Academic cheating

“ The strong pupil has no need of such cowardly devices hence is not greatly tempted to use them. If bright pupils do cheat it is chiefly because a habit of doing so has been formed in the class as a whole, and when a habit of cheating is general it certainly should be laid to unwise handling of the matter on the part of the teachers. ”

“ There is a practice, common to school-life everywhere, known by the not very dignified name of cheating. There is, I fear, among young people generally, while at school, an erroneous and mischievous state of opinion on this subject. ”

“ The child who cheats has not been educated correctly and so has not sufficient prejudice against dishonesty. He needs to be educated. The dread of tests and examinations can be almost entirely overcome by giving, almost daily, tests which take up little time, accentuate important features of the lesson, and give equal chances to test the knowledge of all on a few important points. Pupils invariably like tests under the above conditions.
CASE 49 (HIGH SCHOOL)
Undeserved Standings (4) Cheating by teacher to please principal. ”

“ Why should one be too scrupulous, since it is only the book account that matters? Bluffing runs naturally into something more effective, and the freshman sees the game of cheating going on almost as a matter of course. Sometimes the instructor seems to him to be aware of the game, but too embarrassed to call for the cards; can not afford, in fact, to become unpopular, for may not the instructor's comfort, not to say his standing in the college, depend on the good will of the student? ”

“ Furthermore, at home it must be a grave subject indeed that is entitled to the honour of being represented by a professor; whilst abroad, the commonest accomplishments are raised to the dignity which we restrict to science; and every private teacher of fencing, fiddling, juggling, and dancing, affixes professor to his card. The art of cheating, ingannazione, seems to be at present the only one in Italy irrepresented, eo nomine, by a teacher. ”

“ Like the more violent depredators upon the public, this class (who are extremely numerous) generally proceed upon a regular system, and study as a trade all those infamous tricks and devices by which the thoughtless, the ignorant, and the honest are defrauded of their property.
The common law has defined the offence of cheating—to be a deceitful practice in defrauding, or endeavouring to defraud, another of his own right, by means of some artful device, contrary to the plain rules of common honesty. ”

“ We're blaming it all on the profs, and you know damn well that we don't study. All we try to do is to get by—I don't mean you Phi Betes; I mean all the rest of us—and if we can put anything over on the profs we are tickled pink. We're like a lot of little kids in grammar-school. Just look at the cheating that goes on, the copying of themes, and the cribbing. It's rotten!"
Winsor started to protest, but Hugh rushed on. "Oh, I know that the majority of the fellows don't consciously cheat ”

“ And again, under the same count: it is freely claimed by both teachers and students that the cheating in examinations, of which we doubtless have our share (some claim much more than our share, tho personally I doubt it) , is very greatly increased if not largely caused by our system of marking. In hopes of remedying this some [Pg 257] of the students are now urging the adoption of the "honor system" of conducting examinations. (6) It is impossible to create uniform standards corresponding to our various grades. There are as many standards for each grade as there are instructors. ”

“ Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight paths feet used to crooked ones. ”

“ We may conclude the present chapter with a description of the system of cheating known as 'Counting-down.' This is a method which is not by any means so familiar to the masses as those with which we have just been dealing. It is one of those devices which seem to lie within the borderland between honesty and dishonesty; although, when one understands its real nature, there is no question as to the fact that it really is cheating, and nothing else. ”

“ Coming events cast their shadows before them; the child was the father of the man; what a boy was at school, such would he be in after life. Theft, the boys perhaps thought, was not a sin which immediately concerned them. But there were things which were morally the same if not worse than the actual theft of material and tangible objects—dishonesty in the matter of marks, for instance, and cheating in order to gain an undue advantage over one’s fellow-schoolboys. A boy who was guilty of such an act at school would probably end by being a criminal when he went out into the larger world. ”

“ The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is being led into crooked ways. ”

“ Judged by the example of the law schools, then, the college of commerce, if it is to live and thrive, may be counted on to divert a much larger body of funds from legitimate university uses, and to create more of a bias hostile to scholarly and scientific work in the academic body, than the mere numerical showing of its staff would suggest. ”

“ Only by such means can there be trained the strength of will to avoid such infringement in the future, for it should be repeated that such infringements are not always the result of intentional cheating. They indicate very often an undeveloped power of will, and the teacher should be able to discriminate between the sneaking cowardice that would win unfairly and mere lack of power. ”

“ Stealing is punished with Restoring four-fold if able; if not, they are sold for some years, and so are poor Debtors. I have not heard of many Criminals of this sort. But for Lying and Cheating they out-vye Judas and all the false other cheats in Hell. Nay, they make a Sport of it: Looking upon Cheating as a commendable Piece of Ingenuity, commending him that has the most skill to commit a piece of Roguery; which in their Dialect (like those of our Yea-and-Nay-Friends in England) they call by the genteel Name of Out-Witting a Man and won't own it to be cheating. ”

“ She thought, “Thurman has already had one smart blow from me today. I’ll mark his paper off 20% for cheating. That gives him two penalties. But Clarabelle! She’s taken a fancy to that boy and stops at nothing. I must give her a penalty.”
Next morning she confronted her pupil with the evidence and gave her a choice between two alternatives: to write a letter describing her act of helping another to cheat and to read it to the pupils in her room; or she might face the superintendent with Miss Justin, who would tell the story and abide by his decision. ”

“ Fraud includes deceit, but deceit may not reach the gravity of fraud; a cheat is of the nature of fraud, but of a petty sort; a swindle is more serious than a cheat, involving larger values and more flagrant dishonesty. Fraud is commonly actionable at law; cheating and swindling are for the most part out of the reach of legal proceedings. Treachery is chiefly used of dishonesty in matters of friendship, social relations, government, or war ”

“ The public have occasionally an opportunity of peeping behind the scenes, but the cases of cheating which come to light bear a very small proportion to those which are condoned or hushed up, and the number of these again is nothing when compared with the infinity of cases which are never discovered. ”

“ It is a misfortune for him and for the institution even to seem to have any such power. Too often has the professor, on bringing forward the name of some member of his classes who had failed in his studies or cheated in an examination, been made by the presiding officer, through the latter's anxiety to save some notable athlete or the scion of some family of wealth or high social standing, himself to appear the delinquent, either in the artifice of detecting cheats or in the art of teaching those that will not to learn if they can possibly help it. ”

“ Universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of maintaining security over information. On the contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by many centuries and are not-for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to PASS THE TORCH OF CIVILIZATION, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. ”

“ Crimes of violence and brutality are naturally the crimes of the less fortunate of mankind, and your sheep is more peaceably disposed than your goat. But when we come to the more modern crime of swindling we find that the criminal law is not very successful in punishing the fraudulent well-to-do. Fraud is a more complicated offence than larceny, and defrauders sometimes get the better of the law. Cheating is not always a crime, and successful cheating is a question of better education. That is why the rich so often keep out of the dock. ”

“ The student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. As a student, [Pg 62] he may crib in examination without compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students. Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. ”

“ Many hours could be occupied in the class with the applications of honesty under modern conditions. Student life, for example, is full of temptations to dishonesty. To say nothing of out-and-out cheating, there are a hundred ways in which the fine edge of honor can be blunted. ”

“ The student who asks to be excused from a college engagement because he is too sick to work, but who will go to a ball and dance every number on the program, or to a football [Pg 66] game and yell until his throat is raw, is simply a liar! The student who copies from another’s examination paper and signs his name to it as though it were his own, is a cheat and a forger. The man who steals spoons from some hotel or restaurant in the town for his fraternity table is not funny ”

“ Later on, when carefully discussing the conditions of the experiment, the officer acknowledged that he had interrupted the seance for lunch, and had left his camera at the medium’s house in the meanwhile.—The latter had taken advantage of his absence either to change the plates and substitute exposed ones, or to make a fraudulent exposure on my friend’s plates.
The author of this fraud was, moreover, obliged to acknowledge the imposture. I wonder what motive this young man could have had in cheating! I believe he [179] acted out of pure childishness—having a tendency to hysteria. ”

“ It is useless to expect clean athletics when the members of the faculty participate in or condone fraud and unfairness. I do not willingly admit the shortcomings of college officers, but their own confessions can not be gainsaid. I know of no more corrupting ence upon students than a dishonest faculty. You would be astonished and mortified if you knew the extent to which professors in reputable institutions make false returns of the standing of players supposed to be indispensable to the success of a college team. ”

“ The era of shams, and cheats, and clap-trap, in education, will have gone by. Rewards, and prizes, and other artificial and vicious incentives to study, will no longer he known, and with them the arbitrary, unjust, and preposterous practice of pretending to note a student's intellectual, moral, and deportmental rank and standing by a mechanical system of marks will also be numbered with the discarded rubbish of an obsolete educational dispensation. ”

“ The members of the conspiracy used stolen account credentials to obtain unauthorized access to victim professor accounts, which they used to steal research, and other academic data and documents, including, among other things, academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books. ”

“ If such pupils do sneaking tricks and acts, it is no one’s fault but the teacher’s. By acting the spy in the schoolroom, a teacher does not need to tell his pupils he mistrusts them; his actions speak louder than words. Pupils who have no confidence in their teachers will do almost anything to provoke them. To get the confidence of a pupil is to train him so that he will respect the wishes and requests of the teacher enough to obey them cheerfully.
Among the various activities of the sneak, none is 269more frequent than cheating. ”