Is cheating such a crime?
September 25th, 2007
Opinion
Vermont Tiger links us to an excellent opinion piece surrounding the cheating scandal at Hanover High School. ABC News has this article on their website.
In answer to the tag line question: “Is cheating such a crime?” - only if caught.
There are numerous examples daily presented to us on CNN, the evening news, the blogsphere… Michael Nifong, the boys at Enron… you can easily make your own list. These examples are not lost on our children. Nor is the central tenet of our society today: there are winners and losers and not much in between.
Cheating is not a moral dilemma, and is only a “crime” if you are stupid enough to get caught (at which point you immediately become a “loser”.) This is “rational behavior”(a la Jared Diamond).
“That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists term such behavior “rational” precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible.”
But it gets more complicated than that. My own experience with cheating is a case in point - and it had little to do with moral reasoning.
As a college freshman at a small (”Little Ivy”) University, Economics was a required course and a ball buster of some note. All 900+ freshman took the course with the average grade being a C (grading was statistical, and the grades were allocated on standard deviation.) The final exam was two hundred multiple choice questions with another fifty true or false. On the afternoon before the 8 AM exam, my freshman dorm was informed it could purchase a copy of the final exam, as had another dorm (about 150 of the 900 students, and possibly more). I was propositioned - as were all of us in the dorm (a few of the notorious were excluded).
Now take a moment to muse on this if you will. It appeared that as many as one third of the class would have the answers to this test which would significantly skew the grading. (It was also well known that correctly answering more than 125 of the 250 questions would - historically - yield a B or better).
Now I could “opt” out of this conspiracy and possibly suffer the consequences of ending up on the lower end of a curve that was now skewed. I would be the proud owner of an “honest” C or lower - for which accolades abound! And by opting out, I would have distanced myself from a large number of my peers - my freshman classmates - also for which decision accolades abound!
A similar case in point: you hit the ball pretty well, but if you could hit it harder and farther, more of them would be home runs for which there is fame and fortune. Not so much fame and fortune for the guy who does not make “that extra effort”.
No. I’m not going to tell you what I did (opt in or opt out) because - unfortunately - it makes no difference to the point I am making. But the issue presented me with a rather profound - life defining - dilemma: if I opt in - morally reprehensible (but advancing my own interests and not betraying my peers by not endorsing their collective action), if opting out - socially reprehensible.
I left this prestigious school at the end of my Junior year with a 2.92 GPA, switched majors and received my degree two years later - with honors (at another school).
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