What’s up with all the cheating lately? Today I read an article about a teenage player in a Scrabble competition who was caught cheating by hiding blank tiles in his
sleeve. Check out the article here:
And the Olympics had a Chinese badminton team throwing matches
so that they wouldn’t have to compete against a more difficult team in the next
round. Likewise, a few boxing referees
were suspended and expelled for various infractions. In one case, a boxer from Azerbaijan fell to
the mat six times, easily defeated, and yet the Turkmenistani referee refused
to end the match and give the win to his Japanese contender. In the end, the Azerbaijani boxer won by
decision, although he had to be helped out of the ring.
Seriously? This is
the Olympics, people.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, the best way to beat an opponent at a competition is to have
an advantage over him or her. Ethically-speaking,
that advantage is in skill, intelligence, or athletic prowess, and the winning
competitor has abided by the rules of the game.
But sometimes those rules have loopholes, and if that means winning a
gold medal in the Olympics or going home empty-handed, we shouldn’t be shocked
when people find ways to exploit those loopholes. Or flat out cheat.
I can’t say I never cheated.
But in high school I never did. I
know some kids would write answers on their desks right before the exams were
handed out, but high school studies were very easy for me. I never cheated in high school because yes,
it was wrong, but also because I didn’t need to. I just used my brain and did well.
College was a bit of a different story though. And I think it was the peer pressure that
really made me cross those ethical boundaries.
After taking a few tests in one particularly difficult EE course, a lab
partner of mine asked, “Are the formulas in your graphing calculator messed up?” I had no clue what he was talking about, and
then he scrunched up his face like I was joking, pulled out his graphing
calculator, and showed me a list of about two-hundred formulas broken down by
category that’d he’d entered into the device's memory. He had
the Law of Sines and other trigonometric formulas, chemical reactions, Fourier Transform pairs. And I was honestly just
dumbfounded.
Of course, my shock turned to compunction when other
lab partners started laughing and showed me their calculators, which seemingly had even more
formulas than the first. And then even a
TA came up to us and said he’d never have gotten through EE 330 without his
stash of formulas. In my mind I kept thinking
this was just so…WRONG…but that night I must have spent three hours entering formulas into my calculator. And then
when I took my next exam, I think I referenced those formulas a handful of
times, and sure enough I got a 96 on it.
I look back now and still think that was so wrong. But considering that our profs graded on
curves, and I was at the bottom end of the bell curve in several of my classes,
I really had no choice. I was paying a
lot of money to get a piece of paper saying I was an educated man, and yet
cheaters were robbing me of my money and education.
I remember one statistics class in which the professor
actually encouraged us to use graphing calculators and even laptops with the
Excel statistical package installed if we had them. I came to my first exam with my laptop,
pulled it out, and watched as twenty-nine other students stared at me, most
probably thinking I was a nerd for actually bringing a laptop. I was
the first one to finish that exam though, and when I received my grade, I had
100%. I’d even gotten the two bonus
questions correct. When that course
ended, I recall stopping by my prof’s office to see my final grade. He asked for my name and looked it up, and he
was shocked that I had the third highest out of all 3 sections he taught. His exact words were, “How did you do so well
in my class, and I don’t even know your name?”
I just shrugged my shoulders and replied, “It helped that we were able to use
calculators and computers.” And I felt
great knowing that I used the tools available to me to do well in his class.
There’s a huge difference between using technology as a tool
and relying on it though. In none of my other courses, especially the 300 and 400 level courses, did a professor allow us to use laptops or calculators to store formulas. We were expected to memorize those formulas. My EE grades may not
have been as good as others, especially after having gone through one and a
half semesters without using their unethical trick, but dammit I knew all of
those mathematical formulas better than 90% of my peers. Granted I can only remember maybe 10% of them
now, but at least I actually LEARNED something.
The question is: how many of us would cheat to get ahead if
given the opportunity? Does money or
fame or having your name in the record books trump knowing that you did this on
your own without the assistance of a crooked judge or a computer or some other
method of cheating? Has our society
become so obsessed with success that we are willing to throw out all of our
morals and ethics to obtain it?
Of course, I’m the kind of guy who follows the rules to a
tee. I take all of my corrugated cardboard
and newspapers to the recycling bins outside of Wal-Mart instead of tossing it
in the trash. I always use my turn
signals and stop at every stop sign, even though I know people roll through the
one down the road from my house like it’s not even there. I cringe when I hear about people scamming
stores that offer no hassle returns. But
that’s just me. I was raised properly, I
guess.
But what about everyone else? Am I the idiot for not following suit—metaphorically
speaking, not putting those formulas in my graphing calculator? I’m not asking because I’m considering a
change into the realm of the unethical.
I’m asking because I want to know if you, my reader, have a firm moral
ground to stand on. If you don’t, why is
that? Because you just want to have an
advantage over everyone else? Because
having more money/power/fame is really all that is important to you?
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