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As a grad­u­ate teach­ing assis­tant and course instruc­tor, I’ve encoun­tered cheat­ing and pla­gia­rism a num­ber of times. I know that many of my friends encounter sim­i­lar issues as well. So, to mark the end of this semes­ter, I thought I’d start a mini-series of posts on the subject.

First up: the “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” per­spec­tive on aca­d­e­mic dishonesty

Two ques­tions:

1. Does this per­spec­tive ade­quately explain the badness/wrongness of cheating?

2. Does this per­spec­tive ade­quately explain why we enforce aca­d­e­mic dis­hon­esty policies?

“You’re only cheat­ing your­self” might explain one aspect of the bad­ness of cheat­ing, albeit in an awk­ward way. Ordi­nar­ily, “cheat­ing” is used to express an act involv­ing fraud or deceit. While aca­d­e­mic cheat­ing does involve fraud or deceit, they are not directed towards one­self, as the say­ing sug­gests. (And, while it is pos­si­ble to deceive one­self, cheat­ing and pla­gia­rism are not usu­ally accu­rately described as self-deceit). Other bad fea­tures of cheat­ing do affect one­self, though: cheat­ing (and pla­gia­rism) involve basi­cally telling a lie about the ori­gin of one’s work, and this threat­ens a person’s integrity.  It also cheap­ens the value of a student’s word, as every­one at least implic­itly agrees to some aca­d­e­mic mis­con­duct pol­icy by enrolling in courses at a col­lege. But of course, it is much catch­ier to say “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” than “you’re only harm­ing your­self,” for instance.

But the refor­mu­la­tion of “you’re only harm­ing your­self” starts to make clear what’s wrong with the “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” per­spec­tive on aca­d­e­mic mis­con­duct — it’s plainly false. While there surely is some sense in which you are cheating/harming your­self, there are also plenty of other peo­ple you could be harm­ing, typ­i­cally includ­ing but not lim­ited to the author(s) from whom you stole work and your teacher who has to deal with the problem.

So basi­cally, “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” tries to make cheat­ing look like it’s not in your self-interest and there­fore is an impru­dent thing to do. But, beyond being impru­dent, cheat­ing is typ­i­cally immoral. As such, “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” pro­vides only an incom­plete account of the badness/wrongness of cheating.

But let’s just pre­tend that “you’re only cheat­ing your­self” were true, and that cheat­ing does not harm any­one other than your­self. It would still be a mis­guided per­spec­tive to hold on cheat­ing, because it can’t con­vinc­ingly explain why anti-cheating poli­cies are enforced. After all, stu­dents do tons of things that are incon­sis­tent with ful­fill­ing their aca­d­e­mic poten­tial: drink­ing too much, not pay­ing atten­tion in class, skim­ming or skip­ping assigned read­ings, etc. Cheat­ing is only one among many such prac­tices, and it is not obvi­ously worse in terms of impru­dence or “cheat­ing yourself.“Maybe you’re a stu­dent who con­sci­en­tiously comes to class and reads the text­book, but you’re hav­ing trou­ble writ­ing one lit­tle sec­tion of a paper and so you pla­gia­rize it. Or, you’ve stud­ied well but you draw a blank on an impor­tant test ques­tion and so you cheat off of your neigh­bor. Why are these aca­d­e­mic mis­con­duct sce­nar­ios nec­es­sar­ily any morally worse than a per­son who always spaces out or falls asleep in class? In terms of harms to one­self, they are actu­ally better.

It would be seri­ously and incon­sis­tently pater­nal­is­tic to enforce aca­d­e­mic mis­con­duct poli­cies on the grounds that a stu­dent is cheat­ing her­self, while not enforc­ing all other sim­i­larly self-harmful stu­dent behav­iors. Enforce­ment only makes sense on the assump­tion that some other peo­ple are harmed or have their rights vio­lated when you cheat. More on this next time.