I thought it'd be interesting to ask if any of you cheated throughout your schooling. I put two sets of questions to ask about what your opinion on cheating is and if you did cheat.
As I stated another comment, the problem I have with cheating is that it's dishonest, as you're passing someone else's work off as your own. It demonstrates a lack of respect for the person who did the work, the person you're doing the work for, every student who worked hard enough to do the work themselves, and yourself.
Also, many of these classes considered it "cheating" to program your calculator to compute solutions for you. Usually, on a programmable calculator, the program would only substitute for memorizing formulas. Memorizing formulas is pointless, as if you eventually end up using one often enough, you'll memorize it anyway. Again, I never actually did this (I preferred to just learn how the formula was derived), but I occasionally helped others do it.
Now I don't think you should copy from someone if that person objects. However, I've never worried about allowing people to copy my work: I've already invested the time and as long as it doesn't put my work in jeopardy (that was always my only requirement: don't just copy, but expend the minimal effort required to hide it), why not share? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of what is worth their time. As has been argued many times, especially at forums like HN: schools really don't know what is good for their students. Schools are 'one size fits all'. We know better (which doesn't mean that we think schools are always wrong, which doesn't mean we don't take their advice seriously, etc.)
I can understand why someone might say that, but it would still be immoral and dishonest of them to cheat. When you take a class, you enter into a contract (often an explicit academic honesty policy) to not cheat. If you find the assignment ridiculous, then don't take the class, register your objections with the professor, or don't hand in the assignment. You can't ethically disregard the terms of a contract just because you deem them "ridiculous."
There's quite a difference between a university where you're on your own volition and high school where you're obligated to stay. The morality of cheating in high school is a lot different from cheating in a university.
I said nothing of the kind. I am saying it is an unfair advantage in obtaining academic opportunity over equally or more capable students who are more honest. Even between two students of exactly equal ability, the dishonest student has the advantage.
For instance, someone may be on their way to becoming a very good physicist and doesn't care for compulsory german.
What part of this implies they deserve a high grade in German? Would a student doing equally well in German but poorly in Physics (because he doesn't care for it) deserve a high grade in Physics? Do either of them deserve higher grades than an honest student earning grades slightly below each of them? Does that student deserve to go to an inferior college?
That's a US-specific problem. Here anyone that has obtained a degree can enroll in pretty much any course at any university/college.
What part of this implies they deserve a high grade in German?
People that cheat seldomnly have high grade averages in the subject they cheat in. The just manage to pass the subject. But that's also a US specific problem. Grade averages are much less an issue here.
For instance, the law must forbid jaywalking, to be able to punish those that jaywalk and endanger themselves or others. However, when I get a red light at four in the morning and I don't see a car for a mile in both directions, then I will jaywalk. If a cop sees me, he should understand that the law wasn't meant to cover that case, even though it does. It's intended to protect people, not to be applied by the letter.
The same holds for the contract you have with a school. It must forbid cheating, to prevent people from harming themselves. That doesn't mean that every individual case of cheating is necessarily immoral. Circumstances and intentions are exactly why we need courts: to interpret the intention of the law in many different cases.
The same holds for the contract you have with a school. It must forbid cheating, to prevent people from harming themselves.
The primary goal of an academic honesty policy is clearly not "to prevent people from harming themselves."
Now all schools are going to make a pretense of an academic honesty policy, but some schools actively use that as a screen to let students cheat their way to C's.
Edit: I still think cheating harms fellow students, but plenty of schools let fairly rampant cheating go on for years.
It applies to cases where the terms are not negotiable. If thousands of others have signed the same contract, then there is no room for individual variations in the terms, even if that would benefit both parties. Try to get a different contract with your local library or a university: impossible, even though it would be in you, their and societies best interest.
The pragmatic choice is to sign the contract, but break it in a way advantageous to all parties involved.
You can not have a "contract" with the school. The student is being coerced, to a degree not dissimilar to a prisoner. (I am not saying that a student is exactly the same as a prisoner, because I can think of many relevant differences, I'm just saying the coercion level is similar; it is unilateral, the scope is huge, and there is no way out for most of it.) The concept of "contract" is not relevant.
If you think cheating is bad only because it is a violation of contract, then cheating is not bad. (You may not agree with the word "only"; I am making a logical statement here. If you think it's bad for other reasons, as I do, then that does not falsify that logical statement.)
I'm curious why you'd think cheating would correlate with laziness. I think you underestimate the work involved in cheating.
I've passed on cheating on multiple occasions in middle and high school years purely out of laziness. It would usually involve some laborious homework assignment. A friend would have done it. He would loan me the notebook. And it would just sit in my bag without me ever spending time to copy it.
In middle school we had to take an Accelerated Reader test on the computer each week. I was not prepared one day. So I went to two of the three computers and deleted the shortcut to the program. With only one computer operating, my turn to take the exam never came:) They'd to call the IT people from downtown to fix the shortcuts on the two computers. Silly middle school days:)
Now days I am almost guilty of being too honest. ie. I will skip an assignment because I thought it was a waste of time, tell the professor exactly what I thought and receive biased grading for rest of the semester. (At the end of the semester, though, the professors respect you a whole lot more.)
From a moral perspective, cheating is bad in that it devalues the marks earned by students who didn't. This is only true if you believe that the marks are worth anything to begin with. That, and it's downright rude.
What matters is getting the right answer. If you stop before you get the right answer, then you're responsible for that. If you take a shortcut to get the right answer, then it's not a bad thing until you get to a situation where you refuse to do what it takes to get the right answer.
Given a choice between wasting my time on meaningless schoolwork and cheating and keeping the time to myself, I'll take cheating, and if I went back I'd cheat again.
I think the problem with cheating is that it's fundamentally dishonest. It's not that you're using someone else's work to accomplish something, as we all do this every day in our jobs, it's that you're lying and presenting that work as your own.
It's dishonest, yes, but when you're in a situation where your two choices are spending time learning something on your own versus not copying a busywork homework assignment from a friend... the first stops seeming so unethical.
Do you have a better solution? The system cannot be fixed to a complete extent quickly. My solution is to avoid busywork classes and get high grades in the busywork classes so I can just skip assignments instead as often as possible.
Do you have a better one?
Not true. You harm the honest students that are denied academic opportunity because dishonest students have higher grades. And by the way, it isn't "so-called" dishonesty, it is by definition dishonest. Whether you regard it as ethical or not does not change the meaning of the word.
Do you have a better solution?
What you propose is not a solution at all. It is an exploit.
Either way, I'd like to hear other solutions. I'm not content wasting my life away with busywork assigned in school, and I do not like the fact that mild academic dishonesty is necessary to combat that, so I would gladly listen to other suggestions.
By the way, 'mild' is mild. I'm not talking about stealing code or copying projects or anything. I'm talking about (every so often) asking a friend for answers to questions on near-worthless homework assignments.
As a side note, I'm not exactly sure why I'm being downvoted. Is there a more reasonable way to discuss this?
You could say the same for theft, robbery, and murder. At some point in deciding how to act you must consider the effect your actions have on others. I call it an exploit because it exploits the broken nature of the system which rewards dishonest behavior. Your "solution" merely perpetuates the problem for everyone.
academic dishonesty is necessary
It is not necessary to achieve either of the aims you have described (not wasting your life away and getting into a decent university). The former can be achieved by not doing the work. The latter can be achieved by doing the work to earn adequate grades. Neither requires dishonesty.
It is not even necessary to achieve both. Withdrawing from school and getting a GED avoids wasting one's life away there, and getting into a decent college can be facilitated by enrolling in a community college and obtaining the appropriate test scores. This does not require dishonesty, wasting time, or forgoing educational opportunity.
I'm not exactly sure why I'm being downvoted.
FWIW, it isn't me. I don't like drive-by downvoting either.
I don't like people who cheat a lot, at that point going to school is becoming useless indeed, but when you don't have enough freedom to choose your subjects or they are taught just to be taught, a bit of cheating eliminates a lot of headaches.
Oh, so it was your principled commitment to "what matters" that caused you to cheat, eh?
What matters is that you end up with the right thing. If you can easily get the right thing by copying somebody else, then do that. That doesn't excuse your not learning how to do it on your own, but there's no nobility to finding out the answer yourself, beyond what personal satisfaction it brings you.
I code using other people's languages and other people's plug-ins. I take visual ideas from other people's graphic designs. Then I bend them to fit my own purposes. When somebody else has solved part of the problem I want to fix, there is no honor in my repeating their work.
Looking at someone else's website for visual inspiration is a far cry from copying someone else's paper or having a friend do your math homework. Please tell me you see the difference.
Requiring students to memorize has as much to do with the logistics of testing as it does with learning. If you think the school is being lazy and making it easier for them to test at the expense of substantive (non-rote) learning, then why go there?
Even if this is high school, there are still choices. There are people who have gotten into the Ivies with a GED. If you are the right kind of person, you will do substantive work, be recognized and succeed. You can add the drop out, get a GED and do volunteer work step to this plan:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141
If most people voted with their feet, then schools would get a lot better, fast. Instead, people cheat, which enables the schools to keep up their appearances. You're just as guilty of propagating the paper-reality of testing over actual learning.
You might as well campaign for a general strike. "Vote with your feet" is the age-old leper's bell of market fundamentalists, who deny the reality of tough collective-action problems.
I wish there were some way to confiscate your diploma and force you to live the life of an average high school dropout. But of course, you surely believe that you are exceptional, destined from birth to live out a rags-to-riches tale no matter what. I would like to see just how far your GED and volunteer work would get you.
> you will do substantive work, be recognized and succeed
What reason is there to believe this? As far as American middle-class society is concerned, someone without a high-school diploma is a non-person.
And isn't this the very definition of laziness? Being willing to cross ethical boundaries to avoid unpleasant work?
I see the sort of laziness that strives to avoid tedium and boredom as a virtue.
In those cases, I would not feel guilty in the least, and do not think I would be cheating myself either.
Repetition is how you optimize your brain. Quick and accurate execution of inner-loop code is critical. The more you can optimize, the more effective of a tool your brain will be.
It doesn't matter how much value I place on an assignment? Yes, to me, it does!
I do not understand who decides what 'matters' in this case. I see it as such: To me, a value-less assignment which takes up a disproportionate amount of time is wrong; thus, make it take less time. If it gives me no value in return, and I'm not hurting anything by cutting corners, then I most certainly will cut corners. Is there a better solution?
It's a trade-off. Cut corners, learn more on your own because you have time. Don't cut corners and be honest, learn less.
I cheat and break rules or laws sometimes but I don't cheat other people in a way it would harm them. I also know that I'm taking risks since there might be consequences.
I have never bought that hard work or going over the highest fence would be beneficial to anyone. I like more working smart, fast or even taking shortcuts by cheating than wasting my time on something that doesn't even matter.
School is a another reality where you are rewarded by the complexity and how hard you work, not by what its the most simplest solution.
It was even better when the smart kids copied from me, specially when our eyes met and I caught them cheating: it was established right then and there who was whose bitch :-P
Two real-life problems I have had with my non-cheating principle are:
1) My inability to trust the quality of most people's work, specially if I know about the work and I'm passionate about it. I have a habit of going over people's code with an eye towards catching their "inevitable mistakes". My own mistakes pass in peace, undisturbed, of course.
2) Inability to take hints and advice. I take advice when I seek it. Unsolicited advice, specially when others are there to overhear it, or when I feel like I could have arrived at the same conclusion on my own given enough time; such advice goes unheeded. I might even deliberately make a mishap just because someone helped me mid-task.
I noticed however, that whenever I've selected material for cheating and then put it on those little sheets of paper I actually learned this material in the end. So cheating was a great way to learn something! Than, by simple logic taking what I prepared wasn't beneficial, as I could be caught.
I'm not talking about the skills and things you learn, these can be valuable. I'm talking about social order and customs.
The homework: implement various data structures in C++. The professor then gave us a printed copy of a correct stack/vector/etc implementation. So the homework could properly be rephrased "type what you see on the page into the computer, then run gcc to catch typing errors."
He then threatened that he would catch us if one person transcribed the printouts and multiple people submitted the same transcription.
I split the typing work with some friends, and wrote a perl obfuscator. Suffice it to say, I learned more about programming writing the obfuscator than I did in the rest of the class.
That's like if a professor insisted that you use a particular brand of pen when writing the exam. Disobeying that order isn't cheating.
I do get lazy with tests sometimes, and it does come back to bite me in the ass. Often.
I've been out of school for years now and I don't think cheating on tests in school compares to anything in the "real" world. That is to say, I would never cheat employers or plagiarize code or documentation.
I guess I view school as something you do for yourself and if you really want to cheat yourself out of an education then who cares (especially since you're paying for school in the first place). I never put much stock into degrees and so I'm sure that colors my world view. I can understand that if you do think that degrees and grades actually mean anything then you might feel like cheating in school is unethical. Cheating others is a whole different story and it's a line I really don't like to cross.
If someone has all the skills necessary to perform a given job, but an employer will not even finish reading their resume because they don't have a BA, I see no reason not to cheat in order to expedite the degree-earning process.
If you want to work with computers for a living, and you have a political science paper due in one day, what is going to be the better use of your time in the long-term, an all-night hack session, or actually doing your politics paper?
Also, I've never cheated, and I'm theorizing, but I think that people bright enough to carry out an A-worthy cheat could get the A if they did the work, and people that can't will either get a B or get caught. So in the end, it might be sort of fair anyway.
Likewise, if your 'friends' from school enter the same job market and get the job you could have instead, you pitty them for cheating and even helping them. You know what you're worth and can withstand the tasks they throw at you. While cheaters don't know and don't understand the world they operate in. They probably keep on cheating....
- Unomi -
Obviously I got accused of cheating - and it could well be argued I had an advantage over my classmates (who struggled with an inadequate text book!).
The definition is subjective: but, writing answers on your cuffs helps no one :)
For cheating and being lazy to testing code, the common factor is the lack of pursuit to be responsible. So these behaviours can be a result from a person's character.
Another possible theory is that in response to systems that they don't like, they prefer to tricking them instead of other options such as don't care or quitting.
He was a "pathological cheater": smart, and in the top 5 of the class by his own steam, but had a tendency to cheat on everything, even practice PSAT tests administered by the school. He cheated on an essay contest, his winning entry was published (oops!) and he was called out quite publicly when the paper published a retraction.
Rather than own up to it, he made up a bullshit story about how his story was only superficially similar. In fact, it was word-for-word identical, with the title changed.
He changed schools in order to avoid a failing grade for cheating on an exam (and mounting humiliation) to a Catholic school. He was supposedly kicked out of that school for (you guessed it) cheating.
He graduated from law school last summer.