That's what Stephen Baker asks after a colleague brings up the subject:
A colleague who came into my office (to give me yet another math book) talked about how he used to cheat in high school math. He described networks of collaborators playing a daring game. It sounded much like the current ideals of education: People forming spontaneous teams and turning work into games.
Cheating is all too often used as a blanket term to discredit activity that teachers don't understand. What some teachers label as cheating is really an attempt by students to make their work more exciting, social, and engaging.
People naturally self-organize in groups, divide work amongst themselves, and collaboratively assemble and refine the results of that work. That is more authentic than being assigned to groups, or working in artificial isolation.
Really, where's the benefit in giving 30 students the identical assignment and telling them each to complete it individually? They will find ways to make that approach less mundane and unnatural, and the experience they get from working together is much more applicable to the way they'll work in the real world.
Link to original post