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Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of entrapment (although all are rele

Agreed. I'm no moral authority nor expert in ethics but this is pretty cut and dry to me. I think the most important aspect of entrapment (although all are relevant in the legal sense) is the second clause: coercion. Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
The coercion's implicit. Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around them including (and especially) those in public education have told them that they need to go to college and get a degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto. Then they get there and college is even more absurd than public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall listening to these people who don't live in the real world with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how many credits were for something other than electives or your major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they can't jump through pointless hoops. So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the best way they know how, and they find relevant study materials. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying someone else's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit in on the exam for them? Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found what they thought were the correct answers, and went over them enough that they could remember them during the test. Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children. He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered to do the coercion for him. I might be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that such that they should be putting in more effort... but even in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven't cheated.
- prox 3y ago
  I am sorry but you make a real tour-de-force out of how they are the victim of going to a site that is meant to facilitate cheating by looking up answers to exams, not learning. You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the material, you don’t have to cheat Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but that’s another discussion entirely and imo outside the scope.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - EdwardDiego 3y ago
      Show us on the doll where the bad academia hurt you. > If you don't understand anything in my comment, that's ok. I understand everything in yours, including most of the likely reasons that you can't understand anything in mine. Ironic that you consider the teacher to have his head up his ass, then write something as obnoxious and condescending as this.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      They're supposed to be studying the entire course, not just the questions that will be asked this particular time. And they were given perfectly good study materials for the course. These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test. Sorry, I have to reject these assumptions. One can imagine a stressed student who is attempting to learn from any available resource. This person getting confused by the poisoned material just exposes that they went against school policy by virtue of falling for the trick. There’s no argument for why their intentions were necessarily to avoid the work of learning. Remove the professor’s assumption that they were adequately tricky with their question trap and perhaps it becomes more obvious. They may have instead just done something which confused an otherwise (if one disregards school policy) innocent student into believing false information.
- Zak 3y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people with university degrees better than those without is harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to individual students actually cheating in the manner described. The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers. > Were they copying someone else's tests? Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test. It's fucking multiple choice. If they got correct answers, then their answers would be identical to previous student's correct answers, by definition. If doing that is cheating, then only the first students to ever get those questions on a test could pass it. There's some sort of widespread mental illness affecting a large percentage of the population, such that apparently so many of you see this as cheating. You get that, right? If you learn the answers to questions that end up appearing on the test prior to the test commencing, and you put those answers down on the test because you have memorized them (you know them in other words), this can't ever be cheating. That's not what "cheating" means.
    - foldr 3y ago
      Multiple choice is a red herring here. One can equally memorize answers to a non multiple choice test. If the point of the test is to check that students understand the material, and if students aren't allowed to look at the answers of previous tests ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"), then memorizing the correct answers to previous tests is cheating.
      - randombits0 3y ago
        Memorizing the material is the goal! Being an ethics class, I would have anticipated the gaming of the cheater site. When I saw the wrong answers, I would have laughed my ass off and gone on with life.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Entrapment and RICO!
- paulddraper 3y ago
  So....these students aren't morally failed cheaters, they are just bad researchers who will copy bad information from random Internet sites?
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Your honor, I saw this bicycle just sitting there unlocked. If it hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stolen it. It coerced me. I needed a bike. Give me a break. They cheated. Case closed.
- _proofs 3y ago
  the test... was a take home... they, well, did not have to remember anything, nor recall anything, nor sit down and take a test -- they copied answers from the available source. this whole comment unfortunately has taken quite a liberty with its defense of the students and perceived "due diligence".
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  This feels like you're saying all monetary theft should be legal because of inherent coercion in our capitalistic society.
harimau777 3y ago
It seems to me that this could be entrapment in the sense that by putting the exam on the site the professor may have created the perception that it was trivially easy to cheat. That could cause a student who normally wouldn't cheat to decide to do so because they felt that it was necessary in order to stay competitive.
- theamk 3y ago
  A student who normally wouldn't cheat is not going to go site designing for cheaters, and would not be searching for their finals there. Heck, in my entire college carrier I didn't even know such sites existed. If professor (or TA) made announcement along the lines of "Don't go to Quizlet and don't download my past exams from there", maybe you'd have a point.. but they did not.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Ah, but those sites are often the top Search results if you search for a distinctive phrase from the assignments. The student may not pay for access, but they will certainly be presented with tantalizing snippets of many solutions. And many of those solutions are bad ones. They may contain B.S., wrong answers, and things students didn't learn with the class resources. If you copy/paste one of the solutions, you may evade detection and earn a "C".
- tptacek 3y ago
  That's not "entrapment". If all it takes for you to commit an offense is the perception that other people are doing it too, you're predisposed and require no coercion, and thus culpable. Just to be absolutely clear: it doesn't matter; even if it was "entrapment", it's not necessarily unethical. Plenty of western countries don't recognize entrapment defenses. But it's also just not entrapment.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

The coercion's implicit. Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around them including (and especially) those in public education have told them that they need to go to college and get a degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto. Then they get there and college is even more absurd than public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall listening to these people who don't live in the real world with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how many credits were for something other than electives or your major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they can't jump through pointless hoops. So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the best way they know how, and they find relevant study materials. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying someone else's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit in on the exam for them? Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found what they thought were the correct answers, and went over them enough that they could remember them during the test. Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children. He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered to do the coercion for him. I might be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that such that they should be putting in more effort... but even in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven't cheated.

prox 3y ago
I am sorry but you make a real tour-de-force out of how they are the victim of going to a site that is meant to facilitate cheating by looking up answers to exams, not learning. You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the material, you don’t have to cheat Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but that’s another discussion entirely and imo outside the scope.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Show us on the doll where the bad academia hurt you. > If you don't understand anything in my comment, that's ok. I understand everything in yours, including most of the likely reasons that you can't understand anything in mine. Ironic that you consider the teacher to have his head up his ass, then write something as obnoxious and condescending as this.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    They're supposed to be studying the entire course, not just the questions that will be asked this particular time. And they were given perfectly good study materials for the course. These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      > These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test. Sorry, I have to reject these assumptions. One can imagine a stressed student who is attempting to learn from any available resource. This person getting confused by the poisoned material just exposes that they went against school policy by virtue of falling for the trick. There’s no argument for why their intentions were necessarily to avoid the work of learning. Remove the professor’s assumption that they were adequately tricky with their question trap and perhaps it becomes more obvious. They may have instead just done something which confused an otherwise (if one disregards school policy) innocent student into believing false information.
Zak 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people with university degrees better than those without is harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to individual students actually cheating in the manner described. The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers. > Were they copying someone else's tests? Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test. It's fucking multiple choice. If they got correct answers, then their answers would be identical to previous student's correct answers, by definition. If doing that is cheating, then only the first students to ever get those questions on a test could pass it. There's some sort of widespread mental illness affecting a large percentage of the population, such that apparently so many of you see this as cheating. You get that, right? If you learn the answers to questions that end up appearing on the test prior to the test commencing, and you put those answers down on the test because you have memorized them (you know them in other words), this can't ever be cheating. That's not what "cheating" means.
  - foldr 3y ago
    Multiple choice is a red herring here. One can equally memorize answers to a non multiple choice test. If the point of the test is to check that students understand the material, and if students aren't allowed to look at the answers of previous tests ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"), then memorizing the correct answers to previous tests is cheating.
    - randombits0 3y ago
      Memorizing the material is the goal! Being an ethics class, I would have anticipated the gaming of the cheater site. When I saw the wrong answers, I would have laughed my ass off and gone on with life.
tedunangst 3y ago
Entrapment and RICO!
paulddraper 3y ago
So....these students aren't morally failed cheaters, they are just bad researchers who will copy bad information from random Internet sites?
AlbertCory 3y ago
Your honor, I saw this bicycle just sitting there unlocked. If it hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stolen it. It coerced me. I needed a bike. Give me a break. They cheated. Case closed.
_proofs 3y ago
the test... was a take home... they, well, did not have to remember anything, nor recall anything, nor sit down and take a test -- they copied answers from the available source. this whole comment unfortunately has taken quite a liberty with its defense of the students and perceived "due diligence".
noitpmeder 3y ago
This feels like you're saying all monetary theft should be legal because of inherent coercion in our capitalistic society.

harimau777 3y ago

It seems to me that this could be entrapment in the sense that by putting the exam on the site the professor may have created the perception that it was trivially easy to cheat. That could cause a student who normally wouldn't cheat to decide to do so because they felt that it was necessary in order to stay competitive.

theamk 3y ago
A student who normally wouldn't cheat is not going to go site designing for cheaters, and would not be searching for their finals there. Heck, in my entire college carrier I didn't even know such sites existed. If professor (or TA) made announcement along the lines of "Don't go to Quizlet and don't download my past exams from there", maybe you'd have a point.. but they did not.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Ah, but those sites are often the top Search results if you search for a distinctive phrase from the assignments. The student may not pay for access, but they will certainly be presented with tantalizing snippets of many solutions. And many of those solutions are bad ones. They may contain B.S., wrong answers, and things students didn't learn with the class resources. If you copy/paste one of the solutions, you may evade detection and earn a "C".
tptacek 3y ago
That's not "entrapment". If all it takes for you to commit an offense is the perception that other people are doing it too, you're predisposed and require no coercion, and thus culpable. Just to be absolutely clear: it doesn't matter; even if it was "entrapment", it's not necessarily unethical. Plenty of western countries don't recognize entrapment defenses. But it's also just not entrapment.