"this is college. everyone cheats."

Music: Brian Eno: Small Craft on a Milk Sea (2010)

From the moment of my second cup of coffee until about an hour and half ago I have been reading papers penned by students. I've been through about fifty-five today, five graduate papers and the rest reflection journals written by undergraduate students. The graduate students did excellent, of course, but they are in the academy for different reasons than the undergraduates, and their papers reflect those reasons.

All but one of the undergraduates turned in average to excellent projects. I am noticing, the longer I teach, the worse grammar and spelling are getting. The key problems I'm noticing in my undergraduates' writing: lack of proper punctuation, especially with the comma; not knowing that the titles of books, films, and television shows should be italicized or underlined; and plagiarism.

I've blogged quite a bit about plagiarism over the years. Plagiarism is representing the writing and ideas of others as one's own. Today, this is usually achieved by copying or cutting and pasting something from the Internet into a paper (Wikipedia is a usual culprit, as is the Internet Movie Data Base), but not indicating that one did so with a citation.

In the last few years, I've come around to the realization that a lot of plagiarism is born of ignorance. It's hard to believe, but many students do not know that cutting and pasting prose from the Internet is cheating. The rationale is aesthetic, if not epistemic. In our time, highly successful music artists, such as P-Diddy (or whatever he is calling himself these days), lift bars or whole refrains from other popular songs, slaps on a (usually inferior) lyric, and calls it an original. Girl Talk is pretty damn creative and arguably very original; Diddy signing over the Police is not. Regardless, my point is that our popular, mediated world is swirling in copying and borrowing---usually for entertainment---and I can understand why a student would struggle with issues of authorship and authenticity. The iPhone is a Droid is a Blackberry. The pressures and pleasures of Copy Culture are everywhere. And, heck, I'm dying for a new Cut Copy album too.

I've been working in recent years to address the ignorance by explicitly discussing plagiarism in my classes. I devote more than a page of my syllabus to the issue as well. The problem is simply that plagiarism has gotten pretty darn complicated---and not necessarily that students are devious. I have not resorted to teaching citational practices because, after all, I teach upper division courses and I should be able to assume students have been introduced to the issue. I am coming close to devoting an entire lecture to the issue early in my classes, however, because I'm finding, increasingly, students have not had to think through the basic, academic gesture of citation.

Although I think the growing problem (well, I want to think the growing problem) is really about ignorance, there is the nagging suspicion that the moral compass of younger generations is shifting. Recently, a scandal broke at the University of Central Florida about a 600 student, upper-division business class over cheating. As I understand it, a number of the students got a copy of an exam before it was given. Apparently, the professor was taking his exam questions from the textbook publisher, and a student accessed "stock" questions from the publisher's website and distributed them to the class. Two issues were raised regarding this scandal: (1) insofar as the teacher was claiming he wrote the exam, are the students to be faulted for thinking the practice exam they were sent, cobbled together from the publisher's website, was just a garden variety exam? They didn't speak out when the exam was distributed, so the teacher reasoned it was cheating; and (2) the current generation of students does not think cheating is immoral.

Reading about this scandal, I confess I sort-of agree with the students' arguments of self-defense. Insofar as the teacher indicated he was writing the exam, cobbling together a test from a test bank is kinda like the pot calling the kettle black. Writing good exams is hard. Writing good questions for exams is difficult business---and that's one of the reasons I don't give them often myself. I understand why many teachers look to test-writing experts to craft exam questions---but I also confess it's akin to "farming out" your teaching. To blame the students here---many of whom were probably earnest in not knowing they were getting a preview of their exam---is wrong-headed. Test-bank teaching is corporatized teaching; it's capitalism clobbering craft. That students would "game" the system is not surprising. Gaming the system is the message we're clobbered with in the mass media on a daily basis. The obvious solution here is for teachers to write their own tests. I know, the issue is more complicated than I'm representing it here, but seriously: if you are a teacher, shouldn't you write exams based on your actual lectures, not what a textbook company decides should be tested? Call me a Marxist, but I think this teacher was a bit dishonest. And dishonesty begs dishonesty, too. Had he said the textbook publisher was providing the questions for the exam, I would think differently.

The real issue here is one of cheating: are younger generations of the opinion that "this is college; everyone cheats?" One young person apparently went on record---on television---with such a statement. If this is a common sentiment, then I can say there has been a radical shift in thinking between generations. I'm not sure what to say about this attitude. It exists among some, I know, but many?

I really should have been a priest or nun (both outfits are fetching to me). I can only remember cheating once in an academic setting. I did so, along with eight others, while taking the standardized Iowa Test of Basic Skills. My AP English class was herded into the high school cafeteria to take the exam over some hours, with hundreds of other students. I remember whispering, under my breath, that I did not know the largest moon of Jupiter. Another student blurted out the answer, Ganymede (also a synth-pop band name), and all of us marked the answer. We giggled about this after the test. The test had no impact on our lives---it was diagnostic.

I don’t regret that kind of "cheating"---we were high school kids, the stakes were pretty low, and it didn't affect us one way or another. But I never cheated on an assignment. I've never plagiarized. I've never stolen candy, even. I just grew up knowing deception was, in general, wrong. Lying if a friend asks, "do I look fat in these jeans?" is one thing. Passing off someone else's idea as my own is quite another.

The digital "revolution" is making cheating easier and easier. Is it truly the case that the generation currently in college believes that cheating is "ok" to get by? I cannot believe that is the case; everyone still knows that cheating is wrong. I reckon the question is whether or not, despite knowing it's wrong, folks are starting to think it's ok to do it anyway . . . that the ends justify the means?

I worry that some students think the ends justify the means. I realize such a statement sounds silly---that it's not cynical enough. But I also have much evidence that a majority of students do NOT think this way---at least those who take my classes. Even so, if that is truly the case with students in the future, then the issue is not only one of morality and ethics, but self-conception. Subjectivity is altering, the psyche is shifting, what it is to be a "self" is changing. It may be that younger generations are no longer afflicted by "cognitive dissonance" as older generations. It may be that contradiction is the default postmodern condition, a default hastened by the multi-modal, attention-dividing channels of our mediated environment. It may be the self is fragmenting—psychoticizing, to coin a term. And if that's true, the way we teach will need to change---dramatically.