Is it ok to cheat some times?
Apparently it is, according to Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard, who claims (according to the Chronicle) that: “the chancellors did not personally benefit from using plagiarized material, while Mr. Dussold’s teaching statement was part of a mid-tenure review”, in a plagiarism case that involves a former professor and two of the University’s chancellors.
Thus, President Poshard’s message is that cheating is acceptable, or at least not punishable, as long as the cheaters do not stand to benefit from their misconducts.
I do not share this view, though I consent that when cheaters do not benefit from their misconduct, it is more difficult to uncover the cheating, investigate it, and determine the severity of the violation.
Nonetheless, President Poshard is making a crucial error, in my opinion: by associating the severity of the misconduct to the benefits gained by the cheaters, he draws a line on the sand that can be moved accordingly to accomodate subjective views about the ethical implications of cheating.
Does cheating that result in 1% increase in GPA is also dismissable because of the tiny benefit gained by the cheater? Â How does one determine that a cheater gained no benefit from the misconduct?
Yeah, I thought that Poshard’s statement just made him sound like an idiot. Can you imagine the president of the University of Chicago coming up with something like that? (Of course, I’d guess that the higher-ups at your school probably wouldn’t be dumb enough to plagiarize from a GW Bush speech in the first place.)
Comment by wayward | July 26, 2006