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I'm a little appalled by the number of people who apparently think cheating is fine. Is integrity so uncommon? As I stated another comment, the problem I have

I'm a little appalled by the number of people who apparently think cheating is fine. Is integrity so uncommon? 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.

Confusion 17y ago
Define 'cheating'. I've never cheated, but I voted 'it depends', because, as always, everything depends on intentions and circumstances. I can perfectly understand people saying 'this assignment/test is ridiculous. I'm not going to put any effort in it and rather copy/cheat and spend my time in a more productive way'. 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.)
- neilc 17y ago
  I can perfectly understand people saying 'this assignment/test is ridiculous. I'm not going to put any effort in it and rather copy/cheat and spend my time in a more productive way'. 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."
  - Confusion 17y ago
    We have different opinions on what is ethical. Disregarding the terms of a contract, or the law for what that matters, may be perfectly ethical in my book. There is always a difference between the letter of the contract and the intention of the contract. The letter is the same for everyone, but the intention isn't. 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.
    - neilc 17y ago
      So you're basically arguing that there are situations when cheating is ethical if it wasn't the intent of the academic honestly policy to disallow it. Let's suppose that is true: what is a case of cheating that academic honesty policies aren't intended to disallow? Certainly a student cheating because they find the assignment "ridiculous" is very much what an academic policy is explicitly designed to outlaw. 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."
      - Retric 17y ago
        From a Yale's perspective they don't mind that some rich student is cheating if they are not blatant, because it does not harm the school's reputation to let them relative to the benefit of having that type of student graduate. Having an football player cheat at Virginia Tech is inline with the schools larger goals relative to having that student fail. 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.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
amalcon 17y ago
There are other classes of cheating beyond copying another's work. For example, in many of the pre-college math classes I had, looking up the answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book was considered cheating. You couldn't necessarily complete a homework this way, as you had to show your work, but you could verify your own answers. While I never bothered to do this (I did fine in math at the level these started appearing anyway), I didn't care that others did. 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.

Confusion 17y ago

Define 'cheating'. I've never cheated, but I voted 'it depends', because, as always, everything depends on intentions and circumstances. I can perfectly understand people saying 'this assignment/test is ridiculous. I'm not going to put any effort in it and rather copy/cheat and spend my time in a more productive way'. 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.)

neilc 17y ago
I can perfectly understand people saying 'this assignment/test is ridiculous. I'm not going to put any effort in it and rather copy/cheat and spend my time in a more productive way'. 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."
- Confusion 17y ago
  We have different opinions on what is ethical. Disregarding the terms of a contract, or the law for what that matters, may be perfectly ethical in my book. There is always a difference between the letter of the contract and the intention of the contract. The letter is the same for everyone, but the intention isn't. 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.
  - neilc 17y ago
    So you're basically arguing that there are situations when cheating is ethical if it wasn't the intent of the academic honestly policy to disallow it. Let's suppose that is true: what is a case of cheating that academic honesty policies aren't intended to disallow? Certainly a student cheating because they find the assignment "ridiculous" is very much what an academic policy is explicitly designed to outlaw. 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."
    - Retric 17y ago
      From a Yale's perspective they don't mind that some rich student is cheating if they are not blatant, because it does not harm the school's reputation to let them relative to the benefit of having that type of student graduate. Having an football player cheat at Virginia Tech is inline with the schools larger goals relative to having that student fail. 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.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

amalcon 17y ago

There are other classes of cheating beyond copying another's work. For example, in many of the pre-college math classes I had, looking up the answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book was considered cheating. You couldn't necessarily complete a homework this way, as you had to show your work, but you could verify your own answers. While I never bothered to do this (I did fine in math at the level these started appearing anyway), I didn't care that others did. 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.