Cheating to Succeed?
Wednesday I spent the hour before my physics lecture in the math tutor center on campus. It’s a class-sized room with round tables that have different signs on them, such as MAT171, and you can go in for free and share the tutor at your class’s table with any other students in the same course. Sometimes, however, there isn’t a tutor schedule for that time period, or they’re out sick. Yesterday that was the case, and the two students already at my course’s table were having a discussion that shocked me.
One was teaching the other how to store notes in the program section of their TI-83 calculator, in order to cheat on the upcoming exam.
They discussed strategies for avoiding notice by the testing center proctors, as well as ways to represent mathematical ideas and saving the data for easy retrieval. I was appalled.
Today, I walked from the tutor center to my class with two other students, and mentioned the incident. Not only were they both totally unconcerned by it, both had done the same thing on their calculators! One intends to be a dentist, the other a psychologist. And they are oblivious to the ethical failure of their actions. When pushed, both said “Everyone on campus does it” and told me I should, too.
I chose not to do so. Instead, I studied twice more today before going into the testing center and taking my exam. It felt easy – and I am NOT a math person. In fact, I had to drop the class last semester because my courseload was so difficult that I’d fallen about 3 weeks behind the coursework. Yet I got a near-perfect score on the first midterm for this course, and expect another great score on this one.
So… should we worry that these future dentists and therapists suffer from a lack of morality or ethical understanding?
Given the opportunity, most people will cheat just a little bit. I actually saw a lot more of this in high school than I did in college. In the end, there are no shortcuts – either you know the material, or you don’t.
You might find this interesting, it’s a talk by Dan Ariely about the studies he did on cheating, and what makes people cheat more, and cheat less: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
That video was really interesting. I guess these kids considered it an ok level of cheating because it was just the formulas, and they’d still have to do the actual algebra on the test. It does make me wonder if I would behave the same way as those tested, of if I’d resist the temptation.