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Last time, I dis­cussed some prob­lems with the the­ory that, when you cheat, “you’re only cheat­ing your­self.” Today, I have a few things to say on the wrong­ness of cheat­ing. These are by no means com­pre­hen­sive or ground break­ing, just some food for thought.

First, I’ll back­track just a lit­tle and say that there is a mean­ing­ful respect in which you “cheat your­self” when you cheat. Many peo­ple agree that there is some­thing intrin­si­cally valu­able about an edu­ca­tion, apart from its value as a means to a career and a liveli­hood. As such, in cheat­ing, you may keep your­self from life-enriching edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties that would have had intrin­sic value. The line between pru­dence and moral­ity is not firm or eas­ily defined, how­ever, so it may be dif­fi­cult to tell whether or not the “cheat­ing your­self” line is more of a dis­tinc­tively moral apho­rism or more of an appeal to a stu­dents’ self-interest. You can read my last post as a defense of the lat­ter inter­pre­ta­tion. I sus­pect that peo­ple pro­vide this advice to stu­dents as a kind of backup moti­va­tion for not cheat­ing, in the case that they don’t see the moral force of other-oriented con­sid­er­a­tions, or just don’t care.

But here are some of those other-oriented con­sid­er­a­tions, ordered from those typ­i­cally involv­ing the most to the least harm:

1. Your fel­low stu­dents: These are the peo­ple who you harm the most when you cheat on a test or on a paper. Even though your pro­fes­sor may not delib­er­ately “curve” grades, he or she surely grades at least some­what rel­a­tively to the abil­i­ties and per­for­mance of the class. It is very com­mon for a pro­fes­sor to look over the test or papers to get a feel for them before mark­ing any scores. Par­tic­u­larly in a small class, one or two cheaters could skew the grades all by them­selves. Fur­ther, as Adam notes in this com­ment, enough cheat­ing can ulti­mately end up devalu­ing diplo­mas. Finally, even if your cheat­ing does not affect any­one else’s grade or diploma, the exis­tence of cheaters neg­a­tively affects all stu­dents via the effects it has on your teacher (more on this below).
2. Your teacher: I had no idea of how much cheat­ing (includ­ing pla­gia­riz­ing) harms teach­ers until I per­son­ally began teach­ing about two years ago. Pre­vi­ously, I fig­ured that it would be kind of fun to catch cheaters and pun­ish them mer­ci­lessly. Actu­ally, it hasn’t been like that at all, at least in my expe­ri­ence. I have come to dread read­ing any work that stu­dents have done at home, for fear of find­ing pla­gia­rism. When I copy and paste a sen­tence of a student’s work into Google, I brace myself for the results. I didn’t really have an awe­some “gotcha!” feel­ing when I caught some­one with a crib sheet dur­ing a test. Because cheat­ing and pla­gia­rism hap­pen with quite some fre­quency, I now approach all stu­dents as poten­tial cheaters and must inves­ti­gate all stu­dents’ work (per­versely, espe­cially the best work) for evi­dence of aca­d­e­mic dis­hon­esty. This atti­tude is detri­men­tal to the rela­tion­ship that teach­ers ide­ally ought to have with stu­dents: one marked by coöper­a­tion, con­ge­nial­ity, good­will and mutual respect. Beyond a teacher per­son­ally being harmed in hav­ing to play cheat­ing detec­tive and then deal with the offend­ers, the neg­a­tive effects on a teacher can eas­ily trickle back down to the stu­dents in chang­ing the way they are treated by a teacher for the worse.
3. The author: Hon­estly, I doubt that authors whose work has been pla­gia­rized are often mate­ri­ally or sub­stan­tially harmed by the pla­gia­rism. In the kind of courses I’ve taught (crit­i­cal think­ing, intro to phi­los­o­phy, bio­med­ical ethics), very few of the stu­dents are headed for acad­e­mia, and the assign­ments are not of the type that one could go on to pub­lish. But harm to authors can and does occur, prob­a­bly mostly when one aca­d­e­mic pla­gia­rizes work from a lesser known aca­d­e­mic and gets all the credit for it.

I’d really like to hear from any­one else who has teach­ing expe­ri­ence, either to con­firm or dis­con­firm (2) above.

Also, there are prob­a­bly even more rea­sons why cheat­ing is wrong. I want to hear them!