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Comment by throwaway314155 | Hacker News Reader

I think this misses just one important nuance - cheating is often done out of desperation and it might bee important to try to understand that desperation before deciding on the degree of punishment. For instance, if the student is dealing with a recent diagnosis of e.g. depression or adhd. You really can't know the extent of anguish some might go through before deciding they "have to" cheat in order to hopefully have some semblance of normalcy in their future career.

Obviously cheating is unacceptable, but empathy can really help the student in this situation.

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A person's true character comes out in hard times.

A disciplined character will handle hard times well. An undisciplined character will not.

Compassion exists, sure. But morality doesn't disappear just because something bad happens. Compassion should be sought after before resorting to cheating, not after.

A person's true character is not set in stone, nor can it be generally measured by a single incident.

It's very much like climate. And like climate, you can use it to certainly predict typical weather, such as a desert not gaining much rain.

If you are disciplined in morality and have a well-trained conscience, that will tend to follow you as long as you keep up the discpline.

Awful take.

Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

That doesn’t make everyone a murderer.

> Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances.

Citation needed. I don't think this is true, and if it was it wouldn't change anything. Notably, the individual level of circumstances required matters a lot, pragmatically even if you don't care in principle.

And there is some significant evidence that it is not true.

Think about training soldiers and the concept of “non-firers”. I’m not an expert on those things but the fact that training soldiers to kill is hard, and no one has a great solution even after a lot of effort, and passive combat personnel concepts even exist at all, I think gives evidence to the idea that not everyone can be a murderer, even under extreme circumstances.

“ Gen. S.L.A. Marshall once described war as “the business of killing”. And yet many war-fighters throughout history have gone out of their way to avoid it. Marshall himself estimated (though some say he exaggerated, or even fabricated) that only 15-25 per cent of infantry soldiers in the Second World War fired their weapons in any given battle. The rest were so-called “non-firers”; they had the opportunity to shoot at enemy soldiers but failed to do so. Marshall added that even those who did shoot often deliberately missed their target — they were so-called “mis-firers”. These “passive combat personnel”, as they are sometimes called, have long been a thorn in the side of military institutions. War is a “competition in death and destruction”, in the words of Henry Shue, and these individuals deliberately forego opportunities to score points for their own team.”

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-dobos-military-training-...

To be fair, on the grand scale of possible circumstances that might drive someone to murder, being a soldier is relatively common but not that high. The more interesting cases involve intense personal hate, possibly for revenge for extreme injury, or reasons that blur the line with self-defense or defense of a loved one. But I think a lot of people would still require unfeasibly extreme circumstances, if they could do it at all.

Everyone is a monster, that is true. And I agree that anyone can _kill_ in the right circumstance (e.g. self defense, etc), but I strongly disagree that any disciplined moral character will easily become a murderer overnight.

However, the part you miss is the keyword discipline. To be discipline in morality means that you are aware you can be a monster and you actively choose not to be, even if it means what appears to be a negative outcome for you, relatively speaking.

Morality isn't free. It's not easy, and it requires diligent practice, aka it's a discipline.

By the time your in college, you should have enough discipline to not cheat. If you don't, you have a very untrained conscience.

So how would we expect the same student to handle a situation later in their academic career faced with the perceived choice between fudging a study or losing funding for their lab?

Properly aligned incentives need to be enforced from day 0.

Cheating is done by ppl who don't put in the effort and take the easy way out. Someone who is depressed wouldn't care enough to cheat. Too much empathy where it is not required has become the bane of society.

Well spoiler alert - I cheated in college! I have acute bipolar depression (undiagnosed back then) and fortunately my only punishment was to fail that class rather than expulsion. I'm now a successful software engineer with 12 years of career coding under my belt. I do good work and I don't cheat.

Sorry it wasn't harder to counter your response. I would really implore you to change your perspective and attitude. Other people generally aren't psychopaths trying to take shortcuts. they are as i said, often just very desperate.

I don't think anyone's advocating for death penalty for cheating.

I was referring to the whole "referral to the dean" thing which is again, totally fair in certain circumstances but also basically guaranteed to ruin that person's life.

I would argue that nothing is more destructive for academic and intellectual activities than what you propose.

It immediately replaces the ideal result, which is a true assessment, with a feelings-based assessment, and it undermines academic honesty for all students.

What must be done is to teach the students that failing an exam is OK, and help them recover the learning mindset. Evaluations are intended to measure the things learned and the things that need to improve. Evaluations are not a punishment.

No. The ones who make excuses instead of owning up to it should receive double the punishment.

Im fine with the other comments here but the insinuation that mental health issues and a desire to live a normal life are "making excuses" (as in making up excuses when the real cause is something like laziness) - well let me just say it's not a very polite way to approach the issue and would probably come across as gaslighting to anyone dealing with this.

Like i said, others have similar criticism to yours but don't include this dismissive bit.

Mental health issues aren’t an excuse to cheat. If you can’t do the work, tell the professor about your situation instead of breaking the rules. Everyone has shit to deal with—some single mom was up all night with the baby and still did her work on her own and followed the rules.

And that’s literally the reason to understand people and help them rather than punish. I hope you’ll never experience how shitty life circumstances can be, and how fragile your own mind can be.

That's still an argument for being graceful with failures, not for excusing dishonesty. It's really, truly, not that complicated. Civilization cannot function properly when dishonesty is accepted. (ed: To be clear, this is not a hypothetical problem. We're already in trouble due to erosion of trust.)

Understanding dishonesty and forgiving in it in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted. There are a lot of cases and a lot of circumstances, not all of them should be treated equally. Seeing it black and white especially in environment where, for example, the president do corruption all the time, only will increase sense of unjust, and dishonesty itself.

If the rules aren’t applied equally the similarly situated people, they will break down entirely. And pointing to supposed corruption elsewhere in society is how third worlders justify their own low level corruption in those countries.

> in some cases is ok. Note it’s very different from the world where dishonesty is accepted.

"In some cases", maybe. In a world where the majority of cases are effectively punished, we could start talking about that. Today, we live in the world where it's accepted, even when the offender is just an entitled college brat. We should change that.

Oh, and "but my boss/my friends/the president does it" remains exactly as valid excuse as it always has.

You can understand people when they’re honest and ask for help up front, not when they make excuses after they get caught breaking the rules. The latter warrants only swift and sure punishment, to reinforce the social norms.

What is the point of your last sentence? It reads like the Jehovah witnesses arguments.

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