Facebook study groups = cheating?

[UGAalum94]

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.

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.

[skylark]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

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.

A lot of people are like this, sadly. If you don't make it impossible for them to explain how they are not in violation of a rule, they don't think they are. What threw me was that in all other respects, he is one of the most ethical people I know. Seriously.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by skylark

A lot of people are like this, sadly. If you don't make it impossible for them to explain how they are not in violation of a rule, they don't think they are. What through me was that in all other respects, he is one of the most ethical people I know. Seriously.

No doubt a lot are that way, and I think more are getting that way as we focus more on achievement than we do on character as they grow up. Now, I can't point to a golden age of good character or anything; I just think that if you ask our grandparents what might happen to such a person, they'd have a different sense of him basically being at least a partial failure as a human being because he was willing to cheat and if you asked college kids today, they basically expect a certain amount of corruption.

To tell you the truth, I think the interest and emphasis on "gamesmanship" rather than "sportsmanship" in athletics sort of goes along with it. It's a cultural issue in which we now basically celebrate the ways that people seek to get an edge whether it's actually ethical or not.

I can't tell you how bizarre it is to me that kids cheat to maintain the grades to be in "honor" societies, but as you said, I don't think they think cheating generally reflects on their character. They don't see it as being a fundamental lie.

ETA: I'm not trying to present myself as squeaky clean, but for the most part I was blessed by not caring about my grades enough to be tempted to cheat. If I hadn't done the work, I'd just turn in what I could pull off on my own.