From Cheating to Signaling

So, are you saying that there aren't enough students "good enough" to cheat off of?

Are you arguing that cheating is hard enough that students who would do a good job mostly find it more rewarding to simply learn the material?

"The reason, rather, is that most cheaters are incompetent cheaters."

How do you know? Could it be that you just don't know about the competent ones because they are competent?

It also assumes that one can't learn anything by cheating. Which probably isn't true.

As a High School teacher, I tell my students before each test "If you are going to cheat sit next to someone smart, not your friend you are sitting next to now". The cheaters usually dont get it but the smart ones give an acknowledging smile.

FredR - that's exactly correct. Cheaters you know about are, tautologically, bad cheaters.

Yeah, but what if education is mostly about productivity but employers can't measure it very well, at least not when they're choosing among who to hire, and they're also firing-averse? In that scenario, I'd expect cheating. Education being about building human capital vs. signaling, and employers being able to measure productivity easily vs. not, are separable.

"The reason, rather, is that most cheaters are incompetent cheaters."

At least, the ones you've caught ...

It's a big world out there, and there are a whole bunch of people, a lot of them East of Suez, who are currently devoting a lot of IQ points and energy to figuring out how to game American academic tests. At this point, my money is on the gamers, not on the American academics, who mostly grew up in a more naive time and culture.

As other commenters have mentioned, there is an obvious selection bias when considering cheaters who have been caught. Only a small proportion of cheaters need be successful in order for the top ranks to comprise mostly cheaters. This applies to academics, sports, politics, and many other arenas.

Also, if cheating were rarely successful, the righteous indignation we observe would be very difficult to explain.

Is it that many cheaters are incompetent cheaters, or that only incompetent students attempt to cheat?

Ccheating is a more complicated topic than you might think.

In college, in classes I thought then (and now) to be irrelevent except they were required for a degree, I took lots of short cuts. None "cheating" in the formal sense. But if you read only 10% of the assigned reading and attend only 2/3 the classes, it's hard to claim you've applied yourself. And when you still get an A, it implies:
1. The class was a waste of time.
2. The competition was incompetent, period.

The cheater also has to assume the risk of getting caught and receiving an F.

Plagiarism is much easier these days than it was when I was in college. Detecting plagiarism, through commercial services like TurnItIn, has also gotten much easier. In courses that require term papers or a lot of writing, the instructor doesn't necessarily even need TurnItIn. Simply take a few random sentences out of the paper and google for them.

...cheating on exams would be pointless if the human capital model were the whole truth.

Now, note that the existence of cheating doesn't tell us anything at all about the question of interest. Whether or not education actually imparts any human capital, it's equally useful to spoof the scores that (people believe to) measure it.