Why Students Cheat

An Essay Concerning
the Systemic Origins and Implications of Academic Cheating from a Socially
Contextual View

By Roy D. Follendore III

Copyright (c) 2002 by RDFollendoreIII

This essay is
written to explore the broader issues of academic cheating. Academic
cheating is not only an activity that exists in the classroom, it permeates our
society. Cheating is a business. At this moment there are businesses
who make money by selling the means for students to successfully cheat in
school. There are also companies that are making money by countering
cheats. These companies have a symbiotic relationship to each other similar to
that of the cheater and the academic institution. In economic terms,
cheating has essentially become an identifiable micro economy of the educational
system. It is easy to have a tendency to consider this concept in terms of
a parasitic economics. However, if all that we choose to do is to condemn
the concept of cheating we can not expect to understand the phenomena of
cheating.

November
10, 2002

When
students successfully cheat they are not just trying to get a better grade, they
are changing the rules of education in favor of themselves. Cheating can
take the form of working together rather than independently on projects, taking
crib notes into an exam, looking off another student's paper or simply
plagiarism. In fact, anything that allows a person to have education
biased in favor of him or her can be construed as cheating. At one time or
another, every person has cheated. Sometimes the teacher's directions can
be complex or difficult so that they are misunderstood. The result may
then be rationalized by the student or teacher as being too insignificant to
correct and so the cheat is allowed to stand.

A
cheater can represent or misrepresent themselves to acquire favoritism which in
turn gives them access to resources which the rest of the class does not.
Since concepts like competitive scores and fair play are resonant within the
concept of cheating, the implication of having access to or knowledge of
information or resources, which the rest of the class does not have, could be
construed as cheating. Because of this, cheating therefore does not need
to be for personal gain.The person
who helps others cheat is also cheating. Therefore, if a Professor allows
cheating, they are cheaters.This
is admittedly a broad definition of a cheater. Many might take issue with
these generalizations. However, the objective here is to establish the
action of the academic cheat as well as the actor.Just keep in mind that it is not the objective of this paper
to condemn cheaters but to discuss the reasons why cheaters cheat.

Cheating
is by general definition wrong, but it is also a fact of education. Our
educational system participates in the process of cheating because they set the
boundaries of the definition. It starts with those who profess to know
something teach others and call themselves Professors. Then in an attempt
to prove to the system in which they work that their knowledge has been passed
on, they test.On the other side of
this arrangement, those who were ignorant attempt to prove that they possess
knowledge, which has been transferred to them from their professors[1].Within
the perspective of such situations, these are competitive perspectives and as
long as they exist, there will be cheating. The reasons for cheating are
therefore deeply embedded within the philosophy, ethics, and operations of our
educational society.

To
discuss the basis of cheating we not only must understand the student who
cheats, we must also understand the philosophical environment of education in
which the cheating takes place. To understand the fish, we must understand
the nature of living within the ocean [i].The
commercial product of education is not enlightenment. The product of
education is the opportunity for a successful social class struggle.
Students are people struggling to acquire things that they think will improve
their life and they are under great pressure to achieve those opportunities[2]. At the other side of the court, their Colleges
and Universities are attempting to market the ideal that their certification
through a college diploma will provide students with what they need to succeed
in life. They deliberately contribute to the student's idea that it is the
certification and not the knowledge that is most important. Professors and
their Academic Departments represent the opportunities of their various
departmental degree programs in terms of the elitist class distinctions and
opportunities that would distinguish them.

From
this perspective, the Lawyer, the Engineer, the Mathematician, the Teacher are
the respected products that are manufactured and delivered by various
departments of a typical University. This is reinforced by the observation
that the academic educational processes are organized like a factory where the
student is the raw material. Underneath the surface of this manufacturing
process, these procedures are constantly communicated by the bureaucracy to
students as being more important than knowledge gained. The statement is
simply that if you want to be able to ascribe to being one of the members of
these more respected classes of citizens, then you must jump through the correct
and approved hoops in the correct order.If
the individual student is for any reason unable to make it through this
sequential factory then they will be considered defective.

The
barriers to the student's potential individual success become obvious when the
course requirements are analyzed.Departments
often appear to prevent freshmen students from discovering their true personal
interests and intellectual abilities. In an attempt to create a stronger
program of studies, administrators like to pack their program with class
requirements.The required schedule
of classes to achieve a degree in four years are compressed and rigidly fixed.
This is a kind of protective mechanism for the Department because it is a kind
of enforceable funnel that reduces the number of students who decide to change
majors. Unfortunately from the student's perspective, it also means that
the student arriving at the University for the first time is expected to know
who and what they are, what studies they are best suited, and their long term
interests. The problem is that education often causes students to change
our ideals and interests. Consequently, many students are deeply
integrated and invested into departmental programs for which they may be ill
suited. Because these students never have the opportunity to evaluate
other departments and other fields of study, by the time they see the trap many
of their credits do not transfer. The results can become a costly failure,
both to the University as a whole and to the student.

The
inflexibility of the educational factory to allow students time within their
four year degree program to find their path means that the departments are not
selecting their best raw material for their factory. Departments within
Universities are competitive for new students. It is not in the financial
interest of departments to change their orientation to academic requirements and
support options. The departmental inflexibility and the absence of
properly unbiased counseling that might offer alternative accredited goals to
students caught within these departmental programs induce great social and
economic pressures for failing students. These students are most likely to
cheat in order to push through and achieve their original educational goals.

Others
long ago found this kind of approach to education the wrong idea. The
writer of the Declaration of Independence, our former President of the United
States, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia with the idea that
there would be no testing or degrees. It was to be an intellectually free
program of higher learning.Academic students would be admitted into the University to
study whatever they wanted, and then leave whenever they felt they were
educated.The University of
Virginia (UVA) of course today is an institution that confers degrees through a
similar process as all of the other organizations of higher learning [3].

The
Jefferson ideal of a University for true Scholars was soon abandoned after the
founder died. The only residual of Jefferson's original ideal is the
University's unique and somewhat dubious honor code in which students are tested
without oversight by Professors. It is an honor code that many students at
UVA report is constantly being broken. While this can be viewed as an
academic loss of prestige for the degree programs at UVA, it also means that
students are not placed under the same pressures. Breaking an honor code
is dishonest but if we assume that the majority of students do not cheat, then
the ability to cheat operates as a kind of social pressure valve, in a way
promoting the core Jeffersonian ideal that what is being marketed by UVA is
knowledge, not merely a degree. It is also not an endorsement of cheating
to say that those who feel they must cheat to pass the grade are effectively
given an opportunity to change programs without their grade point average being
affected.

The
majority of our systems of higher education within the United States perpetuate
the central theme that the act of becoming a successful student involves a
privately waged battle, of which sustaining the gauntlet of academic challenges
is paramount. In the business world to which these same students will
work, successfully breaking the rules to get along can often be considered to be
part of their job requirement for success.At the same time, university life is wrongly represented as a kind of
academic artificial womb within which the student feels protected and sheltered
from the real world. The actual truth is closer to the idea that
Universities replace "real world" life with one that threatens
abandonment if the gauntlet is not successfully negotiated. This is
analogous to tribal or parental abandonment, which is the primary fear for all
human beings [4].

Student
access to the Internet is being blamed as the cause for cheating. That
assumption is not true.The
Internet may correlate to the quantity and quality of cheating within
Universities, but the Internet cannot be the cause.The Internet is simply another efficient
means to search and acquire information. It is also an efficient means to
communicate. It may make the ability to plagiarize far easier but it also
makes research easier.The Internet
is a reference shortcut and there is nothing overtly wrong with the idea of
taking shortcuts. Educational institutions are constantly expecting
students to absorb more information and to do this requires the student's better
use of time.They do this by
encouraging students to study smarter. In the 1890s, students were
primarily expected to memorize information at hand to complete their studies,
and by 1990, students are primarily expected to access vast amounts of
information. If we want to blame the Internet for encouraging cheating,
then we must do so with the idea that it raises the bar to higher education.
Those that are not capable of executing search commands and then reading through
and identifying what is most important for their classes must also then be able
to fluidity express themselves or they have problems in today's college
programs.

Confusion
of social identity is a primary cause of cheating within our educational
institutions. This confusion begins with who and what we each are within
our sociological identity.

·As individuals we accept ourselves as a
society of data collectors that must be willing to lose much of what we are as
we individually age and/or die. We must ultimately be willing to organize,
reorganize, and present ourselves as associated but highly diversified groups.
The limits of a society of data is ultimately rests on our internal willingness
to relentlessly search, establish and maintain enormous amounts of random inputs
over infinitely long periods of time.

·As a society of information gatherers we must
constantly restructure what it is that we are attempting to know. We must be
willing to reach to create information where and when that information is found
in our most efficient and effective manner. The limits of our ability to
search, retrieve, relate, and store both data and information transactions
become the limits of an information society.

·As a society of knowledge creators, we must always be
willing to choose to abandon ideas that we love and we must also expect to lose
much of our ability to simplify that we believe we know and what we are. A
society of knowledge is an organization of philosophical acceptance without
regard to investment. The limits of a society of knowledge essentially
become our willingness to internally act against our own vested interests when
knowledge is no longer true [5].

·As a society of wise knowledge users,
then we must be willing to become data, information and knowledge users as is
required for the well being of our society. A society of wisdom is based
on a capability of fluent internal communication and a philosophical
understanding of the virtues of itself in terms of its environment. The
limits of a wise society are the limits of human nature and our ability to
observe and act with respect to the Universe.

Cheating
represents the cracks between these societal identities. The order in
which academics choose to operate depends on their role at a particular moment.All academic educational institutions
simultaneously operate within the space with respect to all four of these
philosophical ideas.

·The data driven educational society is
generally considered as the basis of academic scientific research. Data
drives the request for more data. Eventually the academic is supposed to
derive information that leads to knowledge.Data comes from the field, from the activities of scientific research.
Data is exposed in context. Students within a data driven society often
are responsible for the finding of data and often point to the significance.When data is used to cheat, cheating is
often difficult to discover.

·The information driven educational
society is the reference through which knowledge is achieved. This is the
society of contextual storytellers. The story of information
originates within the data but it is told in terms of as facts and speculation.
Students mostly exist within the information driven educational society. When
information is used to cheat, students can appear on top of their work when they
are not.This kind of cheating can
inevitably lead to failure of performance, usually at the worst possible moment
for the student and the society.

·The knowledge driven educational society
exists within the classroom, where people profess to have and be willing to
express information in useful and practical arrangements and ways. A
wisdom driven educational society exists to within society as a whole, rather
than the facilities of a single college or university. It therefore
exhibits itself in terms of a distributed governing ideal, rather than as a
single institution.Students do not
generally have the opportunity to participate within the knowledge driven
educational society.However, when
they do and they use knowledge to cheat, they shake the foundation of all of the
societies.A student who cheats
within this type of society professes to be an expert, when he or she is not.Because they do not have experience and
have not actually absorbed the knowledge, these cheaters may be able to talk the
talk but they cannot walk the walk of the expert. There are exceptions.

·The wisdom driven educational society
does not represent all things for the individual, but should exist for all
things of society. It therefore should recognized the requirement for
educational institutions, cultures, and even individuals and institutions that
fail, in order that the society may prosper. At the same time and because
of this the wisdom driven educational society should assure that there are
always opportunities for individual progress for every member, even student
cheaters.Cheaters are by
definition unwise.This is the
society in which all cheaters eventually tend to be caught cheating.It is one thing to be able to be able to
cheat on data, information and feign knowledge.Wisdom can also be feigned, but it is another to be able to act wisely.Unfortunately, the greatest harm
to all occurs when a cheat professes to be wise and then acts unwisely.The most “successful” competitive cheats who move into society to
take responsible positions are the ones who also cheat their corporations and
government agencies.It would
therefore not be surprising to see that many of the top executives and
politicians who fall in disgrace were successful cheaters at the top academic
institutions.

Cheaters
are probably best represented by the students that have found themselves failing
to make the grade and were discovered cheating within the information driven
society.However, this is not
always the case.The percentage of
students who cheat is dependent on any number of factors that must be predefined
to be understood. One of these is the grading criterion, which affects the
kind of cheater. Cheating changes the grading curve, encouraging the
Professor to introduce more difficult tests and therefore encourages more
cheating by other students. When it is recognized by the class that
cheating is the only way to pass a difficult class because the majority of
students are cheating then the majority of the rest will compete by cheating.

The
baseline of grading is by nature both objective and subjective. In some
situations, the male who demands more attention in classes may increase his
opportunities for better grades.In
other situations, the female who is most attractive and personable may increase
her opportunities for better subjective grades. These interactive factors
may not be considered cheating because efforts are made to create objective
testing criteria.Nevertheless, for
many of these justifications, objective-testing criteria also limits the value
of tests to the realms of data and at best information societies.

Within
the data driven society the authenticated expectations of truth are clear.
Data is often correct or it is not. To some extent, products from a
societal system based on information can be subjected to interpretation and
determined to be true or false.

Products
from a knowledge-based society are subject to interpretation and are often very
difficult to examine, compare, and authenticate. From a testing
perspective, the evaluation of a student's knowledge is something that is often
proscribed but rarely achieved.Just
as there is no objective test for wisdom, absolute knowledge is something that
very difficult to objectively evaluate on a data and information driven test.It is possible to catch the data
cheaters who copy answers to exams but the highest form of cheating is the
student that plagiarizes knowledge and fanes original wisdom. These
charlatans hijack the creativity of others to lead society into ruin for their
own ends.They are the ones who end
up with the opportunities for running the societies of academia. The
inability of academic institutions to recognize this form of cheating is a
license for the greatest cheaters to shortcut the system of society to their own
ends. Therefore as an academic society, we execute the most desperate
minimal cheats while we exalt our worst.

Educational
institutions have the means to put a halt to cheating if they are willing to
operate their testing procedures from the opposite end of the societal spectrum.
Achievement through an academic society of wisdom would mean that students would
have to be given the opportunity to participate in writing their tests and
grading themselves [6].
It would mean that testing through of data would be kept to a minimum. It
would mean that the current institutionalized barrier that divides the
successful from the unsuccessful would disappear. The means to ending
cheating is to base achievement primarily on creative contribution rather than
the regurgitation of ambiguous facts.

It
is the quality of thought, exercised by students in many potentially different
and unique ways, rather than explicit facts repeated on a test form that counts
outside of the University. The discipline of creative academic thinking
represents the ultimate challenge for students and the institution involved in
higher education. At it's best it requires all of the facets of all of the
societies previously described.

Are
there legitimate justifications for academic cheating?When and how does academic cheating
begin?These are difficult but
necessary questions to ask. The question of why individual students cheat
may begin with the idea that education is a competitive challenge but it is
founded upon situational ethics. Removing the academic context from the
concept of cheating and then gradually reintroducing it is a useful experiment
to evaluate these essential questions. Please keep in mind the objective
of this thinking exercise.

·Value: Suppose you were driving into a parking lot on
a windy day and a $20 dollar bill blew onto your windshield just as you were
about to lock your car. You pick up the bill and you look around, probably
upwind first. Not too far away there several people like you that are in
various states of leaving their car for the day. Some are already walking
away but none seem to be aware of your apparent good fortune. How much of
your time if any are you willing to give up to potentially find the rightful
owner? Suppose that you go to the nearest person and ask if they have lost
any money and they say yes. How do you know that they actually did? Under
these circumstances it may be just as possible that the person you ask may see
it his or her good fortune to have someone ask that question.You might choose go to the parking
attendant who sits in the booth and turn the money over to lost and found.
What are the odds that the lost will be you and found will be the parking
attendant? Anyone who has ever found money like this happen knows that
there is a certain feeling of dishonesty in such a situation. Someone has
obviously lost something of value. You have gained something of value
without having earned it.Anyone who has ever lost money like this knows the sting of
such a hard earned loss. Would it have made a big difference if there were
no one in the parking lot? That depends on you. It usually comes
down to the fact that you were in the right place at the right time. Such
is the nature of a windfall.

·Relationships: Suppose you are just married. You and your jealous
but beautiful bride go to dinner on your honeymoon. Just as you turn to
talk to your wife you see a pretty girl that reminds you of your ex girlfriend.
Your mind wonders and before you can move past your hesitation to complete your
sentence your wife asks you if something is wrong.What should you say?If you tell the absolute truth, you
stand a good chance of ruining the night for the both of you, even though it
might be the most honest solution. If you don't answer her truthfully then
you feel you are starting your marriage on the wrong foot.

·Trust: Suppose you are having car trouble while driving in
the right lane during rush hour. You cannot speed up because when you do
your engine starts to die. Cars are passing you and cutting in front of
you. Your lane ends and your lane changes into an on ramp to an
expressway. The expressway at this time is limited to three people per
car. Your wife is with you, so there are just the two of you. As you
slowly make your way up the ramp, you see a State Trooper giving out tickets to
other motorists. Should you ask for help in the name of safety or continue
to drive on past the Trooper and hope that he does not notice your violation?

·Serendipity: Now suppose that you were sitting in on a tough
exam. You happen to look up at your teacher just as a straight A student
walks past you to turn in their paper. You find you have seen the answer
to the big extra point question. When you scan the question, you find that
the answer is exactly what you would have selected. You have confirmed in
advance that you would have been correct. What should you do?If you explain this to your Professor and you
are then given a new question then you may not pass. It could cost you
thousands of dollars to repeat the class next semester. What if you are a
foreign student and you will not be able to stay? What do you do?

All
of these problems appear to have something in common. For one thing, they
all are situational judgment calls. These events are described as having
happened on the fly, so that it is possible to think that there is no
intentional preconceived deceit involved. It is possible to reconstitute
the potential of deceit. For some people, some of these situations exist
just past their threshold of comfort. Yet, for other people, these
situations are simply non-issues. If we were to change the context
slightly, each of these situations might be a non-issue for everyone. Make
situations life or death and the obvious acceptable choice becomes a non-issue.
The point made is that situations, which involve uncomfortable decisions, can
quickly become non-issues.

If
some Father needed that wind blown twenty dollar bill to put essential food on
the table for his family, then it is far less likely that he would be expected
to look for the original owner of the cash. If the newly wed is in love
with his new bride then it is unlikely he would be expected to want to destroy
the mood of the evening by telling her everything he was thinking. If the
driver of the car could not afford another ticket then it is unlikely that he
would be expected to trust the Police help and not to write him up. If the
student truly needed to pass the test, because he would otherwise lose his
scholarship and therefore his means of having his next meal and perhaps even the
place he calls home, then it would be less likely that he would report that he
saw the answer to the extra point question. The rationality of a cheating
event is relative to the particular situation and therefore the justification
from the individual's perspective is relative to the educational solution.
It is easy to put a zero tolerance on decisions in life through a society of
data driven regulations. It is far more difficult to apply the society of
knowledge and wisdom to situations.

The
prisons of our nation are chocked full of people who were desperate to succeed
in their lives and rationalized the risk of cheating the law.Some of these people in three strike
states are subject to life sentences for three separate relatively minor
offences such as cheating the merchant of his profit by shoplifting videotapes.Whether we academics approve of the idea
or not, our court systems are extensions of our educational institutions.Some 80% of people in the Colorado
prison system have learning disorders.Yet,
people in prisons earn legitimate college degrees without cheating at the same
moment that the best students in the best colleges learn to cheat.Human beings are redeemable if they feel
that they have a true chance at redemption.Much of cheating has to do with self-esteem [7].

Perhaps
this is ultimately the reason why most students cheat.It is not the cost of succeeding as much
as it is the fact that they do not feel worthy of succeeding.Societies of academia based on knowledge
and wisdom should be inclusive rather than exclusive[8]. Maybe Thomas
Jefferson had some pretty good ideas about education.

[2] "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose
the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt." Shakespeare

[3] "Our schools have been scientifically
designed to prevent over-education from happening...The averageAmerican [should be]content with
their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any
other role." William Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889

[4] "To educate a man is to unfit him to be a
slave." Fredrick Douglass, In Freedom

[5] "Truth is eternal. Knowledge is
changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them." Madeleine L'Engle

[6] "We cannot teach people anything, we can
only help them discover it within themselves." Galileo Galilei: The
Quote Cache ( http://quotes.prolix.nu
)

[7] "Truth is eternal. Knowledge is
changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them." Madeleine L'Engle

[i] We exist within an unseen sea we call society and
our educational systems are it’s essence.The ability of a fish to understand its existence requires it to
understand the qualities of water in difference to air, land, and space, in
which it ultimately exists.

[ii] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes within the
footnotes within this essay were chosen from The Quote Cache ( http://quotes.prolix.nu )