable doing things like assigning take-home exams which were closed-book.
All that said, the answer to this question does depend on the university's culture (and the culture of the country). For example, when I told an Italian friend of mine that I had a take-home exam and I was not permitted to use my textbook or notes while doing it, he assumed that everyone in the class would be cheating. When I then told him about the quoted statement above that I had to write and sign on the exam, his view of the situation flipped: if I had to write and sign something like that, of course nobody would cheat! I find the sudden shift in opinion an interesting insight into his own culture.

@Łukasz웃Lツ, United States

"You were not punished if someone cheated by looking over your shoulder, but they would slap you on the wrist and tell you to be more careful in the future." -- wait, what? During my exams I barely focussed more than two feet from my nose for three hours at a stretch. Now it's my responsibility to make sure the people behind me aren't peeking at my paper? I get that honor causes people not to cheat, I don't quite get that honor causes them to look around behind them during exams, just in case ;-)

@SteveJessop, actually, not that I think it was my job, but I also had to be careful not to "let" other students cheat from me. Some exams, we got constant (every 30 mins and the beginning of the exam) reminders to "keep our finished answers face down" or "put them in to the exam folder". It's not as uncommon as you think :)

@penelope: oh sure, I don't mind that the routine I followed involved some anti-cheat elements. It's just totally alien to me that I might have any awareness of what the person behind me is doing during an exam, or that I would be given a verbal warning for carelessness by a student council if they're doing something bad :-)

@SteveJessop Well, in my case, it was not a student council. But it was very similar to the described situation, and especially since it's totally alien to you, I'm glad somebody made the community aware that such things do exist :)

Academically, it is in your best interest to report it. If the class is curved, the cheaters are not only unfairly outshining you, but they are unfairly lowering your grade. Even if it's not curved, unless it's an enormous class, the professor's perceptions of who did well may still be influenced by who did how well. If a student that the professor expects to score low (based on their in-class participation) instead cheats and scores high, the professor may decide that the exam was easier than he originally thought, and value your honestly earned mark less.
In the long term, if cheating is rampant in your school, this will soon become known. The value of your degree will drop even if you didn't cheat, because how can I know you didn't get your degree by being one of the infamous cheaters, and managing to avoid getting caught?
In a class where all exams are multiple choice and grading is completely objective and not curved, cheaters have no effect on you (except for the long term consequences stated above). Only then you could say that pragmatically, neither reporting nor not reporting helps or hurts you appreciably, so you might as well not bother.
But then there is also the ethical aspect. Cheating is bad, you are expected to not cheat and report cheaters by the instructor and school administration, and you probably even signed agreements and made honor pledges to this effect. So, it would be dishonest for you not to report it - not reporting isn't even a valid choice, it would be a dereliction of your contractual and ethical obligations. In practice, you will never "get caught" and be punished for failing to report cheating - but whether you get caught is immaterial to ethics.
So, speaking in terms of your credentials in school and beyond, there is absolutely no reason not to report it, and strong reasons against not reporting (eg. you promised in writing that you would report when you enrolled). It would be extremely unusual for a professor to somehow punish you for reporting.
But that's not the whole story: Like it or not, the people who you reported will hate you for it. They will tell their friends to hate you for it. If they are popular, you will quickly become very unpopular. Not all your classmates may have the same concept of integrity, and some may hate you for "siding with the establishment and betraying your comrades" (as they see it).
Your classmates may one day end up being your colleagues. If you get a reputation as a "rat" who has dubious allegiances, and cannot be relied on to have his friends' back (even though the cheaters are probably not your friends, they are only united with you in their struggle to get good grades) against a perceivedly antagonistic and unfair institution, it may become difficult for you to be seen as trustworthy.
Consider how in history there have been oppressive, unjust regimes which employed "informants" to report on people who try to circumvent or oppose the oppression. Clearly, this is not the same as reporting cheating: For one, academic cheating policies are clearly just, ethical and reasonable (unlike oppressive regimes). But the point is that following a rule is not automatically a just action. It is hard to definitively say what is just and what is unjust, so a lack of skepticism towards even apparently just rules is taken by some as evidence of inability to reject rules even when they are unjust, and generally lack of critical thinking ability.
To answer your question, you must ask yourself: Are you an idealist, or a pragmatist? If an idealist, there is no question that you should report the cheating. But if a pragmatist, unfortunately, it depends. You must further ask, which do you value more: Your reputation among your peers, or your formal academic credentials?

Also, note that reporting may not necessarily harm your reputation among your peers: If your peers happen to value this sort of idealistic adherence to rules, then you reporting is a win-win (but I feel like you would not ask the question if you believed that to be the case).

That's true - although I'm used to the Western idea of professors who are opposed to cheating, if you suspect that your professor is himself of poor integrity - he may indeed try to punish you out of solidarity with his "fellow" cheaters. But I would consider this option, as I noted, very unlikely - unless you do go to one of those few schools where this sort of issue with the faculty is very prevalent and obvious.

You say that "you are expected to...report cheaters by the instructor and school administration, and you probably even signed agreements and made honor pledges to this effect."  Do many schools really have policies like this?  It seems like bad policy to me.  Anyway, promising to do something (like reporting cheaters) and then failing to do it is not necessarily dishonest; it may just be a change of heart or a lack of strength.  Not every rule creates a moral obligation, even if there is a moral reason for the rule.

Maybe German culture is different in this regard but I would never report someone for cheating but instead talk to the cheaters personally. However in areas were people are in danger if the students lack knowledge through cheating (pilots, medicine, ...) I would tell them to report themselves or I would do it myself.

@Łukasz웃Lツ Well, who's to say the cheater won't also try to cheat on the independent appraisal, since he/she already learned that there is no consequence to cheating?

@Łukasz웃Lツ It would probably not be ideal to have your schools double up as training academies where cheaters can practice cheating on "easy proctors", and gain enough experience to beat the "hard proctor" at the final, important exam. But I agree that the issue becomes more complicated with career-deciding exams.

I strongly disagree this stance generally represents "German culture" (without claiming that the stance of invariably reporting cheaters is any more generally wide-spread in Germany).

@O.R.Mapper Maybe you come from a different part of Germany (east here)? In my area, someone who reported a fellow pupil or student for cheating would have a really hard time. Maybe that's because of our Stasi past that we are really fed up with people reporting on others.

@KonradHöffner: South-West here. Possibly that explains the difference.

I'm surprised and chagrined at the number of people posting here who seem to think academic cheating isn't such a big deal. But it is! Fraudulent studies have been published that have resulted in many deaths. In one famous case, the author turned out to be a habitual cheater. His exposure destroyed this researcher's career, and he also faces a number of lawsuits by the relatives of deceased victims of these published lies (clinical studies based on his lies were underway for years before he was caught). Such fraud can destroy the public's trust in the validity of scientific studies. The widespread acceptance of cheating is just plain wrong.

Me too! See also http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/65485/15940. This problem of integrity is a widespread problem that nearly no one wants to actually solve. Most people would rather maximize their own benefit. Whether this involves cheating or reporting cheating, it has nothing to do with cheating but their own selfish interests.

I suggest you send an anonymous e-mail to your instructor about who cheated in the exam and how, so that the instructor can take precautions, if he cares at all.
Who not directly tell during the exam?
One reason is that if 2 students are exchanging answers, without any proof such as cheat sheet, then it is your word against theirs. In such a case, since there is no proof, their exam will be valid but you will be a rat.
Also, although some people here think that you don't need friends who cheat (as if that is the only consequence), the world is not that fair. You may end up being the rat and completely ignored, and worst case, bullied. Some people are just cruel and may try to blame you instead of themselves for the failure. How they handle such a situation depends on their character, and you should not risk it. No honor code is more important than your happiness and comfort during your years in college. If the honor code is that important, your instructor should do his responsiblities first.
You are a student, not an instructor. Every instructor once was a student and even if they never cheated (very unlikely!), they witnessed other people that cheated. Any instructor should know that given the chance, a student may cheat. It is the instructor's responsiblity to create the environment that does not allow cheating. You shouldn't care more than he cares.

if you tell your instructor privately during the exam, he can watch those students carefully and maybe catch them. After exam it becomes your word against their, but during the exam there is still something the instructor can do..... 2) Most instructors care about cheating, and do their best to create an environment which doesn't allow for cheating... In a small class I can usually make sure there is no cheating, but if the class becomes too big it is impossible to get a reasonable foolproof system... And IMO, "expect the students to cheat" is not the right approach...

Most importantly,  I think it becomes essential to let the instructor know during the exam is you don't know the students which cheated too well. Which is possible in a very large university class. Sending an anonymous e-mail that "some guy with glasses might have cheated" in an 100+ students class is not helping the instructor at all...

You could send an anonymous e-mail to the professor, informing him that you saw rampant cheating, without naming the students involved.
As an aside, request your professor to NOT mention the anonymous e-mails to anyone. If you have a reputation of being the most virtuous person in the class, then they might target you, even without evidence.

Is it acceptable or ok to report on students cheating?

Yes, but if you're not convinced by the arguments in the other answers, consider this: is it okay to cheat?
If not, then if those other students can do something that is not okay, why not you?

That being said: the attitude that it's okay to do something wrong if other people are also doing something wrong is not a good one to hold in general. In this case it happens to lead you to the correct course of action though.

You asked this question on the place, where most of the people are actually professors or want to become one. There is no surprise that mostly you will here one answer "Yes, this is ok, encouraged and should be so". But this is life, and there is no easy answers here.
Also some of the people here compare cheating on the exam as mugging and may be some other crime things, but in my opinion it is not even close. Just to compare, I am really curious how many from professors here have never cheated in any form during their academic life? And how many of them have never stolen anything? I think the number will be different.
It is up to you to decide. What what you can gain, what you can lose and come up with your decision. Yes, I agree, that teachers want to know who cheated/abused them, but students want to have trust in their peers and the same way as teacher can assume that cheaters violate the trust in them, your fellow students can assume that you violated a trust in them. Also more and more students lose their trust in education, because it does not really represent the knowledge and sometimes A on the exam only shows that you was able to get A on the exam (nothing regarding you knowledge). So why would you memorize when Napoleon raised to power if any monkey with Wikipedia can give you this result and half of his biography in one minute.
So think it in this way.

It is just business, nothing personal

Weigh pros and cons in your situation.
Pros can be:

you will score higher on the exam on average
teacher will like you more and you can get advantage later
teacher comes to think that you are not a cheater
you restore equality

Cons can be

your classmates will hate/not trust you (not only one that cheated). Maybe you will never get help from them neither in your school life or even after it. Being outcast is hard, being outcast who needs help even harder
teacher might think that you are a cheater too and want to hide yourself this way

So if I would be in a situation when I and 30 people, whom I do not know, fighting for 2 Harvard (or whatever you people value) sits. Then there is no way I would be quite. But if these are people with whom I play basketball taking math/history/language exam, than good luck to you guys, and if you need help I will try to help you.
So life is not back and white. Most of the time it is in grayish. To put this even further: One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
You also might have a strong belief that cheating is terrible, or something similar

you, fighter for justice in entire world, helped to restore justice. (Some people do believe in the just world)
you genuinely think that this is wrong
you do not like people who do this (or they do not like you)
you like the teacher and want to help him
you want to change how cheating is viewed

In such case, think have you ever cheated yourself. I have seen a lot of people who can not stand cheating, but cheat by themselves. With one of them I even had discussion about it, when the person came to me asking for a solutions to programming homework. Funny enough, this person was rising her concern how sharing is bad and had all the discussion with instructor how should he prevent it. So when I asked what changed in her views about the world, to my surprise, she was not looking at it as a cheating. In her eyes it was just minor help for the person in need. No matter how hard I tried to show that this is exactly what she was fighting against, she did not want to hear about this as cheating.

It depends where they are cheating.
If they are cheating on a simple test or exam that is just one of many, don't report them. Such tests do not show the general skill of a student, just what he/she knows at a specific point in time. A good student can fail on a test and a bad one can succeed dependent on way too many factors. It is however a good thing to tell the student afterwards that if he/she wants to succeed, they cannot just base it on luck and cheating.
If they are cheating on an important exam, a final or similar to an extend that is beyond negligible, then do report them. If they are caught at a later point, it is possible that their degree is later revoked, which might not only cause them to loose a complete year, they can even loose a job or worse.
You can cheat during a test, but you cannot cheat when people later depend on your expected skills.

Why would people think this is okay?
You talk about honor, but it is clearly an act of egoism.
You feel bad, because you did not get the same advantage, and therefore you hurt the person who received an advantage.

You should report that someone has cheated, but you should not tell the teacher/professor who it was. That way the security will improve, but you will not hurt your fellow classmates.
If the teacher does not believe you, ignore the fool. To be trustworthy is an important trait, if you report the person who did it, you are breaking his/her trust.
Why do you think you feel bad about it in the first place? Your mother thought you right.

Going around someones back and reporting them, making them receive a punishment, is in no case honorable. Please do not listen to these puny people. Faith in humanity is low these days...

"I saw someone shoot this guy, but I can't tell you who; that would disadvantage that person. Please have more police patrol the area so it won't happen in the future."

I actually like this answer, its funny. Especially the ''if the teacher does not believe you, ignore the fool''. Sounds like you popped off a bugs bunny cartoon

@Raphael I don't know if that's an appropriate analogy. This is more like "I saw a guy spit on the sidewalk" or "I saw a guy jaywalk". Murder in cold blood is a different beast than cheating on an exam.

Ridiculous. If you cannot name the person cheating, how is it even possible to figure out whether you're telling the truth, or making it up? If you say "John cheated" we can go look at what John is doing. If you say "someone cheated"... Good luck falsifying that!

Best answer I've heard. This guy wrote the truth why would the guy care? he is just pissed off he didn't get the same advantage. The teacher is only a moron if he doesn't understand who cheated who else was sitting around you who could you look at? just ignore that fool is correct.

Besides nobody remembers anything after the course is over and just uses google anyways so passing the course is nothing but simply getting a degree/diploma or whatever you get it's not needed in the real world  where the only thing that matters is experience and no test can really show that.

@SSpoke I'm back with this guy too. I think the responsibility is on the teachers or supervisors. If the exam is a survival test, only a specific number of top students can win, then of course you will be outraged and report immediately. If the exam is just about score, anyone who has higher or equal score will be pass, then the only reason for me to not cheat is the fear of getting caught.

@Ooker if the guy has the balls to cheat and proven to the world he got away with it there is no reason you gotta be a asshole and report him doesn't even matter if it's a survival test or not everyone has to survive how they know best.

@SSpoke: "if the guy has the balls to cheat and proven to the world he got away with it" - that sounds as if "the guy gets away with cheating" and "reporting the guy" were independent of each other. That's not the case. If someone reports him, that means exactly that he is proven wrong, that he will not get away with it. Also, I suggest refraining from suggestive wording such as "has the balls to" and "be a asshole", this does not clarify the issue and instead implies a judgement on each of the actions.

@O.R.Mapper dam dude I feel bad for you i got 99 problems but being brainwashed ain't one. I'm not a robot i'm real, so I act real.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Transitioning from a BS in CIS to an MSE in Software Engineering
I'm considering an attempt to gain admittance to an MSE program in Software Engineering but I realize that most of my education may not be fully relevant. My BS is in CIS where the focus was real world application and lots of management type stuff, so there wasn't much math and I know that is going to be be a problem. I was looking at ASU's MSE program which implied that the only pre-requisite was Calc I. However, when I was looking through the pre-reqs for each individual class, there were things like Intro to Embedded systems and such; subjects that were obviously not included in CIS. I currently work as a Software Engineer, but our focus is pretty level in that it's typical information systems type stuff (just moving data in and out of databases). I have a true passion for it, I'm not terrible at math, and I really do want to get deeper into the matrix so to speak, so motivation won't necessarily be a huge issue.
So, I'm wondering if anyone had any experience with this or could give me some info on what to expect or what I'm going to need to do in order to make this happen. For instance, am I going to end up getting a second BS (in CS) before I can make the transition or should I still be able to make the switch outright? I haven't contacted ASU yet because in my experience, they push you to apply without actually providing guidance first.

Simultaneous posting on multiple SE sites is strongly discouraged.  Also: This question seems very specific to your personal experience and goals.  Have you tried calling up ASU and asking them?

My only goal is getting into the program. An other SE sites are continuously referring you other SE sites.

Referrals are one thing; multiple postings are another.

Most MSE programs in the US do not require you to have a BSE in the relevant field. The listed prerequisites for the courses are often requirements that undergraduates need to fulfil before being allowed to enrol in the graduate class. That said, you may need to take some undergraduate classes to get up to speed and you may need to work harder to make up for starting slightly behind. If accepted, it is likely that the admissions committee thinks that your previous background is enough to be able to succeed in the program.
In summary, admissions committees do not accept students that they think will be unable to complete the program.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
How has the global COVID-19 pandemic affected PhD programs regarding admissions/remote work?
There is a lot of argument between employees and employers right now about working from home/remotely now that the pandemic is (hopefully) winding down in some countries. Have there been any changes in PhD admissions and, for example, residency requirements in such countries (outside of universities that have always specialized in distance education)? I'm asking in the context of new admissions, not already-accepted students being allowed to work remotely.
I know this is a very broad question but even knowing whether it's being discussed, anywhere, would be helpful.
The always excellent paul garrett brings a good point to mind: assume an occasional trip to the university in question is acceptable, but moving for a period of years is not.
Note: I searched prior to posting and the questions I found seemed more predictive, e.g., questions about how will the COVID-19 pandemic affect PhD admissions, but if this is a duplicate I'll cheerfully close the question.
This question: Have any major universities around the world announced a transition to a remote-first model? and this question: Do Universities make fully-remote contracts? seem to apply more to people with pre-existing affiliations.

A small data point: for this last academic year, 2020-21, new grad students from abroad had to be physically present to get on the payroll, etc., even though their work was entirely remote thereafter. I'm at an R1, and this was math, but I think the same principle applied to all international grad students.

With respect to admission, at my university in Australia, we require students to obtain a visa before allowing them to enroll remotely; this also requires signatures from upper management, which complicates matters.   If a student has a scholarship, then there is no solution as far as I know apart from deferring to the next session.    The main bottleneck/issue is that the Aus government is not issuing visas as quickly as before.

@paulgarrett - various universities dealt with this in different ways. Some did allow starting remotely.

In the US context, foreign students are required to attend classes in person as a condition of their visas.  This rule has been relaxed during the pandemic, but will presumably be back in force this fall.

You need to specify a country in your question because the statement that "the pandemic is winding down" is simply untrue. Some countries are entering a third or fourth wave at the moment. Yesterday in Brazil there were nearly 90,000 new cases. There are plenty of countries where barely 20% of the population has been vaccinated.

@astronat A fair point and I apologize for the oversight.

I expect all US universities to be back to fully in-person this fall.
While some grad students have always gotten a substantial amount of work done from home, and that will continue and probably become more common, I don't see it likely that universities will allow graduate students to be fully remote/live in another region or country.
For one thing, there are a lot of tax and employment law hurdles to be concerned with. I don't think universities really want to mess with that too much, and individual grad programs don't have the resources to do so. There's also the issue that many grad students are fully or partially supported by teaching appointments - if courses are in-person, their instructors and TAs will have to be in-person.
There's also the issue that for many disciplines, remote work isn't really possible because the work requires bench space and specialized equipment. Sharing data from human subjects research or related to intellectual property across international borders is another area of concern, as are assertions made to funding agencies about where people working on a project are located (for example, US government funding is generally expecting that the work will be done in the US unless specifically approved otherwise).
My own institution recently published a policy for remote work, including for graduate students working from out of state or internationally. You can see it publicly here: https://policy.wisc.edu/library/UW-5087 It's a lot of dull reading, but it mentions some of the complications I've already listed in this post such as the legal issues. In summary, it's allowable if you can demonstrate some substantial reason it's necessary. I suspect these allowances will be quite rare and determined on an individual basis.
An example I would expect the university to make some effort on would be if a dissertator was unable to return to the US to finish their degree due to pandemic-related travel restrictions. I do not expect them to make allowances for new students without a very very good reason, nor to make allowances when there is a mere preference for remote work rather than a necessity.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
What's my job title?
I'm currently a graduate student that conducts the labs for a statistics course. The labs themselves only form a part of the course and the other part consists of lectures where they get a theoretical background of the subject. I'm not sure what I should put as my job title, since I'm both an adjunct tutor and lab demonstrator of sorts.

@NajibIdrissi I wish I had a work contract...

Graduate student / Lab instructor

@NajibIdrissi This type of work is considered under "graduate awards" since, in addition to the stipend recieved, one's school fee is paid.

You need to ask the admin staff who tell you what work to do. We have no idea what job title they use for you. It could be anything.

As others have pointed out, if what you need is your official job title, yes, you'll have to try to pin someone down.  If you want a term that informally describes what you do, then Ébe Isaac's terms are helpful.  Also, lab assistant and teaching assistant.  It would help to know if your country is more influenced by the US or the UK.

@aparente001 My country is a part of the commonwealth so UK..

@MillardoPeacecraft - Suggestion: edit your question and add that information.  Also, if what you're looking for is an informal description, put that in your question too.

You should list whatever your official job title is, as designated by the university.  (If you aren't sure, ask whoever hired you.)  You should do this even if the title is vague or misleading, in which case you should add a few comments on your actual job duties.
One reason to stick to the exact title is CV verification.  Some employers (both academic and non-academic) actively verify CVs, and if they call up your university and ask whether you were employed at job X during a certain span of time, then it's best if they get a definitive "yes" rather than a "kind of" or "there's no such job title".  In particular, some universities care about distinctions between seemingly similar titles, such as teaching assistant and teaching fellow, so you should make sure you aren't inadvertently awarding yourself a title that your university considers fancier or fundamentally different.

The problem with this is.. my university isn't as organised as most. On the system I'm sure my title is simply put down as 'employee' or 'student employee', because the people in admin aren't concerned with these titles.

@MillardoPeacecraft: You could still list a vague title like this.  For example, on your CV you could write "Student employee, University of X" and then add a line of explanation like "Conducted weekly review sessions for Statistics 101, held office hours, and graded homework assignments."  That will at least give your official title (as recognized by the university) while still specifying what you actually did.

@MillardoPeacecraft your location will matter on this, but in first world countries generally some title will be listed on your employment contract, and that is the exact official title that you should use. Generally (again, jurisdiction matters) it would be an absolute mandatory legal requirement for employment that you (a) have a written contract and (b) it will include that title. It also may well be that you are performing some tasks in university as something-that's-not-employment and thus don't have a contract, but in that case it's not a job and should be just listed under your studies.

At my university, you would be a Teaching Assistant or TA. This would be true at other universities I am familiar with.

Whereas that term is hardly used at all in British universities and certainly isn't used in universities in non-Anglophone countries. We cannot possibly know what the asker's job title is, and posting guesses doesn't really achieve anything.

@DavidRicherby, I agree the question is vague as written and generally agree with the comments asking for more details.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
How to handle a colleague who hasn't pulled their weight
I'm working on a project with a partner that involves developing a mobile app and corresponding server. I won't bother with the specifics, but both involve a fair amount of work (both require some custom algorithms as well as thousands of lines of code). This project will serve as a final for one of our classes.
Originally, we agreed that I would write the server and he would write the mobile application. I stayed up for a couple nights straight and got together a working server in no time. He told me he was bogged down with papers/family life/etc., but he'd handle the client side.
About two weeks went by and still no progress had been made. I had some free time so I figured out how the app needs to be written (i.e. writing out the pseudocode and sketching wireframes). When another week went by and still no work had been done, I went ahead and wrote a good deal of the client code. My partner is also my friend and I trusted him when he told me he would do his part and he was just totally bogged down.
Now the project is due on Friday and I'm still the only one who's actually done anything. I find out today that he still has yet to write a single line of code because he's so busy (but not so busy that he couldn't go to a baseball game, a concert, and spend all of Friday night getting drunk).
I'm not sure how I want to approach the situation. Even if my partner finished the project on his own, I've still done 80%. I don't think its fair if he gets an A because I killed myself to do the work of two people. At the same time, if I tell the professor how little he's done, the professor will fail him (rightly so) and I will lose a friend.
How can I get the credit I deserve for my work without losing my friend? I feel like I have the Hobson's choice between getting credit for my work and keeping a friend.
EDIT: I did choose a specific answer as my accepted answer, but all of these answers are of really good quality. If you're having a problem similar to mine, I highly suggest reading through all of the answers here.

How can I get the credit I deserve for my work without losing my friend? I would think it would be difficult to accomplish both. Probably best to chalk this up as a lesson in choosing collaborators more carefully next time around.

What should i say to my professor? Which path should I take?

There is nothing good to be accomplished by saying anything at all to the professor. You will almost surely lower your own credibility, whether or not you also lower the credibility of your collaborator. E.g., the professor was not responsible for your choice of collaborator in the first place, and is also not obligated to believe you, and so on. Better to retain your dignity, and learn a lesson about choice of collaborators (as opposed to friends, etc.)

@paulgarrett That's true. But I'm in a quandary: do I take his word that today will be the day he finally writes some code? Or do I finish the project myself and discuss his lack of participation with the professor? I don't want to gamble my final grade on my friend's commitment to this project.

@ahjohnston25, as in my answer below: don't take his word, finish the project yourself. If your friend has already proven his unreliability, don't hope for a miracle. But/and don't try to "get justice" by talking to the prof. Nothing good can come of the latter. Have you received an injustice? Yes. Remediable in this life? No.

If your friend expects you to work for his grades, maybe he's not that good a friend after all. You don't need to discuss anything with the prof: just hand in your solution/documentation under your name alone; it's not up to you to decide how to deal with a slacker, that's the prof's job. Be fair and communicate that to your friend, though. If he's fair he'll go to the prof himself. Maybe he can get out of the thing as if he never even started.

The big take-home message here is that you shouldn't wait until just before the deadline before dealing with this kind of thing.

@DavidRicherby Normally I would have. Since the partner was my friend I just assumed that he would respect my time and our grade.

Why did you do the work he was supposed to? Along the same lines, if you are the kind of person who can and wants to do everything yourself, then why take on a partner? I mean, really, you shouldn't have done his work for him. Since it's a collaboration, you sink or swim as partners.

@MichaelMartinez I did the work because when my friend and partner says he's swamped I want to help him out. We were asked to take partners for the project given its size. I figured it'd be less "partner-like" to not help because I had completed my role.

@ahjohnston25: if you choose to "help" with his share of the load, then it means you choose to "help" him get an A, as well.

Ahh, group projects in college. Actually, what you will really learn from this is how the whole industry works: It will never be fair and you will most likely sometimes work much more than other guys, have a better solution and still have equal or less success than others. The thing is to suck it up and still concentrate on your own work: Will you be happy with your final product if you leave aside the struggle with your partner? The you should be happy and proud of yourself. And also: You are not alone on this one - Everyone had such projects at college, I guess

Our shared project at university allowed you to enter at the end what % of the project was done by who. There was some negotiation at the end and actually the guys who did less were perfectly happy to have a lower percentage

You don't do favors. You collect debts.

When students come to me with problems like these, I very rarely just take the side of the active student against the "lazy" one.
If you work in a group, you're both responsible when the dynamic doesn't work. And keeping the group dynamic healthy is something every student should learn. I know how difficult it is, I've been both the lazy student and the active one.
It may feel to you like there's nothing you possibly could've done. But that's never true. You started the project by immediately splitting the work load, and reducing the level of necessary communication to a bare minimum. He took the easy half, because he was busy. When his work started to lag behind, you began to write specifications for him.
All this combined probably sapped his motivation. Every step along the way took the challenge out of his part, while he still had those thousands of lines of code to get through. Meanwhile you felt like you were doing more than your share, but you were getting things done, and things that you designed, problems you solved.
In a healthy project, you communicate and you meet often. You don't divide the workload to minimize communication, you use your shared expertise and you design together. That way, you both stay motivated, because you both feel like it's still your project.
What you're doing now is focusing on everything that he could be doing differently. That may be the fair option (cause you're doing all the work), but it's not a productive option, cause that's not a dimension you control. You should be asking yourself what you could've done differently. It may feel unfair, but it's something you can actually implement, so you'll feel a lot less powerless.
Anyway, that's a lesson for the next project. For this one, I'd say remain detached. It's not your responsibility to make sure John learns something, and you'll get the same grade either way. Talk to him, tell him you're unhappy with the way the project's gone and ask if you could've done anything differently to get him more motivated. Let him know you don't expect to be working with him on future project and you're better off as friends than as collaborators.
Just make sure you don't get angry with him. Anger might've been productive halfway down the project, but you're too late now.

Thank you. This might not have been the answer I wanted, but it was definitely the one I needed to hear.

I do like this answer... but I would hesitate to add, don't get angry with the friend if this is a solitary occurrence. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. People make choices. He's chosen concerts and drinks over other commitments. If this is a one time occurrence, okay: it's a mistake and bad communication. If this has happened before - inside or outside of this class - it's now a pattern of irresponsibility. Either way, this can contain a valuable lesson outside of course-work.

@WernerCD, I guess at that point whether to be angry or not becomes more of a personal choice on the friendship level than a tool to help the collaboration. It depends a lot on what that kind of confrontation means to you personally. Nevertheless, people are always more likely to look outward for problems than inward. That's a known cognitive bias, and it helps to look out for it.

@Peter Definitely. Again, I like this answer - it actually focuses on "YOUR" part and improving the next situation from  your end. Also, anger is subjective and would depend on person and circumstance. I see some similarities to lending money to family - what do you do when it goes wrong? You have to decide what is more important - the money or family. In this case, the friendship or the grade. Do you get angry or forgive (and forget the money/grade)? Or brush this off in name of framily? My point was trying to simply be: don't let this be a pattern of bad things if you forgive and move on.

Good answer. When I read a question like this, I think, why are you in a situation where you're asking "How to handle a colleague who hasn't pulled their weight" instead of "How to handle a colleague who isn't pulling their weight"

This is great and applies across the disciplines.

Terrible answer. Divide and conquer is how to you solve problems. Minimizing the communication is important because the communication is frequently the least efficient part of any development process. In the real world, everyone has to be able to complete (at least most) subtasks without hand-holding.

Do not attempt to talk to the prof about it, as in my comment above. There are too many ways that that could go wrong for all of you, and surely not giving "satisfaction", such as it would be, to you.
The goal of not having someone get credit for a thing they didn't earn is dubious for fairly obvious reasons, and even though it's more understandable that you'd not want someone else to "get credit" for something you did, in overtime, ... the situation of collaboration with a partner chosen by you tends to put you in a situation of having little ground to stand on. And the rest of your life will provide you with very many more examples of people aiming for, and receiving, more credit than they earn.
Lesson: good friends are not necessarily good collaborators. Indeed, in the future, consider that a botched collaboration might ruin a friendship, thus, do not hastily choose collaborators from among friends. (Pity, I know...)
The possibility that you get less credit than you earned is also just a presagement of many events. Although one should generally avoid such situations, especially if one has bills to pay and such, it is unavoidable... So keep your internally-generated stress level as low as possible, even while recognizing the failings of many people... e.g., one's friends.

I had a similar experience in a programming course. My partner started to claim to have some problems doing it, so when I finished my part, he decided I should take part of his task. After a few iterations, he was left with a quite trivial piece of code, plus the documentation (easy, but boring).
Long story short, I ended up doing it all by myself. For orthogonal reasons, the relationship with my friend was quite delicate, so a frontal confrontation would have been messy. Instead, I submitted it without making comments, but every file had the auto-generated header including author:@David. A few days later, the lecturer asked me why was this, and I just explained what happened.
In retrospect, my handling was not so good, as I didn't try hard enough to solve the problem before the deadline was biting. But it is too late now. If he is your friend, and you want to keep it, you should talk to him first, don't let the problem rot. Now you have to decide if he has enough time to make it up to you, or if you should inform the grader (together) and reach an agreement (for example, split the grade).

For convenience, let us refer to your friend as "John."
As a friend of John, you should be gracious
in accepting his personal failings, mistakes and idiosyncrasies.
At the same time, that does not preclude that you should deal justly with him.
As I see it, here are your two choices:

If you are lenient with John on this occasion,
perhaps in the future John may do something similar in his workplace,
where the consequences are more severe.
On the other hand, if you do what is right
by telling your professor what has happened,
then John may fail the class.
However, he could always take it again, and learn it properly the second time.
If John is a man of good character,
he would respect you more as a friend than before;
but if he is not,
such a friend is not worth having, in my opinion.

One of the most important things for a young man/woman to learn
is that "for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
In other words, "for every action there is a consequence."
Finally, the movie The Emperor's Club may be relevant.
Very briefly, Kevin Kline plays a teacher
who decides to change grades to favor a student, but later regrets his decision.

I personally would be too alone for my tastes if I lost all the friends that would respect me less if I made them retake a class. :)

Aside from anything else you should check your institution's code on plagiarism. If you submit the work jointly when you literally did every single part of it, then you might be guilty of a serious infraction (helping your friend to cheat the assignment) for which you would be held responsible if caught.
Best outcome is probably if you can persuade your friend to do one of:

contribute significant work to the project right now, even if it's inevitably less than half, so that it is at least a joint project as required.
take his name off the project and accept the fail. Maybe that means you've done a project solo when it was supposed to be a group assignment, which might mean you fail too so check the rules on that. If collaboration was supposed to be an important part of the assignment, then whoever is to blame you have in point of fact not completed that part (and for that matter arguably you wouldn't have seriously collaborated even if he'd done his end, since the first thing the pair of you did was split the project in two).

I don't think its fair if he gets an A because I killed myself to do
  the work of two people

With respect, you created that situation when you went significantly past 50% of the work. It's not fair, but it's how group assignments work. It also wouldn't be fair if you did 50%, he did 20% and you got a bad grade because the project was incomplete. I think (although I'm not sure) that the purpose of group assignments in part is to teach you a lesson along the lines of how important it is to develop the ability to persuade others to get some freaking work done. A lesson that you have hopefully learned and therefore deserve the grade.

At least at my institution, the plagiarism rules are very unclear in this situation for the person doing the work; Sufficiently unclear that I ended up going to a student ombudsman when faced with an almost identical challenge.

Some people are just lazy, there is nothing we can do. Good friends do not always make the best study mates. And in cases like yours, you really can see how a friend can be irresponsible and leecher. My advice to you is, let this be a lesson to you. Do not talk about this to your professor and you get your deserved grade while he gets his undeserved grade.
And this nice lesson will result in the fact that you will always choose the people that you are going to do a project with much more carefully.

Different people have different activity curves. Some plan to distribute the load evenly over the time remaining, others prefer to sprint doing everything in the last 24 hours without sleep.
Students with very different activity curves may both study with success, but they are not well suitable for working in a single group.
The "sprinter" also gets into nasty situation, staying without the necessary communication and cooperation during these last hot hours, because the "careful planner" is not ready (or even not capable of) the enormous burst of activity very close to the deadline. This is likely to happen, have your coffee maker ready then.
Attempts to do part of the partner task almost never work in the intended way. Trust. Wait.
You can try, this time, to adapt to your friend. For a single time, everything is a good experience. If this is something really not for you, simply avoid the shared projects later.

I don't think this has been said yet but.. if I was a teacher knowing that one of the student did all the job, I would fail both, because we are in university and what is evaluated is not only the capacity to solve the submitted problem, but also the team cohesion and capacity to collaborate efficiently.
Actually, studies about group dynamics show it is not so simple to have every team member do his share, and the more members they are in the group, the higher is the probability that some of them will hardly do a tiny part of the job.
From another point of view, I would suggest you to reconsider the problem, because you are in the perspective "It is unfair that we get the same grade when I am the only one who actually did something", and you are too focused on the grade and work acknowledgment... But you did not come to university only to get good grades and being acknowledged, right? Your main goal is to learn. If possible learn things that will be useful in your professional life. Be happy, you just learned a lot about group dynamics, and that friends are not always the best colleagues, and since you did all the work for two people, you probably also learned a lot on what you are currently studying and will probably get a better grade than your friend in final exams because you practiced a lot more than him.
Now getting back to the point, when I was in junior high, I had to make a presentation with 3 colleagues. I did my part, but they just printed some encyclopedia extracts. Then the teacher said that my work was worth a 20 while theirs were worth a 0, and that since it was a supposed to be a teamwork, he would take the average. As a result we all got a 5. This is the reason why I don't think anything good will happen if the teacher figures out that you actually did all the job.
Plus it is always better to keep an ace up one's sleeve, so I'd say nothing, submit the work as is if had been done by both, and wait for the result. If the teacher figures out by himself or you get a low grade, you can still explain things afterward. If you both get a good grade, don't feel like it is unfair, because you got more than the grade you deserved (since you got the job done without actually managing to work as a team), and as for your friend, try to be happy for him, managing to get credit for something he did not do, but keep the whole story in mind, you don't know what life will bring, maybe there will be an occasion for him to repay you later in another domain, taking you to the airport or helping you when moving from your former house to a new one.. etc.

Honestly, college students are terrible project managers, so most group projects are done by a single person anyway.  Usually the strongest student (or the one who cares the most) realizes it's easier to do all the work themselves than to prod the others to do their share.
I would just do all the work yourself, because class projects kind of have to be designed so that it's possible to work individually.  At this point you're much more familiar with the codebase than he is, so it will be much easier for you to write the client than him.
If you still feel bad about it, remember that you got much more out of this class than he did.  Next time you have to write a nontrivial piece of software, you will be better at it because of the work you did in this class.  Not to mention job interviews are coming up, and it's much easier to talk convincingly about a project if you were the one who did most of it.
(By the way, I recently had the opposite problem, where my partner and I were fighting over who got to do all the work, because we were required to work in teams, and both of us wanted the practice.  Sometimes I did the homework sets without telling him because otherwise he would have done them first.)

For you got much more out of this class than he did and you will be better at it because of the work you did in this class. This answer tells why homework is important.

Not enough information:

which year are you in, and how much grade does this count for, and how important is the class?
would failing be a minor issue, or cause major GPA damage, or to lose a summer internship, recommendation for grad school, or what are the $$$ consequences?
are you honestly telling us you didn't know anything about your friend's work ethic until now?  What was his track record on previous projects? Did you ask?
don't pick a friend as a project partner, unless you personally know them to be reliable.
different colleges, courses and professors have different mechanisms for handling the team dynamic, giving credit, handling denunciations and members flaking out. Some professors do handle this situation, others don't want the headache of intervening, or they figure this acts as an early first real-world lesson. Usually the TAs (or admin staff) know the deal. You should have found out what the general procedure is - at the start, when you're choosing team-members, not at the 11th hour. (Expect the best, plan for the worst)

Anyway, my reactions:

sounds like you could have completed this all as an individual project. (Once you realized you could, why on earth didn't you? And don't email or give him the code or wireframes, dammit. Unless you're using SCM, in which case make sure your 'Author:' name appears on all your checkins)
when you agreed milestones and your friend started not delivering, you should have warned him you would remove his name from the team by (date) if he did not deliver (milestone). And actually meant it. Early on, would have been more credible. Constantly kicking your teammate's ass to do basic work is no fun.
anyway now you're at this late stage. Find out how the professor/course/college handles such situations. But let's assume they don't get involved.
this is important: you also learned something about your own judgment, and specifically, when taking teammates, be more skeptical and discerning, ask questions, sit back and observe whether they take responsibility, schedule stuff, manage communication, deliver it. Or just go and get drunk. Be ready to fire a team-member. Have a fallback. Learn what would happen in the extreme case you couldn't find a suitable teammate, or had to submit as an individual project.
if you had fired the guy in week two and submitted the entire working thing as an individual project, I really can't see why you wouldn't get an A/A+. You're not obligated to carry him.

I'm not sure how I want to approach the situation. Even if my partner
  finished the project on his own, I've still done 80%. I don't think
  its fair if he gets an A because I killed myself to do the work of two
  people. At the same time, if I tell the professor how little he's
  done, the professor will fail him (rightly so) and I will lose a
  friend.
How can I get the credit I deserve for my work without losing my
  friend? I feel like I have the Hobson's choice between getting credit
  for my work and keeping a friend.

well yes, but you got yourself into this situation, and learned a crucial life lesson. You do have to make that choice. It will depend in part on how significant this grade is. Unless he's a tool, I don't see that he'd stop being your friend, but if he did, he's evidently not that good a friend.

Yes you do have to make that decision now. Decision time. So: decide which is more important to you? Fill in the blanks for us.

going forward, a more pragmatic expectation of human behavior on teams is that a large fraction of people will be lazy, bad communicators, well-intentioned but not very good, or just suck up your productivity for a variety of reasons etc. So: think ahead, plan accordingly, communicate clearly, document who did what, anticipate dependencies, deal with unacceptable behavior.

Thanks for your answer. To answer some of your questions, failing would be detrimental, i met him through research work (which he's always been very reliable on). I used Git so I have records of everything I created and when. I didnt kick him off immediately because i figured he'd be decent enough to eventually do his part.

I also dont recommend talking to the prof, but if you do, I suggest being smart about how you tackle the subject by instead working from a constructive angle.
For example, go in asking how to motivate someone to deliver their best work. Or ask how they (professor) handled working with people who cant pull their own weight.


text:
Grad school with 2.62 EE GPA. Does self study help?
I'm highly interested in going to grad school in electromagnetics (eventually a Ph.D.) but for various reasons, most of which are my fault, and some aren't, I graduated with a horrible GPA. In short, my transcript sucks.
My initial attempt to get around this was that if that I do extra-curricular research that is impressive/relevant enough, it will at some point outweigh the GPA and let someone consider working with me.
I volunteered at a professor's lab for a year (not interested in his field, but it was the best opportunity I found). I studied on my own for an average of 4hrs/day on online grad course material for about 2 years and can say that I now have a somewhat solid understanding of the field, comfortable reading and understanding published papers, wrote my FDTD solver, as well as other self-study projects that are directly relevant to the field. Left my full time software job after 2 years to fully devote myself to this cause because I didn't want to waste more time.
After almost 3 years from graduation, I started contacting potential supervisors but never heard back positively (aside from a professor stating that her work is Chemistry and not EE based and stating that my background is "super interesting" which might be just a compliment.)
My question is, will this approach get me anywhere? I'm confident that my background in the field will consistently get better the more I keep doing this, but what if it is a dead-end as far as graduate admissions are concerned?
EDIT (with GRE information):
My GRE scores are slightly above average, 158 quant. and 156 verbal.
I did pretty awesome at my job, in fact I was called the "brightest person in the company" by my supervisor, and the "smartest person in the team" by a VP. That team including two fellow classmates that graduated with distinction.
However, I quit because I felt I was wasting my life doing something I didn't like. I tried getting a job exactly my field of interest (electromagnetics/optics) but I wasn't successful.
The push for grad school is because I believe my horrible grades are not a reflection of my ability, and are at least partly due to mistakes that I have learned from. The other part is rampant cheating and serious unprofessionalism on part of some of the professors, but I don't like stressing that part as I believe owning my mistakes is far better than blaming others.
I truly find myself in doing research work, contributing to the field I like, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

Why such a push for grad school--why is it even a target? Do you have a job? Can you put your efforts, interests into your career? Some people are mediocre students but great in the work world. 2. How were your GRE scores? If high, than at least you might be able to claim aptitude.

See How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions?.

This scientist's blog has a worthwhile perspective on why "good students" aren't always the best people for a lab.

The push for grad school is because I believe my horrible grades are not a reflection of my ability — That’s a terrible reason to go to grad school. — I truly find myself in doing research work — Much much better.

I was in a similar situation - my undergrad GPA was low but I wanted to pursue a PhD. I enrolled in a professional master's program in my field (CS) and got involved in research. I did this by first taking an individual study with a professor I was interested in working with, and proving my value. The next semester I received a research assistantship with this lab. I made sure to maintain an excellent GPA in my master's coursework and first authored a conference paper. Now I've received two admits to very respectable CS PhD programs. Moral of the story: there is always another path

Grad school with a 2.62

You may need to accept grad school is not in your future.  At least not in your near future.  Exactly why do you want to go to grad school?  Have you considered starting a company working in a field you're passionate about?
If you really want to go to grad school, here is what I'd do.
1) Stay at your current company and get raises and promotions.  Be sure to stay in touch with everyone who praised your work.
2) Make sure you have a very concrete reason why your GPA will be a lot higher.  Having a few good semesters won't cancel out years of bad grades.
3) Get your company to pay for it
4) Make sure your GREs are AWESOME!

Poor grades aren't just an indicator of lack of ability. It also means a lack of preparation. I would worry that you'd be in over your head in grad-school courses, because you didn't learn the fundamentals as an undergrad. You have picked quite a difficult area too.
The good news is, in your area of interest there is plenty need for experimentalists who operate the hardware and build things, even if they didn't learn a thing in Calc III or whatever. So you really should be able to find such jobs in a research lab. If you haven't found one you need to keep looking. Though if you are restricting yourself to a certain location, plus insisting on a research job in specific area, your chances of getting it are nearly zero no matter who you are and what your grades were. That's just how the job market works. You need to be flexible somewhere and keep at it. Applying to hundreds of places is quite common.
A job as research assistant or similar in a research lab will set you up nicely for a grad school application, with research experience to talk about as well as a recommendation.
Another tip is you can often take classes through an open university program at your local public university. Rack up some good grades there.
By the way, in my opinion working on projects independently is generally a pretty bad way to learn a subject. The tendency will always be to follow a path of least resistance to getting things working. You start out trying to do "A" but veer into doing "A-prime", seemingly the same thing (to a novice), but actually much easier because you already know a lot more of what you need. And you never will get past the deep divide that blocked you from "A" without being dragged kicking-and-screaming through it by the inflexibility of a real class.


text:
Cutoff for a paper "in progress" on CV
I currently work at a research org, and will be applying to PhD programs soon. For my CV, I am a co-author on a few publications that I'll be able to add, but have been recommended to add some in-progress or under review reports.
While "under review" is pretty straightforward, I'm curious what the cutoff should be for a report that is "in progress"? I have some projects that still have a year remaining, but we've written roughly half of the report. For others, we have less time remaining but have only written the introduction, or something like that. I'm guessing people will have very different opinions here, looking forward to seeing what you all think.

I came across some CVs that used the term in preparation.

I haven't done this (but am very curious, +1), but my intuition would have been only to list it once the draft is being circulated regularly.

the only danger is they may ask to see a manuscript.

@FuzzyLeapfrog is that considered different from "In progress"? And the same question still applies, about the cutoff point...

@Blaise I don't know what any of the other users of the term in preparation were thinking. In my working group, we used it whenever a text, i.e. the real text of the publication, was structured and partly written and when we could estimate how long it would take from this point to the submission/finalisation.

@FuzzyLeapfrog that's the most useful clarification I've heard so far. Thanks!

As an applicant to a PhD program, you want to demonstrate that you have been involved in projects that have lead to publishable results. It is common in my field (let's call it neuroscience today), for junior researchers to list in prep manuscripts. As to what constitutes an in prep manuscript, you should list anything that has a large enoguh scope that you can confidentially discuss the research methods, results, analysis, conclusions and implications. If you can do that, it doesn't matter if you have anything written (although if you are that far along, you should be writing it up).

But for a long-term research project (say a 4 year evaluation of a STEM job training program), you might be 2 years and nine months into it, have written a decent amount of the final report, and done more than half of the total work, but you can't actually speak to final results/conclusions/implications yet. This isn't exactly my scenario, but is more the example that I was thinking of because it is similar. It is truly "in progress" in the literal sense of the phrase.

“As an applicant to a PhD program, you want to demonstrate that you have been involved in projects that have lead to publishable results” — Really? Is this a requirement nowadays? Shocking.

In principle you could list any unfinished manuscript which you can immediately show if requested.
However, be careful. This is highly dependent on local culture and practice. I have included two manuscripts "in prep" to my online CV prior to applying to a PhD position. I was recommended to do so by a senior friend and colleague. I think overall it was advantageous, though surely there will always be someone who will not see that with good eyes.
So, to make sure, ask around trusted senior colleagues. If you believe you have "enough" published papers, I'd recommend not officially listing any under preparation, though you may mention their existence more noncommittally.

Perhaps - Unless you know that a report/work has been accepted for publication, I would not suggest listing it. However for work in progress that has some sort of verifiable references (grant's, fellowships), consider making a stand-alone section named something like: "Research in Progress", and here I would suggest making a table of Sponsors, and the title of the actual program, followed by the estimated due date. However if you decide to include this information block, it may accidentally confuse your reader if they are considering you for a job, as they may consider you will be overloaded with work. So, an alternative would be to NOT include any in-progress work as you don't want to put your efforts at risk for the goal you are seeking just to pad your resume. Both options are workable. It depends upon the situation. Good luck.


text:
PhD without Enrolling in Formal Program
I am in the USA. Did a BS and MS in Computer Science years ago.
Is it possible to do a PhD without enrolling in a formal program?
Currently I get small breaks of free time (between work and helping an elderly parent), and I'm using it to do self-directed programming projects to determine what I am truly interested in researching.
Any guidance is most appreciated.

How would you "do" it, in that case? Are you interested in simply learning a very specific topic very deeply, or do you want to actually get a doctorate out of it?

@msanford Both. Learn a specific topic very deeply and get doctorate.

Have you considered a part time PhD program?

I have difficulty envisioning a situation in which a university would be willing to bestow a PhD on a student that doesn't have a formal relationship with the university. What you are probably looking for a is part-time doctoral program, which would seem to suit your needs.

@msanford I dunno. At least in Germany, the only formal requirement is to present and defend a thesis. In practice, of course, there are several bureaucratic and intellectual hurdles. But this has definitely been done before. Practically finding a supervisor who’d play along might be hard but far from impossible.

Not in the US, but in many other countries.

There are some dodgy on-line "universities" where you pay them money, and they give you a "degree" based on "life experience".  Yes, even a Ph.D. degree.  This is not a good idea.

@GEdgar No dodgy business ..... a pure, heartfeld PhD

I think this is very unlikely, but it would depend on the educational resources that you have access to. If you have a local university you should talk to them and maybe to one or two faculty members there as well as the department head. I assume that your relocation options are currently limited, so that is where to start. If you have a lot to contribute they may make something possible, but expect it to take a long time. But it will likely require a formal relationship.
On the other hand, there are places at which the on-site requirements are short term. You might have to spend weekends (or one or two a month, at least) at a university remote from you. Such programs aren't part-time, however. It is just that most of the work, even team work, is done remotely. This might be a better option for you, though the travel costs (time and money) might not be small. They can also be just as intense as a residential program.
Some of these programs, while they are doctorates, may not be PhD programs, though. They may require the same level of research or not. They may or may not be suitable as the basis of an Academic career. They may be intended as more practical/applications based than theory based.
An online search might turn up something that interests you.
However, if you seek a career in Academia in the US, you almost certainly need a doctorate that the NSF recognizes as a Research Doctorate. Anything that isn't may get you a job initially, depending on the market, but you will very possibly run in to trouble when it comes time to apply for tenure.

No. At some point, you would need to formally enroll to complete your PhD.
Some universities allow students to "preview" graduate school by taking graduate-level courses without entering graduate programs. For example, Texas Tech allows students to be classified as "Graduate Temporary". However, programs such a these often have limits about the number of credits one can complete and how these credits may be applied to doctoral program course requirements.
If you want to see if you like research, I suggesting finding a professor whose research looks interesting to you and offering to volunteer with a research project.

I have difficulty envisioning a situation in which a university would be willing to bestow a PhD on a student that doesn't have a formal relationship with the university.
Another aspect to consider is funding. I find it equally hard to imagine a granting agency that would fund an individual who is not formally enrolled in a program (though you may be able to find one).
What you are probably looking for a is part-time doctoral program, which would seem to suit your needs. You might have fewer funding opportunities for a part-time program, though.

On this part

[...] self-directed programming projects to determine what I am truly interested in researching

Definitely a good place to start! I would suggest you also read academic journals in computer science in the field you think interests you in order to get a feel for what more advanced research into computer science (which differs from implementation) looks like, if you're not already familiar with it.
And though this may be obvious, given the context of the question I'd just add that what you are interested in is only part of the equation.
A doctorate is about contributing something new to the corpus of knowledge of a given field. Certainly do find a topic that interests you, but it ought to be a topic that you can contribute to as well.

There are a few countries (with respectable universities) where you can receive a PhD without formally enrolling in a PhD program, but not in the US AFAIK:

In Germany, you CAN do a doctorate by work. You need a supervisor in a university, but there are not many formal requirements, as long as you can convince the supervisor that you'll finish a PhD dissertation by work (see the section on "Doing a doctorate in industry").
In Japan, you can do a PhD by dissertation (ronbun-hakushi). That is, you submit a dissertation, go through the defense process, and get a PhD if the committee accepts it. This used to be more common, but it seems less common now.

Of course, there are part-time PhD programs in the US which require you to spend very little time on campus, and I know a bunch of people who are enrolled and on track to their PhDs. But the key here is that you need to be enrolled.

The situation differs in different countries as already highlighted. I'd like to stress some further issues.
You need an advisor
Even if you don't enrol for now (which might give your prospective advisors bad vibes, my feelings are that US PhD programmes are quite formalistic), you need someone to guide, council, and, well, supervise you.
The choice on an advisor is important. It's arguably even more important as choice of the subfield.
Your advisor should be aware of your situation and be able to factor it in.
It's a risk
All the formal things (coordinates programmes, supervision agreements (Betreuungsvereinbarung, a relatively new thing in Germany), graduate schools) serve (or at least are thought to serve) for the benefit of the PhD candidate. If you have firmly defined, that you need, say, 3 papers to graduate, your supervisor cannot force you to write 5 papers without letting you graduate.
Further, some kind of a formal status at the university may mean access to hardware and labs, travel funding, supervising student projects, actual positions, etc.
I understand, why you would like to have "no strings attached" in your situation. But the situation itself is already a risk for a PhD project. You (and your supervisor) need to be aware that it might take you longer than a full-time student that is not forced to any teaching and spends 12 hours a day in the lab.
Basically, if you do your PhD part-time, you need to divide the 3-4-5 years needed for the degree by the time share you do research.
To give you a concrete example: At the beginning of my scientific career I was working 3 days a week at an unrelated programming job and was trying to do my PhD the remaining 4 days a week. I was in this mode for 2 years, during which I did around 30% of my PhD. (The "breaking in" might be a factor, you need to become proficient in the subarea you are working on. But it's definitely not only this factor.) Then, I got a thrid-party funded research position. In the next 2,5 years I did the remaining 70% of my PhD. The first phase could be even seen as some kind of a preparation for the PhD, but the main contribution was done in the second phase. Insert your numbers and estimates and do your calculations.
I stress again, that not only you, but also your advisor need to be very clearly aware of this.

I don't think you can do it the way you envision it: studying outside a university context and expecting a university to give you a PhD on that basis. If that was possible, you might be able to wrangle PhDs from multiple universities on the basis of one thesis.
However, you can achieve both parts of your goal.

You can study anything you like, and think about anything you like, to any depth. This satisfies your desire to engage in a deep-learning exercise.
If you are outstanding in your field, universities sometimes confer honorary degrees. Here's an example:

Gates, who dropped out of Harvard and co-founded Microsoft Corp. to become the world’s richest person, stopped off at his former stomping grounds to collect an honorary law degree.
  - Reuters, "Dropout Bill Gates returns to Harvard for degree"