What Is Cheating? How The Recent Push For "Academic Integrity" Bumps Heads With Democracy

Cheating is a term we hear all throughout childhood.  We’re told “cheaters never prosper” and dishonest behavior is frowned upon in sports, dating and even politics.  While cases of cheating in those areas of life are usually clear cut, I can’t help but view this push for “academic honesty” that’s grown in recent years with a more socially critical lens. 

Namely, “cheater” is more of a capitalist slur meant to enable professional gatekeeping than a legitimate indictment of one’s morality.  In college, it surfaces mainly through anti-smartphone/internet and, in special cases, anti-calculator rules for exams and other graded assignments.  Also, the pedagogues who take it upon themselves to enforce policies meant to deter cheating blur the line between educator and cop.

             As someone who started at a community college, I can say the enforcement of academic honesty and capitalist gatekeeping in general is way more salient at bigger institutions.  But that goes without saying.  However, that’s not to imply it’s non-existent at the former.  During my Physics exams, for example, we had to put our phones on the table and show that they were off.  I found this odd given that, in their career, no physicist is doing their job in absence of an internet-enabled device.  So, the idea that this practice is preparing a student for the real world doesn’t hold up.  What’s more likely is that this is done to limit how many people use education to cross over into the elite economic class.

There’s also the practice of playfully labeling a paper inscribed with formulas relevant to the exams (which were allowed) as “cheat sheets.”  This is concerning because it leads students to believe they should be happy that the system even allows us to have any point of reference.  When using a fucking sheet of paper with formulas scribbled on it in the age of publicly available information is barely even the minimum for “leniency.”

            Surprisingly, math courses aren’t impervious to the effects of late-stage capitalism.  They are usually some of the most straight-forward, no-bs courses in STEM curriculums.  But in Linear Algebra, for example, it’s weird how we’re expected to do row operations by hand.  Not only is this time-consuming, but it robs students of one of the most engaging things to do on a TI-84: solving systems of equations.  Luckily, my professor wasn’t too much of a stickler about this and merely wanted to know that we could do it; which was rather easy to discern from context (I mean, if you can effectively use the Gram-Schmidt process in one question then you also probably did the row operations in a prior question in a calculator vs. by hand to save time rather than because you didn’t know how).

            Further, I’ve always viewed my Data Structures professor, who I took during my last semester at community college, as a true comrade.  She was lenient, accessible for tutoring and even her daughter, who she brought to campus on the last day before finals, emitted sort of an angelic vibe.  I drew this from how she randomly offered me a fruit roll-up: something I would’ve never done as a kid, given how candy was like currency at that age.  Though, maybe my memory of this professor is selectively biased.

            Further, there was an incident halfway through the semester that a classmate vented to me about.  She’d been called into this professor’s office, questioned about a lab she’d submitted and ultimately accused of copying code from another student.  I recall assuring her that it probably wasn’t a big deal and expressed my curiosity at how such enforcement would be sustainable in Computer Science departments, given that referring to code from Stack Overflow and GitHub is literally what developers do all day.  Ultimately, I didn't want to rock the boat with my own grade and wrote it off as an isolated incident.  But I was wrong.

            This attempt to enforce the plagiarism rules that traditionally applied to the liberal arts onto tech courses is more prevalent than I’d hoped.  Recently, in my Artificial Intelligence course, my professor kept emphasizing “don’t copy” in reference to our first assignment.  This is, strangely, after linking us to sources with examples of the solved problem.  After submitting, I also saw an icon that explained how my documents would be run through Turnitin: something I’ve never seen in a CS class before.  I guess they want us to pretend the internet doesn’t exist.

            This was in addition to his exam, for which we had to comply to several security measures, including allowing software to take a snapshot of our faces and even a government-issued I.D.  Though, what really pissed me off was his posterior announcement which instructed us not to try to negotiate your grade with him because “it’s a class, not a business.” I wish he could tell that to the $158 per credit hour tuition and textbooks I can’t return.

            In essence, the recent push for academic honesty at institutions is overzealous in nature and does more to enforce classism than produce more ethical professionals.  It also alludes to a bigger issue: the increasing clash between the “every man for himself” default of capitalism and the democratic nature of web-enabled technology; the latter of which attempts to equalize humans by putting access to information in the hands of all, not the elite few.  

            All things considered, the next time you hear behavior labeled as “cheating” I implore that it be taken with a grain of salt.  Thanks for reading and stay pissed.