November 5, 2024

2 thoughts on “Thinking About Cheating? Learn Philosophy.

  1. As someone who has spent a lot of time discussing this with Andrew and others, I can give you his basic response:

    Cheating is rampant at Cornell, and professors catch it all the time. But the standard avenues of discipline are time consuming and the punishments are not effective. In many cases, this has led to a level of resignation among the faculty, and some courses have even altered their curriculum and testing simply so they won’t have to deal with cheating. Cracking down would be rather simple: a sliding scale of punishments after a rapid, strictly enforced judicial process. Other ideas include an honor code or (yes) an ethics course.

    In Engineering Speak:
    The function cheating = f(enforcement) has a steep negative slope in the vicinity of its current level of enforcement, with a slowly varying positive second derivative. Thus ramping up the level of enforcement would coincide with a steep drop in cheating, and this drop would be sustained, perhaps over several orders of magnitude, before a local minimum is reached.

  2. Thanks for the comment, Salem. I must ask, though, what you think constitutes “rampant”? Is cheating rampant if one out of every, say, 10 students admit to some sort of academic dishonesty (however small)? Or does it only become “rampant” if more than 20% of students in a class admit to cheating on an exam or paper. Not knowing any actual figures about cheating at Cornell or the ‘natural rate of cheating’ at other universities, it’s just difficult for me to call it rampant at Cornell from personal experience. But who knows, maybe I just hang out with an ethical bunch, or a bunch of liars?

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