Get Herald RSSLast month, Stanford held the SOS: Stressed Out Students conference to address two worrying and linked phenomena on college campuses. First, an increasing number of students have sought mental health services for stress related to academic achievement. Second and more disconcerting, administrators have noticed an increase in cheating. As Brown students, we may think we are insulated from cheating by the Open Curriculum - but we are not.
There is a cheating epidemic nationwide and it extends to Brown. We are at the point where it is impossible to avoid cheaters on campus. The practice is more widespread than has ever been acknowledged, and we are all to blame for ignoring it.
We have all seen, or at least know someone who has seen the type of capital "C" Cheating that results in a Dean's hearing. Properly motivated students are incredibly creative.
There was the boy who laminated a 3x5 note card and carefully taped it to the inside of a fresh Grande Starbucks coffee cup. The girl who slid a list of chemical reactions into the clear plastic front slip of a binder she placed below her feet. The guy who paid a professor in England to write his final Shakespeare paper. And the engineers who wired their cell phones' GSM chips to a TI-89 so they could send text messages during an exam.
Yet we already have honor codes, computer algorithms and internet-scouring devices in place to discourage these sorts of nefarious activities. These students are the recognizable cheaters we condemn to public ridicule as a warning to would-be Cheaters across the land. Often, they are asked to take a temporary leave from the University, and on some occasions a permanent one. But this is not the central problem at Brown.
The cheating that happens every day is a more subtle beast. It is the last five questions of a Math 9 assignment copied from a classmate. Or the lab results "borrowed" from a friend because a dirty test tube skewed your results. The discussion of a paper that may have marginally overstepped the collaboration policy.
Often, if you confront students, they will say this sort of activity is "not really cheating." They really could have done the work themselves if they had the time, they swear. The Phi Psi party just left them a little bit more tired than they expected. Or their roommate lost his wallet and they had to spend the afternoon looking for it.
The dirty truth is that many of us are cheating, and we rarely think twice about it. If we aren't actively engaging in it, we look away when our roommate does.
It would be wrong to complain. Why risk your roommate's future at Harvard Med for a lousy Chem 33 assignment when a third of the class is probably doing the same thing? He's not hurting anybody. You aren't in the class, you don't know what the policy is. Maybe they are allowed to fax the answers to each other. So we operate on a strict Don't Ask, Don't Tattle policy.
Unfortunately, the distinction between cheating and Cheating is one we are willing to make to justify actions we know are wrong. Some would say it is human nature. We cheat on our diets and our spouses, and as long as we try to learn from our mistakes, and catch the Cheaters, we are doing well enough.
But while individual instances of cheating may not be the moral equivalent of kicking puppies, they contribute to a culture of rule-breaking, excuse-making and reasoning that spills over into other aspects of our lives.
Plagiarists do not wake up on a Tuesday and begin copy-pasting chapters of a book into their theses. They begin with a word here, a sentence there, eventually lifting entire paragraphs until they are caught. Or not, as is often the case.
By ignoring small acts of cheating, we encourage the Ken Lays to keep skimming off the top and the Martha Stewarts to trade on insider information. It is probably too late to remagnetize the moral compass of Lehman Executive Richard Fuld Jr., who blamed everyone he could but himself and happily walked out of the building with more than $500 million in compensation.
But maybe we can try to make sure the next ones do not come from Brown.
We can fight cheating like we should fight fake IDs, by legalizing and embracing the activity- in this case embracing many different types of academic collaboration. We could remove incentives to cheat by changing the way we grade assignments. Or we could make ourselves miserable by providing rewards for snitching on our classmates.
Then there is the current policy: we can just keep ignoring it. As long as we do not talk about cheating, Brown professors and the University administration can continue to claim plausible deniability, and students can continue to slightly cross the line. But maybe if we address this dishonesty head-on right now, we won't have Brown alums screwing over honest people ten years down the line.
Jake Heimark '10 "borrowed" this column from his roommate.
