Is Cheating That Bad?

Come on, admit it - we've all cheated at school at one point or another. Whether it's a cheat sheet, copying someone's homework, or plagiarism - most of us have ventured off the academic "straight and narrow" path at least once or twice.

But is this really that bad? I'm not going for the defense that since everybody does it, that makes it right because that's bullshit. A lot of people in the 1700s were racist but that didn't make that right. My argument is that cheating is basically using information that others don't have to gain an advantage. This is a common practice in the real world. You're allowed to ask for help from others and are allowed to have and use your own notes - whether you're working for a company or the government. Hell, teachers frequently use each others' powerpoint presentations to aid in their lecture.

What I'm trying to get at is the debate as to whether or not it's that bad for students to use someone else's information.

I thought you meant a different kind of cheating at first, and I was just about to rip you a new one.

But since you didn't mean that kind... that's a good question, actually. One that I can't really think of an answer to now that I think about it.

edited 18th Apr '14 8:36:49 AM by BaffleBlend

In School? Honestly, yes. It means you didn't learn the subject properly and are cheating yourself out of a proper education.

In Video Games, no. Unless it hurts others. You don't have to play for the challenge, you just should concentrate on having fun, you know? But not at the expense of others.

And to say the least, obviously no when it comes to relationships. Just, hell no. :|(may be fun in a fictional roleplay setting if the players agree to it, since it causes drama and storytelling and entertainment)

Depends on the situation.

Air Force recently had a thing were most of the guys in charge of the nukes had cheated on their tests for years. Those kinda people need to actually know shit.

I think I have an answer now.

The problem with using ill-gotten information is that the cheater doesn't read it, he or she only processes it in RAM of sorts one or two letters at a time in order to write it verbatim and then promptly forgetting it. This is especially bad in multiple choice tests, where you're just copying answers without seeing the context of the question. So, yeah. If you're not gaining any knowledge from it, it's bad.

In Britain, if you get caught cheating in an important exam, like a GCSE or A Level exam, all your subjects will be disqualified. So yeah, it's quite bad.

A future employer will look at your CV and see that you have no qualifications. When they find out that you cheated, good luck getting a job.

edited 18th Apr '14 9:42:33 AM by PeacefulApocalypse

Actually, I've never cheated on homework, quizzes, or tests... :| I wanna stay loyal to the teachers, and it wouldn't be fair, because then, all of the students would cheat. Soon, if everybody expects somebody else will have the answers, nobody will do it, and then you'll have a pointless class.

edited 18th Apr '14 9:43:05 AM by DaftPunch

Well that's definitely bad but I was talking more, morally and less legal.

Of course, that raises a whole other question of if those standardized tests are really as valuable as they claim but let's not get into that. I don't know - you guys bring up some great points so thanks for getting me thinking. But cheating is still pretty commonplace in esteemed schools like Oxford and Harvard. I doubt that most of the kids over there want to cheat themselves out of an education but, rather, they cheat due to an overwhelming course load. Of course, I've never been to either school so any alumni, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong .

Also, is it detrimental to cheat on an assignment with no value? Like a "busy work" type assignment?

edited 18th Apr '14 9:51:26 AM by FantasyLiver

I've cheated on an assignment before, due to not having enough time. I had a game project with only me and another person (a normal team has at least 3) that took up most of my schoolwork. It wasn't fun when I got caught in the end, receiving a 0 for that assignment. So yeah, cheating isn't good.

edited 18th Apr '14 10:06:48 AM by ironcommando

I think a lot of people here are missing the point of the question in that I'm pretty sure it wasn't asking "as it actually plays out when you get caught", but instead it was asking "the act itself as compared to similar acts outside of the school setting, such as asking others for assistance or looking things up in a work setting, etc."

That. Thank you.

Within reason I could see cheating being fine (for example, Sparknotes when forced to read any book that's a huge slog. Looking at you, Pip.)

However, as Irene said, you're usually cheating yourself out of the proper knowledge that comes with taking your pills beating work like a man. And, in the cases of tests, it's completely dishonest to the teacher.

As for things like plagiarism, in my eyes that's always wrong no matter what. It's stealing someone's work and extremely illegal in the real world beyond education- breaking the law is wrong. And you're again cheating yourself out of something, in this case it's letting your creativity and style flow out.

I think it largely depends on what scale we're talking about; I'd say copying someone's maths homework before class is a world away from, say, this.

But I think it diminishes the value of hardwork if someone can put the effort in for a B while someone else cons their way to an A.

In Ireland, if you get caught cheating in any state test like the leaving cert (GCSE,SAT) you get banned from all other exams for 10 years, which includes any college ones, your driving test, tractors license test ect.

Using somebody else's info for your assignments (as long as it's not wholesale copying) is generally ok, but you'll be cheating yourself as you don't use your own knowledge to do it and therefore miss out knowing how to answer the question.

In high school, a guy in my year managed to get most of answers during a test (an analysis of a play, if I remember right) off the internet by way of a smartphone and highly inattentive teacher and scored a (for him) unusually good grade. Morally questionable perhaps, but I had to admire the nerve of it.

I'd say the occasional copied homework that you forgot or didn't get around to doing is alright, provided you can understand the content and don't make a habit of it. By complete coincidence, that is roughly what my cheating in school amounted to too...

@Bat Pencil: Would you mind making a summery of that link? My computer kinda hates that website.

A college athlete's paper on Rosa Parks consisted of barely over a paragraph that only retold the part of her life where she was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus (not to mention, most likely plagiarized from Parks' own autobiography).

He got an A-.

Okay. That is... wow, that is an enormous amount of laziness.

While the fake classes scandal is a real thing, the Rosa Parks "report" image actually seems to have been taken out of context from a completely legitimate class where the A- was the student's final grade. The paper was likely an informal outline; I've made many similar ones to brainstorm ideas for reports before, and occasionally classes require you to present one to the instructor so they can discuss it with you. Not discounting the possibility that the final paper was still utter shit, but the actual scenario leaves a bit more room for interpretation.

Link from slate.

@topic, such cheating can be bad because often the student is relaying the ill-begotten information without taking the time to actually learn it. I've known people who have, say, cheated on some questions in a Chemistry class while overall still retaining what was taught, but too often people simply copy/paste something without even taking the time to actually read/try to understand it.

In a higher educational setting this can have serious consequences. Do you seriously want o be treated by a doctor or nurse that cheated their way through basic math classes? Personally, I've seen some of those and the thought that people's lives may be in their hands is rather disquieting.

edited 18th Apr '14 3:53:03 PM by carbon-mantis

To address the OP's main question; "Is cheating really that different from the information sharing that is expected in the work world?" my answer is that the difference is in the intent: a test of assignment in school is given to find out if you yourself know the information. Getting the information from someone else therefore defeats the purpose of the work in the first place.

In the work world, it's very rare to have someone ask you about a subject because they want to know if you know the information yourself. They're asking because they need the information — it usually doesn't matter if you knew it off the top of your head, had to go look it up, or asked someone else. The information is the important thing, not how you got it.

Gotcha. That's a good summing up. So is it a consensus that if one knows the information but cheats on a simple/worthless assignment, that isn't catastrophic provided they have actually learned the information?

Also, I have a new point. In the old days, the Spartans would deliberately not feed their new recruits - which would force them to steal. However, if they were caught, they were punished severely. This was to teach them craftiness and guile. Would you say that cheating itself could be a teacher? I've seen a lot of students put some serious effort into cheating and, while they clearly don't care about the assignment, they're clearly smart enough to do it and their cheating may teach them about people's reactions and certain other practical matters.

I guess in such a case, the cheatiness loops around from "dishonest and lazy" to "craftiness in the work."

It's certainly one of those things that can easily be harnessed as a talent beneficial to society. Heck, said cheaters could easily be the ones being hired to catch cheaters! Anyone can cook, but it takes a master to be a chef. Kinda like that, I think.

But they learn nothing about performing the task. The reason behind the task isn't simply to put words on the page or attaining a grade. It's so that the student/pupil learns how to use tools and methods in a way that processes information A into result B, so that the method may be adapted to real-life situations. Learning about how to cheat or people's reactions brings you no nearer to an understanding of what you were supposed to do. A person who cheats at applying knowledge in one field will learn nothing about that kind of application of knowledge.

For example, imagine an Engineering student presented with a theoretical problem. He may cheat in various ways, which will indeed require and possibly train the student in such skills such as persuasion, finding old tasks to copy from or other inventive and creative ways in which extracting the necessary knowledge from where he's not supposed to get it so that it ends up on his work. What he DOESN'T learn the method for how he was supposed to utilize the knowledge he SHOULD HAVE attained during the course, I.E. the part that's the whole point with the course.

In short, people who cheat may be become good at cheating, but are hardly getting better at what they're cheating at. Now, if you do not simply care for the subject you're cheating at, I suppose that doesn't matter. But the results of your labour is not solely supposed to reflect the validity of your answer, but the competence of how you arrive at the question. Cheating circumvents the intended competence and thus the intended value is lost.

Cheating instilled some creativity and cunning in me that I didn't know I had.