In the team's analysis, three clusters emerged: One group of students solved the problems about 10 minutes after the problem first popped up, another answered a day or two later, and a third typically answered correctly in about a minute. Because the online system presents problems one at a time, it precludes working out all of the answers ahead of time and entering them all at once.

"Our first reaction was "Wow, we must have some geniuses at MIT'," Pritchard says. The team soon realized that the answers in this quick-solving group were entered faster than the time it takes students to read the question, raising suspicions that these students had a cheat sheet of copied answers.

[...]

In the study, the heaviest copiers were male, and although most of the students in the classes were freshmen and had yet to declare a major, subsequent analyses turned up an interesting trend: "Copying homework is a leading indicator of becoming a business major," Pritchard says.

Cue that kossack sig: "A career criminal is just a sociopath who never saw the value of getting good grades and going on to business school."

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.