Whatever happened to old-fashioned cheating?
The kind that made you feel guilty. The kind that, when you were caught, you actually felt bad about it? It appears it has given way to a brand new kind, a kind which conveys only a sense of gratification and a job well done.
Michael Moore, in the Daily Telegraph wrote on June 20: “What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting in their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating.”
According to Moore, cheating is so widespread in China that parents and students insisted that preventing students from cheating puts them at a distinct disadvantage over all the others who are doing it.
Author, blogger and former teacher at Guizhou University in China, Michael Levy, wrote in his blog: “When I assigned papers, they would often be cribbed from the Internet (and when I say often, I mean 75 per cent of the work submitted contained some form of plagiarism, and about 10 per cent was entirely cut-and-pasted from the web). In the most depressing incident I witnessed, a fellow teacher refused to turn one of her students in for using a cheat-sheet during an important test. ‘It's none of my business if someone cheats,’ my colleague told me. ‘And this student has influential parents. It would be foolish to report this.’"
Lest we think that this is only a Chinese phenomenon, the recent scandal at Harvard University should remind us that cheating on a large scale knows no bounds.
Sixty students were suspended from Harvard in January for plagiarizing each others work on a take-home test. The course, Introduction to Congress, was supposed to be an easy one so there were a large number of Harvard athletes taking it.
Apparently, it wasn’t easy enough. Instead of being horrified, some parents blamed the faculty for not giving clear enough directions to the students.
Apparently at Harvard the word “plagiarism” needs clarification. Thomas Stemberg, one of the parents and a wealthy supporter of the basketball program, was particularly critical of faculty.
Perhaps his vehemence was fuelled by the loss of a number of Harvard’s star players, suspended for a year, thereby crippling the basketball team.
Of course, recent incidents in Canada among provincial and federal government officials does seem to indicate that even men and women at the highest level of social standing see cheating as a way of supplementing one’s income and see getting caught as merely a temporary inconvenience.
There is no sense of guilt, only a sense of entitlement, and the only bad feelings felt by the perpetrators are for the whistle-blowers who turned them in.
As at Harvard and in China, there will be no apologies, no expressions of remorse and no admissions of wrongdoing.
The Watergate scandal of the 1970s spawned the term “misspoke” for lied because no one can be held accountable, or feel bad, for merely “misspeaking.” In the new millennium, we will apparently have to replace “cheated” with “misdeeded, misacted, or misacquired.”
– Jim Holtz is columnist for the Weekender and is pinch-hitting as reporter for the Grand Forks Gazette