No Obligation
Thinking Cheating is Okay
I overheard a conversation between two students while I and others waited for a street-light. They seemed oblivious to the rest of us as one asked the other if he'd plagiarized his essay. This caught my attention because of how casually it was asked. The other student said he hadn't in an equally casual way.
The first student said she didn't think essays from web-sites were a good bet anymore because of profs using search programs; he answered it cost a lot to get essays written by senior students. Nothing they said came close to acknowledging ethical issues about plagiarism. Everything they said was quite matter of fact, including reference to senior students providing essays for money.
The conversation and much else I've heard from students, profs, and deans convinced me that cheating for better marks has simply fallen off the edge of the ethical table; it just isn't an ethical issue anymore. Getting caught is now simply the cost of doing academic business. And that's the rub: the cost isn't very high anymore, given how new procedures protecting students' "rights" take the edge off any repercussions.
Universities have instituted many regulations to "protect" students from profs and have effectively made the student-teacher relation adversarial. Exams are submitted with student or random numbers instead of names; all sorts of appeal procedures are available regarding marks; charges of cheating or plagiarism have to be dealt with in complex bureaucratic ways involving representatives for both sides and even lawyers; and penalties have been greatly softened. Where plagiarizers were once expelled, now they're allowed to resubmit their work.
There are two issues here. One is ethical: the sad fact is that cheating is no longer seen as immoral. The other issue is less obvious but is mostly responsible for the first: it's that the more procedures are in place to deal with cheating, the more routine cheating looks to students and many profs. It's as if the implementing of the many procedures half-way legitimizes cheating.
Foucault pointed out that criminality isn't something contemporary societies try to eradicate; instead they try to manage it. This seems to be the case with academic cheating; it's being managed. The trouble is that the objects of management are seen as tolerable, so it's not surprising students see cheating as something they'll either get away with or at worst have to jump through some bureaucratic hoops to fix.
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