Cheating, or What?

by Richard K. Squier

This note is simply a jotting down of some thoughts. I should come back sometime and edit them.

Cheating and plagiarism have become a big concern, but there has not been a lot of reflective thinking about the subject. One aspect that is prominent is the good-versus-evil assumption: If you are against cheating, you are good; otherwise, you are evil and need to be cleansed and severely punished. Of course, depending on the depravity of the case, cleansing may not be available. This sometimes gets to such an extreme one feels cast back into a poor reproduction of the Inquisition. For instance, if one confesses to the accusation, then salvation is benevolently bestowed, along with a salutary penance for one's own good, which of course can be quite severe. But, refusing to confess requires the sternest consequences and condemnation. That is, claiming innocence is by far the worse sin. It seems as a first step the accused must admit to being a sinner. As an Honor Council faculty investigator once told me, "e;Of course she says she didn't do it. What else would a guilty person say?"e;

A question that does not get asked is, What is cheating, why is it bad, and whose fault is that? Actually, the first part of that question gets a lot of attention, but only as a laundry list of prohibitions with a boatload of implicit assumptions and fuzzy concepts. Some of these lists have become so restrictive that no scholar could follow them. They often prohibit using even a few words or even concepts from other's work without citations while demanding significant original content. Of course, any cited material does not count as original. Discussions among students are also tightly circumscribed, with the effect that nearly all conversation is vulnerable to censure. Besides being very much the opposite of what we claim we want students to do, interact and share new thoughts, the effective outcome is to make every student vulnerable to arbitrary accusation. When everything is illegal, enforcement becomes an prerogative of power. While the letter of the law says that every infraction must be prosecuted, in practice it becomes a choice reserved for use when it suits the accuser: I can always find some infraction when I want to and convince myself I have been evenhanded. Finally, the requirement that students accuse each other or risk sanction themselves cannot lead to anything but a paranoid environment. Worse yet, targeting to hurt another is far too easy. The lack of respect given students cannot be a healthy thing to be teaching them.

Some faculty are bitterly resentful of students. Some students have advantages they did not. As one instructor told me, "e;I never had anyone to help me."e The trauma of being accused is dismissed, even blithely ignored, claiming it is a character building experience. Is there a similar tribunal instructors can be victimized by to help build their character? And just to set the experience on an equal footing, as students subject to disciplinary action may subsequently suffer in their careers for an entire lifetime, it ought to at least include dismissal from the academy as one sanction. I doubt any faculty member could say being accused would be a beneficial experience, having clearly imagined the circumstance.

So, why does it matter whether one copies another's work? In the past, and in some circumstances, imitation is either necessary by the nature of what is being learned, or is seen as an effective learning practice. Even if someone copied some text and put their name to it, why should we be interested? What does it matter to the instructor? There are abstract arguments about taking from others and so forth, but what is really going on in the classroom? It is entirely a matter of evaluation. The instructor must evaluate the student to assign grades. Suppose the instructor did not have the burden of assigning grades, why would any student bother to copy someone else's material? What would be the point if all we are interested in is learning? From a student's perspective, one must get high scores to get good grades and and we demand that they get good grades. We have provided the incentive to cheat. There would be no motivation without the structure we have imposed. It might be called entrapment. And the assumptions about what is being evaluated by these scores is vague and confused: should a student be rewarded for hard work, for having learned the same material previously and done no work, or for having advanced from whatever level they were to a new one, and so on? And why is it a question of rewards. I imagine Aristotle's tutelage of Alexander had a completely different structure than what we implicitly take for granted as the norm.

We must accept that rewarding grades is a requirement of the teaching profession, at least at present. The issue of cheating is really about grading. If a teacher had one student, they would be well known to each other. There would be no point in exams, for instance, as every day would be a form of examination. So, the crux is that evaluation is difficult. The more difficult the task, the more "e;cheating"e; becomes an issue, and the more intense the feelings of the teachers that students make the job more difficult. The difficulty is to get to know each student well, or well enough. How does one get to know a student well? Certainly, reading one or two pieces of work of unknown authorship does not look like a good idea. Whose responsibility is it to find a way of getting to know the students? Whose responsibility is it to devise effective methods?

Teachers are asked to do contradictory things. Currently, collaborative learning, group projects, and other non-traditional methods are encouraged, or demanded. Without carefully thinking about our assumptions and the goals of each party and how they interact, mechanisms can become their own ends, actually working against what we intend.