Can you expand on (your understanding of) the Russian attitude? For example: are stealing and murdering similarly things you do if you can get away with them? If not, what makes cheating different?

It is a broader cultural thing. Are cheating and corruption accepted throughout your society? Or is integrity considered important? There are some advantages to living in a society where you can trust authorities and people to do their job properly and know how to do it. Would you be comfortable getting an open heart surgery if the surgeon may have cheated his way through med school?

Stealing and murdering harms actual human beings and it is definitely immoral. Stealing from an abstract (particularly private) legal entity is (morally) fair game. Not all exams are seen as equally important, obviously. Important subjects are more heavily curated, obviously, but I would not see it as immoral to try to cheat on them - just futile.

Integrity as in blindly following the rules is naïve. Integrity as in loyalty and keeping your word is important.

Do you find it strange that Americans, most of whom with absolutely no connection to the area, donated millions of dollars to help the victims of the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria?

@AlexanderWoo No, but it seems irrelevant. Regardless, I find it that if you have more money than you can spend than perhaps there there is nothing wrong with "feel good" philanthropy...

Please note that there is no such thing as "the West" in a any homogeneous sense, so it's rather pointless to ask a question about "Western universities". E.g., from my experience in German acamedia, the situation that you describe in Russia appears to me to be quite dysfunctional. But at the same time I find the attitude that some people from the US on this site sometimes express towards cheating, overly moralizing and a bit bewildering. (I've never been to Russia or to the US myself, though, so I don't know how representative anything of this is.)

You should add some examples of what exactly you consider cheating, because without that the question is very vague. For example, breaking into a lecturer's office to obtain a copy of the exam would be cheating? What about bribing a lecturer to give you the answers beforehand? it is unclear to me what would be cheating in Russia.

@IamCleaver cheating is lying and lying is the opposite of "keeping your word".

@Dr.Snoopy I was specifically vague because I don't condone the behaviour. Completely understand why universities do no want to encourage it. I just don't see a moral component to it. But I was talking about using your phone to Google answers, prepare notes, get someone else to help you with homework etc. As a teacher I would totally be trying to prevent such practices, but I wouldn't go ballistic if I catch a student. At worst, I would disqualify the work if the cheating is too cheaky. I had experience working as a teacher's assistant in grad school and that os what we had to do....

...I was fully aware that my students were trying to cheat and I lowered there score if they did it too cheekily. In the last year of my bachelor's course one guy turned in a paper that had 4% originality, so the professor gave him the lowest score for it.

@henning Cheating isn't lying, and I don't remember promising anybody not to cheat

I think it would be helpful if the people who downvote (three so far) pointed out their objections. As I said in my previous comment, I think the question would become much better without the framing regarding "Western universities" - but I haven't downvoted since I think it is an important and interesting question what causes different attitudes towards cheating in different countries, societes, or (sub)cultures.

I think this question can be improved if it notes whether there is any difference between "official" and "unofficial" policies. Is the OP stating that the official line is that universities do not promote cheating, but they accept it anyways?

@JochenGlueck Knowing a lot about the Russian culture I can say that THERE IS such thing as "the West" from Russian viewpoint. It is people in "the West" who can see the subtle differences between Germany, Italy or USA. Or within USA. Russians are so much different culture that "the West" is easy to get collected together.

It seems that this question might be better inverted to focus on the outlier data point: why does Russian school culture (under the assumptions of this question) seem to uniquely embrace cheating, when every other place on Earth considers it a major violation of trust?

@DanielR.Collins it is pretty much not limited to schools.

Reddit kicked you out for "promoting cheating"???

A large part of this is general cultural attitudes, not specific to academia, and might also be well addressed to an Anthropology Q&A site, if such existed.

This is actually a very good question, and I'm surprised it hasn't been asked on this site before. The asked is Russian, but someone from China (or many other countries) could easily have the same point of view. It is a fact that ethical values differ across cultures. Every culture views cheating as wrong, but exactly how wrong varies extremely widely. Many Westerners are shocked to find out how cheating is viewed in many places, and many simply refuse to believe it, but it is true that cheating is simply "not a big deal" in many places.

I made a counterpart question: academia.stackexchange.com/q/195057/14144

@cag51 Your point of view is an excellent example of the cultural differences. You mention cheating in the same vein as theft and murder. That is not an objective fact, but your opinion which has been shaped by your cultural background. Someone else might argue that all three are bad, but murder is much worse than theft, which is much worse than cheating.

Anecdotally, grading schemes at my american university varied widely.

oops wrong room, mb

I just completed two international surveys: one, list of countries in which popular culture holds that university exam cheating is no big deal, and two, list of countries which have managed to get a RBMK fission reactor to explode. The correlation coefficient is very close to 1.0.