Quote:
Originally Posted by skylark
Well, I think that a lot of how something gets portrayed is based on whether others can point to a clear rule and say "hey, you're totally cheating." One of the people I'm thinking of is actually a really smart really high-achieving friend and I actually told him (nicely) that what I thought he was doing was wrong. Because it is a public forum and not hard to figure out what school I'm talking about, I'll skip the details and just say that the end result was that he was word-for-word typing someone else's thoughts into an essay exam worth 100% of a semester grade. He responded that he thought the professor was inviting the issue by not making it explicit that you were not supposed to do what he was doing, and until the professor changed the system to make the rules more clear, he didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing.
Based on the rule cited in this case, I think that their description of what is prohibited needs to be more specific.
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Being more specific certainly wouldn't hurt, but your friend was clearly lying to himself. And he tried to shift the blame for cheating onto someone else which may be an even bigger problem in the long run.
His complete lack of ethics was someone else's fault in his mind. Obviously the stakes are different, but I wonder if he feels entitled to break laws that he doesn't feel have been explained to him sufficiently as well.