If I had to sit through a lecture room with 200 students (TWO HUNDRED!) and I was absolutely confident that the professor cannot possibly give a shit about my learning in this crowd, I too would cheat.
You could use this justification to rationalize any sort of unethical behavior you like. Embezzlement is a natural consequence of society putting a huge value on owning a Benz and other dullard measures of achievement!
That is to say, I disagree wholeheartedly.
Low GPA means no good job straight out of college (because apparently you need a 3.5+ from an ivy league school to model in excel) means in a lot of cases lesser income for the rest of your life.
No Benz means you can drive a Toyota. Big whoop.
Your reply vis-a-vis a Mercedes vs lifetime earnings seems to imply that you are willing to sell your integrity for some value x: $(Benz - Toyota) < x <= ~$2,000,000 (spread out over a lifetime). I'm a bit incredulous that your reply was basically that the only reason you would act ethically in my hypothetical situation was because you required a higher bribe.
This is a classic mentality of victimization. By focusing on the theoretical harm that been done to the extent of all other considerations, you can justify anything. It's a dangerous mentality that has resulted in many evils throughout history. Hell, this is the same justification ISIS originally used when recruiting Sunnis who were tired of corruption and discrimination at the hands of the Shia Iraqi government, only with the economic context replaced by a political one.
A more mature ethical position would recognize that in some environments, while evil has been done which harms or disadvantages you, the strategy of employing "any and all effort necessary to further one's interests" is likely what gave the advantage to those who have allegedly disadvantaged you. If you successfully follow through with this attitude you'll likely perpetuate a cycle.
If you are going to cheat, break rules, or whatever you should do so because those rules or prohibitions have little or no moral and social value in the context in which they exist. If GPA is just a meaningless filter enabling incompetent HR departments at BigCo to trim down their resume pile, then sure, game the system to your advantage. But don't draw the conclusion that you are morally entitled to do whatever it takes to promote your own interests. That path leads to psychopathy.
It can be much easier to get a job, and achieve other things, if you have the proper toys to signal your social status with.
It's not that you need those credentials to model in Excel. Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
> Rather, you're signaling that you have a proven capability to work long hours, deal with bullshit, work "within the system", etc. It's not about intelligence.
I'm going to argue the opposing part for a bit here: So OP's response should be (something along these lines):
HA, there you admit it's putting up with bullshit! But if it's bullshit what's wrong with cheating on it as long as I get to where I want (within the system)!
Rather I would suggest the premise that there is an ethical guideline to behaviour should rest, on our ability to validate the consequences of this behaviour. So in the embezzlement behaviour clearly there is a deceived party and someone suffers. In the student cheating behaviour perhaps there is a deceived party (the future employer) - but it's not clear whether someone suffers or not, are biology 101 grades a good indicator of anything (i.e. future performance), should students caught copying biology 101 exams be exorcised from their academic institution with prejudice?
My take on it is that least in the US there is an overtly-strong caveat for this kind of thing (i.e. even copying assignments), while we are generally accepting of various other forms of deceit (i.e. sociopathy).
That said in my personal experience standardized tests are a good deal better than attendance grades, participation grades, national honor society, club activities or whatever other bs people have to put up with in highschool.
The future employer might be deceived, but the other students who did not cheat are the real injured parties. They will have a lower GPA either in relative to the cheaters (no curve); or possibly absolutely if the class is graded on a curve.
I'm not promoting cheating on tests - but.., I do think the value of a class is primarily in the education and not the grade; therefore in my opinion students aren't being cheated, because they all learn as much as they want to learn. Where as if the grade were the value - people should not have been forced into such a course in the first place! Although, obviously the system (or mostly employers) need some objective metrics for assessment and they have made them (perhaps poorly in some aspects but what systems aren't?)
To use the biology 101 example - if you can't spend 10 hours/week studying/learning material that you don't really care about and that is irrelevant to your life, how are you going to spend 60-80 hours a week doing that in your excel-modeling job?
It isn't a justification; it's an explanation.
Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
To take the next step and use that explanation to rationalize one's own cheating makes it is a justification (or rationalization, whichever you prefer).
GP certainly used it as his justification.
> Because, I agree: if there wasn't such a societal emphasis on material goods (ie the Benz), there would be less embezzlement.
Noting that that relationship might exist is entirely different from saying "this relationship exists therefore I shall embezzle."
I don't understand why your professors' interest in your personal learning would impact your own desire to learn.
(Thinking about it a bit more, I can vaguely understand this if it's a required class that you have no actual interest in - an elective you had to take because all others were taken, or if you were retaking a class that you were already very familiar with - but at that point, cheating would be redundant.)