To state the obvious, Ritalin and Adderall make studying easier. They provide for unnatural focus and absurd alertness during times of high stress and little sleep, to the benefit of thousands of improved grades and to the detriment of countless study habits. Going to a university that provides for and believes in the pursuit of academic knowledge involves an academic agreement. This agreement, which is necessarily meritocratic, relies on fairness. Study drugs, which prevent their users from being assessed on certain important skills, do constitute cheating, as they violate this agreement by making academics unfairly harder for some and easier for others.
Some of the academic agreement is obvious. As part of going here, we agree, and are expected, to pursue and demonstrate academic knowledge. I guess, in a way, Adderall and Ritalin don't subvert this either. While on such a stimulant high and in possession of such a seemingly unstoppable potential to focus, one could easily direct his focus toward non-academic pursuits. To gain the benefits of the drug, the student still needs the will to study. And at the close of a test or a conclusion of a paper, a study drug user has still demonstrated the same knowledge that everyone else has.
The other portion of this agreement, by which we are expected to be assessed through a specific test of skill, is less clear and certainly less discussed. At a university, each student is also being tested on an amount of stamina, an amount of vigor that stands independent of the will to study and simple knowledge.
Hard academic work necessarily involves petty and large-scale frustration. It has inherent amounts of complexity. It will often bring boredom. It can be sidetracked by emotional difficulties. In other words, hard academic work is a synecdoche for life itself.
The student on Adderall is tested on her will and her knowledge. The student who goes her way without chemical help is passing an entirely additional test, one that evaluates her ability to bypass frustration, delve into complexity, defy boredom and succeed independent of emotional turbulence. We all know that this test is important. We feel it in the hundreds of pages of readings we have a week and when we experience a breakup the day before a paper is due.
So when a student uses Adderall or Ritalin, artificially manipulating his neurotransmitters to do the work his stamina and willpower should have done already, he is taking a full 50 percent of the test that the unaided student is. I challenge anybody to call that anything but cheating.
Kevin Carty '15 is a political science concentrator from Washington. He would love to hear any responses and can be reached at kevin_carty@brown.edu.
