We’ve all done it. We spend hours studying for that one final, and then in the face of pressure, we forget one word, one formula, one number, so we sneak a glance to the side and then continue as if nothing happened. It’s not cheating, because we didn’t copy a whole sentence or a whole answer. It was just that one component that kicked our mind back into gear. It’s not cheating because the knowledge is there. Most of the time, we all know the material we were supposed to know, but the pressure of taking that exam and doing well made our minds blank for a mere second.
Cheating is not a result of lack of knowledge or laziness but rather the opposite. The need to thrive all the time, to come out on top, has led many to believe that success is success regardless of how you get there. Society puts so much pressure on young people to succeed, especially those attending elite universities and attending difficult classes.
More and more, it has become clear that the students at the top of their classes are also cheating. The excuse can no longer be “I didn’t know,” and teachers can’t say, “you should have studied more.” These students have received top marks in their classes until now — and there is no reason or excuse for that to stop. No excuse for not graduating at the top of your class and no excuse for not having a high paying job at a world-renowned company right after college.
The pressure for the top to remain on top is making cheating appear acceptable. The same society that doesn’t want us to fail is telling us it is okay to cheat to get there. The pressure put on us by our professors, our parents and even ourselves does not allow any room for failure. But more than not giving us room for failure, it tells us we need to succeed at any cost.
A survey cited in New York Magazine says that “51 percent of people age 17 or under agree that to get ahead, a person must lie or cheat.” But maybe it’s not our generation that is immoral, but instead the generation before us — the generation that gives us top marks on papers and exams. The same generation that employs us in spite of how we got that job and confirms that cheating will get us to the top, because they reward it.
Professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University said in a New York Times article that there isn’t “any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them.” Because our methods produce positive responses, no one tells us they are wrong or immoral. We are encouraged to continue cheating because the alternative — failing — is a greater wrong than dishonesty.
Cheating is a result of our fear of failure and a society that tells us we cannot fail. We fear that if we don’t get the right answer we have failed our professors, our parents and ourselves — even if it’s just one question on a test. In most areas of work, it is nearly impossible for us to get jobs unless we cheat the system — our parents contact the CEO, who happens to be an old classmate, and, just like that, we get to skip the entire process and head straight to the end goal. Yet not getting a job tells us we have failed a whole group of people again, but we fail to recognize that maybe we just weren’t right for the position.
Educational institutions continue to talk about cheating as a negative and stress that it will not be tolerated. But they ignore it for the most part. Unless the cheating happens in a large scale, such as in the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, the actions are rewarded rather than punished.
What is the result of a system that pressures us to thrive and encourages cheating? None of us know how to fail — yet failure will come at some point. We will not always be able to look to the side and see what our peers wrote, and our parents won’t always be able to pull strings so we can get that job or promotion. Educators even go as far as inflating grades to have their students succeed, but our teachers won’t always be able to make our achievements seem more impressive than they actually are. Failure leads to a loss of confidence in our skills and knowledge. Society tells us that learning for the sake of knowledge is worthless. It leads to a belief that everything we learned will only help us succeed after we get what we want. But for us to get to that point, our cunning is more valuable than our knowledge.
Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of California at San Diego, said in the same Times article that parents have “real trouble accepting that … kids make mistakes and fail.” Unfortunately, this means we ourselves have trouble accepting that we make mistakes and fail. A vicious cycle of cheating and dishonesty is born, but this cycle is easy to break. If we allow ourselves to fail and learn from those failures, rather than continue punishing ourselves for them, cheating wouldn’t be so heavily endorsed. Society won’t let us break the cycle, and until honesty is valued over success, cheating will continue to be the preferred means to an end.
Sami Isman ’15 hopes society can one day measure success in a way that doesn’t involve numbers and that the journey becomes just as important as the goal.
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