Preventing Cheating Culture

Although cheating at Middlebury sometimes feels like a non-issue — or at least, a non-discussed issue — last month’s events at Harvard have sparked an important conversation.

In its biggest case of cheating in recent memory, Harvard announced in late August that it was investigating over 100 undergraduate students for allegedly committing “academic dishonesty” on a take-home final exam. While some of these students plagiarized outright from the class readings, many others turned in almost identical papers, evidently collaborating with their peers — an act explicitly forbidden in the professor’s instructions.

Harvard being Harvard, this scandal has prompted important conversations throughout academia about the causes of cheating, changes in cheating culture and how to deal with dishonesty in today’s ever-competitive and high-tech university setting. While some of these discussions have been constructive, I’ve found them largely disappointing; rarely do they broach the two central roots of the scandal at hand — class entitlement and academic stress.

While discussing the recent Harvard scandal in one of my classes, many of my classmates excused the act of cheating in academia as “just something people need to do to get ahead in this economy” and “a part of life.”

Numerous other friends that I’ve talked to expressed similar opinions, saying that the Harvard students’ overburdened workload almost made cheating a necessity for post-college success.

As a fellow classmate and a Student Wellness Leader (SWL) on campus, I find these discussions both concerning and alerting. When I hear Middlebury students echo the Harvard student response that they had at least some “right” to cheat, I cannot help but recognize this as an issue of class entitlement. As scholars at an elite institution, we Middkids sometimes think, “We pay to go here; therefore, we deserve to get good grades for our transcripts and our futures, no matter how we get them.”

And those who get in our way — in this case, professors and the institution that aim to punish academic dishonesty — receive criticism and blame. One Harvard student told Salon that Harvard is just “out for blood” to protect its own reputation, that in fact students were “being scapegoated.” Another told the New York Times, “They’re threatening people’s futures. Having my degree revoked now would mean I lose my job.” As a result, many Harvard students have already gotten lawyers and are preparing to sue the college, the professors and the course’s teaching fellows.

Talk about entitlement! The students explicitly violated the rule of the exam. In any other “real world” context, such a violation would be strictly punishable by law — no excuses. We as elite college students generally accept that lawbreakers must be punished, but we don’t hold always ourselves to the same standards.

For example, take the gas station worker who steals 50 dollars from the cash register — do we excuse her from legal repercussions simply because she needed it to get ahead in this tough economy? Is it just a “part of life?”  I’d guess that most Middlebury students would have no problem with her legal punishment for cheating at a gas station job — so why the strong defense of cheating students?

To be sure, I do not mean that all Middlebury and Harvard students have no morals. I know for a fact that we as a student body hold strong ethical values, expressed from immigration and human rights symposiums to dedication to community volunteerism. So again I wonder, why are we defending the Harvard students?

While class entitlement accounts for one part, there is another crucial wellness issue at play here: stress. Academic stress, along with time management, is a central cause of cheating, yet few people make the connection until it’s too late. It’s often not the morally corrupt person that decides to cheat, but the desperate, sleep-deprived student who doubts her ability to get all her work done. This type of student, as Erika and Nicholas Christakis (both faculty members at Harvard) describe, is “prone to panic and self-doubt … these students become so worried about failure that they lose perspective and fail to see obvious alternatives to cheating like asking for help before things get out of control.” Such tunnel vision, they continue, “takes on a toxicity that inhibits resilience in the face of disappointment.”

We also face much stress, but this stress should not serve as an excuse. Instead, once we’ve recognized the essential link between high stress and cheating, we must act to prevent both. There are a number of resources here that aim to help students manage their time and stress, from CTLR [Center for Teaching, Learning and Research] tutoring to meditation sessions to puppy hours to commons advising. We are lucky to have a faculty and staff support system that works to counsel students on time-management. We should take advantage of these resources. Better to take the hour to discuss your schedule with your adviser than to disobey the honor code pledge you took your first week here. Rather than blame your professor for making the instructions unclear, talk to her about them.  As we all know, communication is key.

While there is no shame in asking for help from available faculty, there is — and must continue to be — shame in cheating. Instead of excusing college cheaters in the name of the competitive economy and necessary collaboration, the conversation around cheating must become one of preventative measures and preserving integrity.