How Wrong is Academic Cheating?
You, a teacher or professor, give your students a writing assignment. You find evidence that one of them has plagiarized in a way you think was deliberate. You sigh, curse a little under your breath, collect your evidence, and file a complaint of “academic dishonesty” against the student. They cheated, you caught them, they must face the relevant penalty. Obvious. Right?
I won’t so much argue that you are wrong as that (1) your conviction that you are right deserves to be deflated a bit, and (2) probably has a less lofty justification than you might think. Along the way, I will try to convince you that even if the student isn’t acting rightly by cheating, they might not exactly be acting wrongly either, especially given the incentives schools typically place in front of students.
To start, I’ll focus on a composite example that resembles cases of plagiarism within my own courses. I teach courses in the philosophy, history, and sociology of education within a college of education. All students studying education must take these courses, and the courses also fulfill (writing or diversity) requirements that other students need to satisfy. Thus, I get a range of students: from (a) those who are absolutely eager to learn the course content, to (b) students who want to be teachers and might benefit from the course (even if they aren’t yet convinced of the value of the course content), to (c) students from other majors who are taking the course solely to fulfill a mandatory requirement for their degree.
From time to time, I catch students [often from group (c)] practicing various forms of academic dishonesty on assignments. When I catch them, I file appropriate “academic dishonesty” charges (for reasons I will detail below). Yet, I actually feel quite guilty about it and, when I try to justify my decision to myself, I am consistently underwhelmed by the rationales I can think of.
Students in group (c) [and arguably those in group (b)], are in my course not because the want to be, but because the university has told them that being there will satisfy a requirement for their degree. They care about the degree (and maybe also about being a teacher), but that doesn’t mean they care about or would necessarily benefit from my course.
When we justify the punishing of student cheaters, we usually do so by appealing to arguments about students’ own good. We say that they are cheating themselves somehow by finding ways to do work and not get the benefit of the content (or the process of gaining the content, which seems worthless to me unless the content itself has some value for the individual). Or, we say that their cheating is unfair to the class and institution because it allows some students to get the same result (i.e., the course grade and credits received) without doing the work other students did. I find both of these reasons faulty.
The first wrongly analogizes the learning process in my class to the learning process of a student who learns something by choice that they believe will benefit them. A student who wants to learn guitar and skimps on their teacher’s assignments but finds clever ways to appear as though they have learned does cheat herself if her goal was actually to learn guitar. But my students in group (c) and, arguably, (b) did not take my class by choice and it isn’t clear that what I will teach them is something that will benefit them in the future (or if it does, that they can’t plausibly learn it by other means and at another time). We teachers (and administrators) could, of course, assert that those who think these courses have no value are simply wrong. First, that is only plausible for group (b), but probably implausible for group (c). Second, even if true for group (b) - they aspire to be teachers someday, after all! - that’s a blunt instrument that could wrongly seem to justify a whole lot of coercion whenever adults in authority believe they know what their students will need. I suspect the rationale would lead to lots of false positives (such as when my teachers in the 1980s were absolutely convinced I’d need to learn cursive).[1]
The second reason for punishing student cheaters - the fairness-to-all argument - wrongly analogizes school learning to a competitive sport. Lance Armstrong cheated in order to improve his results relative to others in professional cycling and authorities were right to punish him. This is so because in a context within which everyone competes for a scarce prize and rewards that follow from one’s relative results, Armstrong’s cheating unfairly affected the outcome of races. Since I do not grade on any curve that has me distributing a finite number of good grades, a cheating student does not affect anyone else’s ability to get grades or credits. [2]
“Don’t hate the player; hate the game” has become one of my favorite mottos for understanding student behavior. Students are faced with a web of incentives structured largely around grades, credit hours, and pieces of paper whose primary value comes less from the learning it represents than from their ability to gain the student entry into certain professions. (Education sociologist David Labaree has written much about the relation of credential-driven learning to cheating and other performance strategies adopted by students that have little to do with learning.) Given those incentives, it’s hard to blame students for making what seems like an entirely rational calculation on their part. The internally voiced benefit analysis might proceed as follows: “Given that what I really want out of this course is the grades and the course credit, and given that I have no reason to think the course content will benefit me, I’d rather try to get a good grade by finding ways to bypass the content than by mastering the content.”
I know; this is a pessimistic view for us teachers to digest. But I suspect it is the reality we face. What we think we are doing - imparting our knowledge onto the youth - diverges from what (most) students think we are doing - setting up a game where each course is a level, and each grade and credit is a reward for playing it. Of course, genuine learning does happen in schools; but when it does, it tends to come from engaged students. Insofar as cheating reflects non-engagement with the content, it seems unlikely to me that preventing cheating will necessarily lead to better learning (rather than the appearance of learning, with disengaged students simply becoming better actors).
We can, of course, make it less likely for students to cheat, by making assignments harder to cheat on or upping the penalty for cheating so that students will think twice in their benefit analyses (see above). Maybe that would lead more students to learn content that, it turns out, will positively affect them. In my own situation, I doubt this. I teach about the philosophy of education (among other things) and I strongly believe that philosophy is only of value for students if they respond to - the fancy word is “appropriate” - what they’ve learned in some personal way. A student who wanted to cheat but didn’t (maybe for fear of being caught and penalized) might be able to explain what Deweyan progressives think teacher/student relations should be but remember this material only as part of an assignment they had to do and would have cheated on if they could have. If the goal in cheating prevention efforts is to increase the likelihood that students will learn the material and that’s the result, then I am at a loss as to why we went through the trouble. [3]
In the end, I do penalize cheating students. Why? I do so only because it is part of my role as a professor. If pressed to elaborate, I penalize cheating because institutions of learning function, and maybe must function, on a myth: that most of what goes on in our classes involves our imparting knowledge to students who absorb it so that they become improved. To be clear, I think this sometimes happens. More often, I think students see school as a game they play, whose rewards have more to do with credit hours than content knowledge.
The cheating student does not (generally) cheat themselves, but cheat all of us who (try to) believe in that myth. Her wrong comes primarily from her example of how the myth did not hold true for her, and if not for her, maybe not for other students either. We penalize her so that we can find fault with, and “hate, the player, not the game.”
[1] Another problem I have with the argument that cheating students are cheating themselves is that if true, externally and artificially imposed penalties are hard to justify. If I harm myself, it is difficult to see why that harm isn’t itself a sufficient penalty on my behavior, why we should compound that penalty with an extra artificially imposed penalty.
[2] I should mention that this is only true if one is grading for mastery (as I am in my class) rather than by class rank by grading on some sort of curve. In the former case, teachers and professors give out grades purely as a function of whether the student seems to have mastered the material, and one person’s grade does not affect the others’ grades. In the latter case, cheating students are akin to person jumping up in class rank, thereby negatively affecting all students who’s place in the rank is lowered based on the cheater’ dishonest performance. In this latter case this is now a strong reason (the good of other students) to detect and prevent cheating. Not in the former case.
[3] Here, I will make a distinction between learning as remembering and learning as appropriating, somewhat akin to the distinction Kierkegaard would make in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript between objective and subjective truth. Some things – for instance, math facts – may be useful to remember even when the person remembering does not currently see them as anything more than facts they were made to learn. Other things – such as reasons why it is wrong to be racist – likely diminish in value if they are remembered only as things one was made to learn; their value comes not just in their being remembered, but their being appropriated in ways that the remembering person recognizes their importance. I suspect this type of learning more rarely happens in groups (c) and (b), and hence, am skeptical that we should ground attempts to curb their cheating on a rationale that centers on getting them to learn (remember) the material.
Kevin Currie-Knight is a Teaching Associate Professor in East Carolina University's College of Education (Special Education, Foundations, and Research Department). His research is in the history and philosophy of education as well as educational approaches that give students more opportunity for self-direction. He is the author of Education in the Marketplace (Springer) and is working on editing a collection of "classic" anarchist writings on education.