Harvard announced last week that 125 students are accused of cheating on a take-home final of their Intro to Congress course. Over half the class, or nearly 2% of the student body, is implicated.
Students were explicitly forbidden to discuss the exam with anyone. They were supposed to take the final as if they were writing a proctored open book exam.
The professor brought the case to the Administrative Board when he noticed suspicious similarities among 10-20 exams. A review of all the exams found many more exams with suspiciously similar answers and some cases of outright plagiarism.
Lindy West of Jezebel descends into self-parody in her post on cheating:
You know what I hate? Cheating. Cheating is shitty, and people shouldn’t cheat. But you know what I don’t hate? Also cheating! Cheating is great sometimes, and super helpful. I’m specifically talking about academic cheating, but the same applies to cheating in general — cheating hurts people, and it hurts the cheater, and it sucks. Except…when it doesn’t.
Farhad Manjoo of Slate produced an equally specious, if better written, apologia entitled, “There Is No Harvard Cheating Scandal.”
West and Manjoo are as bad as the sophists in the comments on the Harvard Crimson website. “Everyone has cheated,” insisted Crimson commenter MarcusBunny, “And it doesn’t stop in the academic world. All musicians cheat, many politicians cheat, many athletes cheat, many spouses cheat.” (Musicians? Does this guy hate AutoTune?)
West acknowledges that there is something unseemly about letting the children of the elite subvert the meritocracy:
I do think that letting privileged kids cheat the system to get ahead encourages dangerous levels of entitlement. But it’s so much more complicated than “cheating = bad; honesty = good; overbearing parents = bad; perfect-mystery-ingredient-parents = good.” The older I get, the clearer it becomes that pretty much nothing is binary. Everything is contextual. It’s not like I’m a “good feminist” and Sarah Palin is a “bad feminist” and that’s all there is to it — we both exist on a continuum (there are people who are “better” than me, and Michele Bachmann is clearly “worse” than Palin). That’s why “White dudes go to the store like this; black dudes go to the store like this” is fucking nonsense, because everybody goes to the store in varying degrees of “like this.” And I’m sure Hitler loved his dog, or whatever. The world is gray.
If it’s all contextual, how’s this for context? These students were told not to collaborate, and they did. Their primary defense is that they were expecting a gut course! Intro to Congress was known as an easy A for years, but the professor made the exam a lot harder this time around. The students felt so entitled to an easy A that they felt justified in breaking the rules to get one. Some students are threatening to sue if they face serious punishment. Charming.
Some students blame their teaching fellows for explicating the questions, or even giving out answers. If so, then the students are still guilty of cheating, and the fellows are guilty of helping them. The rules said students weren’t allowed to ask fellows for help. If the fellows took it upon themselves to break the rules, they should be punished, too.
West asserts that it’s okay to cheat on assignments that are “bullshit” anyway. She says she and her friends copied each other’s math worksheets in high school because those were a waste of time anyway.
West says she’d be really pissed off she got passed over for a job in favor of another candidate with a plagiarized poftfolio, but she says she wouldn’t care if she found out the other applicant cheated on a math test in high school. Huh? I bet she’d be upset if she missed out on a spot in grad school because a cheater had a higher GPA.
There’s no question that cheating, like burglary, comes in different degrees. Plagiarizing an entire portfolio is worse than cheating on one test, but they’re both clearly wrong.
What are the odds that 125 students decided to cheat for the first and only time?
Manjoo argues that cheating on a take home exam isn’t really cheating because students should be encouraged to collaborate. Collaborative learning is great, but that doesn’t include copying off your neighbor’s paper during an in-class exam. Copying off your neighbor during a take home is no more acceptable.
Manjoo echoes West’s contention that it’s okay to cheat when the assignment is bullshit:
In this case, it’s the test’s design, rather than the students’ conduct, that we should criticize. In allowing students to consult a wide variety of sources, the Harvard exam was looking to assess something deeper than how well they could memorize and recall facts. Judging from some leaked questions, the test seemed to be designed to measure how students could think about some of the contradictions inherent in American government. (An essay question began, “Do interest groups make Congress more or less representative as an institution?”) But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?
The point of an exam is to assess individual learning. Often, individuals will do better when they are encouraged to hash out ideas in groups, but you can’t measure their progress unless you test them separately.
The idea that students are entitled to decide for themselves which rules to follow is deeply disturbing. These are the future leaders of our society. We don’t want them getting the message that it’s okay to follow the rules selectively.
Students should be taught to protest stupid rules, not to quietly subvert them for personal gain.
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