Why Shouldn't I Cheat?

There's a moment in Malcolm Gladwell's argument about the rise and fall of crime rates in New York City where he describes a study that shows how people's ethics change when they are in a hurry. This isn't just true for students: the study Gladwell cites concerns practicing seminarians who, in their hurry to give a lecture of good samaritanism, step over the homeless people in their way without a word in their rush to get to the lecture hall on time. This is a useful story to raise in a discussion of plagiarism, because it confirms our own experiences investigating cases where students have ended up knowingly handing in work that was not their own. The most common explanation we receive during these investigations is that the student "was in a hurry," "ran out of time," wasn't thinking because of all the pressure to pass." While there are, to be sure, those students who knowingly cheat and are indifferent to possible consequences of their actions, most students who find their way to our offices and eventually to the Student Judicial Affairs proceedings are fairly law-abiding citizens who ended up making a bad decision because they felt pressed for time.

At our university, the consequences for plagiarizing are quite severe, with penalties ranging from course failure to public service to suspension from the university and even to, in the most egregious cases, permanent expulsion. The university takes plagiarism quite seriously, as do we, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. Our feeling is that the university is meant to provide you with a place to learn and to acquire skills you don't already have: in keeping with this, we believe the writing class is meant to help you acquire the writing skills that are considered the building blocks of success both inside and outside the academy. And so, from our perspective, if you knowingly represent the work of another and get away with it, this isn't a victimless crime carried out against some faceless institution: what has happened, first and foremost, is that you have robbed yourself of a valuable part of your own education.

If you're pressed for time, if something has come up at home or at work that makes it impossible to meet the deadline, or if you just can't understand the assignment and are afraid that you never will, we recommend that you talk to your teacher. Perhaps you will get an extension, perhaps you won't, but the best bet, in the long run, is to not place for educational future at risk because you have a paper due and you're having trouble finishing it. This, at any rate, is the significance, we believe, of all the revelations about TV commentators and best sellers who have been exposed as plagiarists: the point isn't that everybody cheats; the point is that plagiarism is now the only intellectual misdeed that everyone still takes seriously, so seriously in fact that even misdeeds done years in the past can surface and result in dismissals from work and public embarrassment.

Is it worth it? We've been involved with proceedings where students have been permanently expelled from the university when they were just three courses short of graduating; we've been involved in proceedings where students have had to openly lie in front of their parents and their peers as the evidence mounted against them; and we've been involved in plenty of proceedings where the students felt that handing in someone else's work was no big deal and then were surprised to find themselves with permanent disciplinary failures of their transcripts and with the daunting task of trying to figure out how they were going to explain to their parents that they had been suspended for a semester. So, we know, first hand, what's on the other side of making the wrong decision when time is short. You might get away with it, you might not. Either way, you will lose out in the long run.

So our advice is this. If you are struggling with your writing:

• get help early--see your teacher during office hours, work with a tutor, take advantage of all the resources available at the Tutorama;
  
  
• keep your teacher informed if events outside of class are preventing you from handing work in on time;
  
  
• if you feel "stressed out" psychologically or emotionally by the heavy demands of going to college, seek professional help, either through your school's health services or through other local providers;
  
  
• and, if you find yourself faced with the choice between handing in a failing paper and handing in someone else's work, hand in the failing paper or hand in nothing at all.
  

The worst that can happen, if you hand in your own work, is that you will fail and you will have to take the course again. In other words, the worst that can happen if you do your own work is that you will be given another chance to learn and acquire the skills that are required for academic success. On the other hand, if you do cheat, the best case scenario is that you get away with it this time and that no one finds out prior to your graduation or after you've moved on to other things. Ultimately, the decision is yours alone to make.

Good luck!