On Cheating

A friend of mine got surprised and shocked after learning that the app I was using to practice my typing skills wasn’t tracking my hand movement to ensure I wasn’t cheating by using the fingers I wasn’t supposed to be using.

A lot of people make the same mistake. They think people cheat if it’s easy to cheat.

But that’s not really the case when you’re trying to improve or learn something. Because incentive shifts from beating others to knowledge, at which point it becomes pointless to cheat. (Because, after all, you’d be cheating yourself.)

So if you worry about cheaters, remove the scoring system, and the problem will go away. This should work well for schools, apps, companies, and even games.