Shades of Gray

Martin Lockman

Cheating, plagiarizing, and other types of academic fraud are unquestionably and unfortunately a deeply ingrained part of the academic system. As a student, I can’t count the number of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers that have asked me for help on tests. (Actually, I can. The answer is three.)

Facetiousness aside, I agree with most of the suggestions in “Degrees of Cheating” and “Cheating in Academic Institutions” regarding methods to prevent cheating and create an atmosphere hostile to dishonesty. However, the definitions of plagiarism leave a large gray area - the accidental plagiarism of ideas.

The issue of peer-to-peer plagiarizing in the classroom is complicated by the simple fact that a shared intellectual environment will often result in similar thoughts. My sister and I share many political opinions, but I doubt anyone would claim that those beliefs arose from intentional intellectual mimicry. In any healthy intellectual environment there will be debate, discourse, and discussion, inevitably leading to an exchange of ideas.

Faced with this complication, the question then becomes “What can we, as students and educators, do to correct the problem?”. There is no simple answer, but in general I think that educators should encourage introspection in their pupils. Students should be taught to inspect their own thoughts and identify the main idealogical sources behind their arguments. As well as preventing accidental plagiarism, such self-examination would result in a well-rounded, reasonable, and self-aware student body, creating an environment hostile to plagiarism of every kind.

Jake's Response to the Cheating Article

Cheating is definitely a problem on college campuses. Being so difficult to catch, a huge percentage of students partake in cheating. I think this is mostly due to the increased pressures to do well and have a high GPA coming out of college. The job market is extremely tough to enter, so students believe that, if they can have their GPA be as high as possible, by any means necessary, they will have a better chance to get a good job and make more money. After all, money is the basis behind anybody's reasons to cheat. There is a huge amount of people who, in my opinion, do not have their priorities straight. They believe money is the most important thing in life, and that money will automatically make you happy if you have a lot of it. It is these people who believe that cheating is justified and that having a high GPA is going to get you the best job. However, if you are not truly smart, and do not have the skills that you may have gotten if you chose to take the honest route through college, there is a good chance you will fail to pass through the first stages of interviewing for a job.
And, while I agree with the articles that bad leadership has something to do with cheating on campus, I also believe that it is going to happen nonetheless. Even with our strict honor code here at Wash U, and multiple professors saying how they will go out of their way to get you the worst possible punishment if they catch you cheating, I have seen multiple people cheat anyways. It is also extremely difficult to catch cheating if it is not in class, like for a homework assignment where most of the papers that people turn in will be extremely similar no matter what.
While I believe that it is technically the faculty's responsibility to enforce cheating, I think that students should take it upon themselves to realize that, in the long run, there are many more benefits to being honest and learning the material. If you do not understand something, instead of asking someone who knows for their answers, ask that person for help and guidance so you can learn to answer the question yourself.