Cheating on tests, making up stories to tell the spouse about why you’re working late, lying about WMDs… It’s the American way of doing things.
A better way to prevent student cheating
As another academic year draws to a close, amid a rushed flurry of final exams and term papers, it’s time for professors to play their least favorite role: cop. With some surveys finding that up to three-quarters of college students cheat, faculty and administrators are making a bigger push for integrity. What most still lack, however, is a compelling moral argument against cheating.
Many young people take this bleak view. A 2004 poll of high school students found that 59 percent agreed that “successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.” Young people believe in honor and value integrity; they also worry that living by these beliefs could mean ending up as a loser. In justifying her cheating, one student told a researcher: “Good grades can make the difference between going to medical school and being a janitor.” Few professors have a ready retort to this logic.
Appeals to self-interest only worsen the problem. If you tell a student that she shouldn’t cheat because she might get caught, or that she’s “just cheating herself” by not learning the material, or that integrity is an asset in life to be cultivated, she might respond – as the student I met in North Carolina did – by spelling out the ways that successful cheating could advance one’s self-interest, especially if “everybody else” is doing it.
What can faculty and administrators do to stem epidemic cheating? Their best hope is to cast cheating as an issue of justice.
Smith — In my mind, the certainty surrounding the WMDs was always the biggest lie. Leading up to the war, every speech contained a call to arms based on the certainty that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons and the capability to produce more. Administration officials always talked as if they practically had the zip code of the weapons stockpiles, and never conveyed any hint that they had less than 100% certainty. In one news conference, Rumsfeld was surprisingly specific about just where the weapons were. The American public was always left to assume (as I myself did) that the Administration had reliable intelligence that it simply couldn’t make public. Sometimes, you just have to trust people.
Only since the invasion have we learned that whatever beliefs they actually had lodged in their single-purposed little brains, there was no logical basis for the certainty they always conveyed to us. They were able to cherry-pick enough intelligence that indicated a high probability WMDs would be found, but they often ignored sources that carried equal or greater credibility that cast doubt on their expressed expectations. In short, they’ve covered their collective ass in terms of hard proof that they lied. Rather than judge them on the basis of what they claim to have believed, perhaps we should judge them for what they had a reasonable basis to believe. That’s where they always come up short.
But if you want to be reminded of a few of their lies of having actually found mobile weapons laboratories, despite already having strong evidence to the contrary, here’s a story from the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101888.html
I know it’s not fun to be reminded what lying weasels you’ve entrusted with your children’s safety and future, but once in awhile truth is important. It’s funny how all discussions of honesty and ethics tend to take a turn towards George W. Bush. Perhaps it’s because his campaign was fought and won on “values.”
Cheating can’t be stop untill and unless there is mutual understanding of students wth teacher what they actually doing and more of restriction