I honestly don’t care if it’s “rational” or not. It’s still cheating themselves in the long run.
You’re assuming everyone else in the world views life as one big transaction. It’s not.
It’s not the ONLY thing that matters.
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I’ve heard this from academics I know, too, one of a litany of righteous complaints about how poorly most American public K-12 schools prepare their students who go on to college or university. They take the same attitude at you and the other two profs here regarding second chances, although they aren’t exactly happy with the state of things that necessitates them (I’ll assume you guys aren’t, either).
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I suspect you are right, but only because she is poor and black. If you are rich and white and male, it’s all part of the game. Of course, your statement wouldn’t be phrased that way.
“Yeah, I know I’m polluting, but I got to make a living don’t I?”
Interesting choice of an example given how many mainstream, not-reviled businesses do unapologetically* pollute.
*ok, maybe some make some apologetic noises, essentially adding a tree to their logo. But Mary could make the case that she is mitigating the wrong she is doing by providing educational opportunities for an underprivileged woman in Kenya with each essay she writes.
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The problem is that this mindset has more wide-ranging consequences than just how the cheater deals with the moral implications as an individual. It’s one of the factors that, as part of a vicious circle, informs and justifies the idea that credentialism and not education are the primary aim of post-secondary institutions. And per my points above about future MBAs and med students (and going to yours about those aspiring to JDs), the attitude has wider, potentially fatal, negative effects on society beyond academia.
For someone who cares about the justice system, for example, the first reaction to an insane and lazy hiring process by firms and judges shouldn’t be “cheating is a rational response” or “credentialism should be more important than education” but rather “fix this insane and lazy process (which was in large part put in place by cheaters and credentialists)”. Easier said than done, I know – it would probably involve shuttering most American law schools, for example – but that should be the starting point rather than excusing cheaters.
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I’m not saying credentials are all that matter. But not everybody who takes a class is in it just for the knowledge they can get out of it. Sometimes it’s just checking a box.
I’m assuming that for at least a large subset of people, college is a means to an end, and that to justify taking out a giant mountain of student loans, there has to be some reasonable prospect of employment that will actually allow the student to pay back those loans. And for those students, getting a bad grade in some class that’s outside their interest area and ancillary to their major can still have significant real-world consequences. (Though, thankfully, likely less-fatal ones than during, say, the Vietnam draft.)
Sure, assuming there’s some value to them in the knowledge or skills they’re missing out on. I value knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but I also am not going to pretend that everybody shares that view (or needs to).
And I completely missed “Vellinkton” as Wellington! Duh.
Ironic indeed that you can’t view it.
I can’t view clips from Schitt’s Creek, which is shot, and set in Canada.
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Agreed. That should be the goal, and closing down about 100 of the 200 American law schools seems like a good start. (And because most law school grades are based on those exams and are in-class exams, I think cheating, though it still happens, is less of a problem than it would be on, say, take-home essays in other fields of study.) But the point remains that there are significant incentives in favor of cheating in the system we currently have.
I don’t condone cheating. My point is just that I can understand the motivation for doing it.
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As someone who teaches these classes, I’m well aware of that fact. But thanks for explaining it too me, as I clearly had no clue.
How do you define value? Is it just whatever makes a buck or is it maybe what improves your life in other ways, helps you to navigate and understand the world more effectively, make better choices in an informed way, helps you to engage as a better, more thoughtful citizen. Ignorance of basic facts has more wide reaching consequences than just your bottom line, as we’re all discovering in the current world, where there is so much bullshit that many people are ill-equipped to sift through and identify as such.
We ALL live in a complex world that requires us to do more and be more than just cogs in a wheel. The political and social decisions that we make have ramifications outside of our own lives and our direct circle. Being able to understand the world isn’t just a “nice to have” after-effect of higher ed (or a more robust and well rounded k-12 education, for that matter). It’s critical to being able to navigate a world that is both increasingly smaller and much more complicated.
Part of why we are in the situation we are in is thanks in part to the American anti-intellectual streak, in addition to the disinformation campaign on various issues (everything from scientific issues like climate change and vaccines, to social issues like racial and gender discrimination). Understanding how science works at the very least and being able to make informed choices for your child’s health shouldn’t be seen as “just knowledge acquisition” - THIS IS LITERALLY LIFE AND DEATH. People are getting sick and dying from preventable diseases, because there were people who were unable to parse good information from bad, and just assumed that science is just an “opinion, man.” Same with issues like race and gender. The history of racial discrimination in America is critical to know, because we have to vote for policy decisions that impact all citizens. If people believe bullshit like “slavery wasn’t that bad” and “women are fundamentally better off when they are only wives and mothers”, then they vote for bad policy which hurts other people in profound ways.
THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT A NICE TO HAVE! It is critical to being a modern human being living in a complex world. Fostering deeper understanding of complex issues, empathy for others, and some humility about one’s limitations about understanding everything out there under the sun - these are critical skills that if we don’t work on them, could likely get us all killed.
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That’s true, but the university is requiring that box to be checked for a reason (mainly to fulfill a general education/breadth graduation requirement), and usually offers a number of courses, topics, and profs of varying difficulty that can check that box.
Increasingly over the past 20 years, that end is a job or career that never before required a post-secondary credential that puts one into ruinous life-long debt, let alone a post-secondary education. If a large subset of people are looking at college in this transactional way, it’s because the neoliberal consensus has conditioned them to do so.
There is value in breadth requirements. An engineering major should know how to write a clearly written, well-structured, and properly cited original essay. A fine arts major should be able to have some basic college-level numeracy. This is knowledge that makes a real difference in the long run – especially if the person in question is an ambitious careerist. [ETA: or, at a deeper level, what @mindysan33 discussed above about just living in a complex world]
I can understand it, too, as a very base, kneejerk reaction. But that’s not where the discussion ends, because it’s also a destructive motivation that has to be attacked from both ends (i.e. cheating in colleges and also societal and economic norms that make cheating in college “understandable”).
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Personally, I define it much the same way you do. But–again–I’m not going to pretend that everybody defines it the same way. As @gracchus deftly explains it:
Cheaters are, in my view, victims of a broken system similar to the way that opioid addicts arrested for reselling heroin to support their own habits are victims of a broken system.
There’s the rub, though. It’s so much easier to blame lazy, entitled youths for cheating than to address the underlying societal and economic norms that make it “understandable,” and so the problem will continue to only be attacked from one end until we’re at the crisis point @mindysan33 describes.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but closing down for-profit schools, radically reforming the current student-loan system (up to and including forgiving existing student loans), increasing the acceptability of associates’ degrees or degreeless licensing programs for jobs that don’t actually require a B.A., and offering at least some costless-to-the-student options for post-secondary education would all help. But all of those options are difficult and/or expensive. So much easier to throw the entitled 19-year-old who buys a paper from a paper mill under the bus.
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I don’t buy that comparison. In the case of opioid addicts re-selling smack, they’re doing it because they’re already at rock-bottom with no other options left. The same can’t be said of a college student with the money to pay someone else to write his essay.
Plenty of students worried about their career prospects in this broken economic system still manage to graduate with good grades without cheating; very often, they’re the kind of students who don’t have the money to pay someone to write essays for them.
Until? We’re already there on a societal level. Buying term papers on a regular basis is probably a multi-generational and normalised activity for a lot of these families (those at the top end of the wealth spectrum have long ago moved on to buying admissions).
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Well, I’ll just let the men talk then… /s
Which those of who do this for a living have just told you we don’t want to do. Nor can we as individuals single-handedly transform the problems that plague the university. To ensure changes that we’d like to see we have to roll back the anti-intellectualism of the neo-liberal culture, lean into a k-16 model of public education, and give people real options and a better understanding of what an education is for in the first place, some of which I noted to you in my previous comment, which you studiously ignored in your flippant reply to me. To make these changes isn’t going to happen in a single class room, it will take systemic change, which won’t happen if we aren’t making an argument in the public realm for k-16 education that is about more than job training.
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I know some grad programs that see this path, or even a low gpa freshman/sophomore year followed by a high gpa later, as a better indicator of future success than a solid gpa all the way through.
My god, college as theme park.
Two thoughts: One, I’m glad I’m not a lawyer. Two, do those top law firms want someone who is willing to win no matter what? Like, if you couldn’t figure out how to (or were unwilling to) get an A by any means necessary, you aren’t a good match.
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I truly don’t mean to be flippant, and you obviously have a bunch more expertise and experience than I do in dealing with these problems. And I 100% didn’t mean to suggest that you were trying to throw the cheaters under the bus–only that that is an easier approach to this particular problem and therefore the one that, by and large, gets implemented (including in the OP). Like I said, I am largely in agreement with what you’re saying.
Some likely do. Mine, thankfully, doesn’t.
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No, right-and-wrong don’t operate in a vacuum.
This guy Maslow would like a word. (Yes, I know you were being as sarcastic as I.)
This is true if the value is education, not merely educational credentials. Unfortunately, for many it’s the latter.
I dunno, could be interesting. Just think of the Imagineering Department possibilities. 
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I think what is being missed in this discussion is that what we are witnessing is the tip of the iceberg of corruption. The old boy network, a well placed phone call, the knowledge that graft trumps craft. Where you don’t have to study the rules of the road - you just buy your drivers licence. Observing the law? Who’s got time for that? Oh yes, and I can see the rationale. But so what? I can see the rationale in murder too.
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Society and its rules doesn’t just sprout out of the ground, it is created by participants. We may be born into a system we hate, but we usually learn to accept it, some embrace, and a few walk away.
No. The essayist is surely between a rock and a hard place, yes. However, they are also directly and knowingly violating one of the fundamental values of the academy, thereby eroding its value. “I was clever about harming public higher education” is not a ticket in in my book.
Perma-ban for life.
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