Carty argues that part of the "test" of college involves stamina and willpower, something that study drugs can induce artificially and, therefore, unfairly. There are a number of problems with this position.
First, I wonder why Carty doesn't consider the consumption of coffee a form of cheating. More than a handful of academics are addicted to caffeine. Aren't Red Bull and Five Hour Energy also artificial enhancers of cognitive stamina? Carty doesn't give us a reason to think there is a difference between study drugs and these other stimulants. But I'd bet that many people are unwilling to say that consuming caffeine and other over-the-counter stimulants constitute a form of cheating.
Second, I think we should be skeptical about Carty's characterization of college as some sort of obstacle course. Professors don't directly assign grades based on how much time and attention we allocate to a paper or problem set — they grade the quality of what a student submits. Furthermore, the point of a taking a course isn't to spend some arbitrary amount of time studying outside of class. Rather, the aim is to master either some skill set or some corpus of knowledge. If you have learned and internalized the essential lessons of the course, then you deserve an A, whether or not you used a stimulant to do so. In other words, knowledge itself — not the amount of stamina required to comprehend that knowledge — is what matters in college.
Third, let's think about genuine cases of academic misconduct. The most obvious examples that come to mind involve copying another person's work or passing off someone else's work as your own. Bringing in answers to a test — that is, using a ‘cheat sheet' — is another paradigm case of cheating in an academic setting. In these situations, the cheater has helped herself to resources beyond her own mind. But, using study drugs doesn't seem at all analogous to these classic examples of cheating. Taking a study drug isn't like downloading the answers to a test into your brain. You still have to study for tests in order to know the material. You still have to adequately understand the relevant concepts to perform well on the assignment.
Again, I do not want to suggest that the use of study drugs should be encouraged. There are in fact many severe health risks involved with using drugs like Adderall and Ritalin. There might even be other moral reasons for prohibiting the unprescribed use of study drugs. It's clear though that we shouldn't consider the use of study drugs a form of cheating.
