Cheating as violating instructor's trust
I am new to teaching, but my gut feeling is that it is unwise to personalize student behavior.
Can you provide an explanation why a student's cheating is more often a violation of the instructor's trust, and not simply the behavior of someone trying to game the system?
I can't think of a scenario where both factors are not in play. The cheating student is both gaming the system, and violating the instructor's trust.
Not to mention hurting themselves. Instructors must set the tone the first day of class. Let the students know you are there for them. They pay a lot for the books and for the college fees. They are there to share there ideas, express their experiences, and cultivate the knowledge of the instructor and the other students.
Learning is collective and individual. If they choose to use other people's work and represent it as their own - they have lost an experience to express their own ideas and answers. Right or Wrong they have to take ownership of their ideas, actions and decisions. Stealing is not acceptable in the business world, nor is fraud or embezzlement. People go to jail for those crimes. College is business. Cheating is in the same catagory. Taking anything that does not belong to you is plain and simple theft. Intellectual property is in that catagory. Tests are intellectual property.
They need to have faith in their ability - because that is what is going to carry them through life. Yes other folks help out, nobody gets through life alone, or succeeds only by themselves - but education has to be applied based on individual thought, effort and research and then combined with other individual, thought, effort and research. That is how we expand ideas and how enlightenment takes place.
Collective wisdom is applied in discourse, discussion and then application. Tests are only a means of limited recall aimed at a specific area for a moment in time and that moment in time needs to be the students thought and presentation based on his/her education, training, background and memory of the moment.
Well reasoned answers, even if not textually in agreement, are credible. Let them know that. Remember, in most cases we are just dealing with one text on the subject. Does it contain the ONLY answer to the question? Or is the professor the sole and absolute authority on all there is to know about the subject? Most educators I know like to be challenged and appreciate ideas and research from the student body. Thus we all learn.
Give credit for creative individualism, as long as it is logically presented and documented. This takes away, in many cases, the desire to use other's work or cheat. It gives recognization to well thought out answers that may not be in complete agreement with the text at hand.
In most cases you will not get this type of response - you will want the textual answers, but at least you have opened the door for the students to show you their research and talent. So they do not have to violate the instructors trust; they know the instructor is willing to consider and alternte well founded and logically reasoned answer and they don't have an excuse to game the system either.
A shorter answer is that the student was never disciplined or caught or made to feel the consequence of his or her dishonest behavior. In more dramatic terms they have never been to court and been sentenced or put in solitary. If they understand the explaination above they have no reason to cheat - as their work will be given full consideration - textual or not?
Larry Bignall, Cleveland, Ohio
