Ok you've got me there.
EDIT: you would have got the points if you had studied hard.
The equivalent statement in martial arts would be:
Why should waste time learning groundwork? I'll never need it. I'll just keep improving my striking because I'll never get taken down.
You avoided a chance to work hard and succeed, and took the easy way out. Instead of fixing the problem (not knowing enough about subject X), you covered it up (by pretending that you know enough about subject X by cheating).
In the real world, when you make a mistake, it is better to either not make the mistake in the first place, or admit you are wrong and fix the mistake, not cover it up. When you cover up your mistakes, they come back and bite you in the arse later on. Just like cheating.
So yes, you did miss an opportunity to develop skills you need in the real world.
Right. No one ever gets anywhere by just working hard. You have to be able to utilize a much larger skill set. Yes you have to be ready to push/bend/twist/break the rules. We call that "thinking outside the box," but covering up your mistakes and leaving them behind for someone else to find, or leaving them behind so that they blow up under you is not "thinking outside the box." It's laziness. And it's that cheating mindset that allows things like mazda misreporting the HP on the RX8, causing them to have to recall a massive number of the cars, causing a huge loss of profits for mazda. It's the cheating mindset that causes people in my business to purposefully overlook glaring errors in schematics or documentation, that cause problems in the feild, and cost our company huge sums of money to fly our employees out to colorado to fix emergency errors in our systems.
The mindset: "aw screw it, I don't need to work and study so that I can make an A on that exam," is the exact same mindset as "aw screw it, it's just a tiny error, I don't need to make the changes, and do the paperwork, and admit that I'm wrong to my boss, and get all that copper we ordered thrown away, no one noticed the error, we'll just let it slide."
Oh, and by the way. Those lazy ass politicians who would rather take a poop on their golden toilet then admit that they are wrong, and take the drastic steps required to fix their own and their predecessors errors are part of the reason that there are so many problems in their respective governments. They aren't very good evidence to support your claim.