Incidentally, in my experience the only group that is routinely graded on anything like a proper, strict curve is law students. Yes, even in NA, and even though a lot of people in NA are told they’re being graded on a curve.
The effect you noticed is most likely that students from NA are self-oriented arseholes…
Generalize much?
Back on the topic of cutthroat competition …
The MBA program I attended in the '80s was characterized by routine vandalism of library materials and rampant hoarding of whatever scarce assets were needed to complete assignments.
This was long before the internet made it practical to provide unlimited unstealable supplies of materials.
In any game where the vast majority of the rewards accrue to the top few percent, many people will do anything to move themselves into, and others out of, that top few percent. The coursework area as such (med, law, MBA, architecture) has nothing to do with it.
What I cannot comprehend is the people in this thread who assert that somehow undetected cheating does not benefit the cheater. How could it not?
I can readily agree that comparing two situations, one where nobody cheats and one where everybody cheats to the same degree, could result in no gains for any of the cheaters. But that’s not the situation anyone seems to be positing.