Imagine overhearing someone say something like, "Well, that guy who got murdered last week kind of asked for it. He was walking at night through a bad neighborhood and was dressed in expensive clothes."
The ridiculous nature of that statement is obvious, but try to find it in this statement: "Well I only cheated because the professor is pretty bad. The assignment is so hard and I'm not doing well in the class and how stupid would it be to do poorly in a gut?"
The events of the CS4 class seem pretty messy to me--it is not going to be as simple as saying "Yes, he cheated" or "No, he did not." Did people actually cheat? I don't know. That's for other, more qualified people to figure out and I don't care to comment on that.
What interests me more are the reactions to the allegations, the way in which we, whether or not we are personally involved, have responded.
Explaining ourselves, it seems, is one of our most natural instincts, and with good reason. Who doesn't want to explain or qualify one's action? Explanation is not the issue.
My concern is when explanation becomes a synonym for justification. It is very dangerous to allow why we do something to become our passport for excusing it. This is college -- who hasn't had a professor that isn't exactly on the ball? Who hasn't had a tough week, with tough assignments piled on top of that week?
We have all worked on those really tough, annoying and seemingly pointless assignments that lead us in circles and appear to be utterly impossible. I dread assignments like those, the kinds that usually involve spending the previous night cursing my professor and the subject in general, and wishing someone would just hand me the answers.
And, as I hand in these assignments, I'm sure a little part of me smugly thinks, "I don't cheat."
Well, I'm not too sure how true that is anymore -- is it that I do not cheat or that I have never been able to cheat? If someone had walked up to me with a sheet of answers, would I have taken and used them? Is the absence of an opportunity the only thing that has kept me from cheating?
I don't know, and I may never be able to answer that question about myself -- I would just as soon not. It would be a tough thing to face if I failed to measure up to the standard I thought I did.
But those are the types of questions we need to ask ourselves, those are the questions that address this issue. This issue should not be about the perceived competence level of a professor. It should not be about how easy he made it to get to the answers. This issue should be, and is, about the higher code to which we all agreed to subscribe.
Perhaps that higher code is both the issue and the root of the problem -- perhaps it is unrealistic to expect us to subscribe to that code. Perhaps we are too morally lazy. I know I am too morally lazy -- or perhaps too frightened -- to really answer any of the questions I have posed.
Cheating says something about a person's character. Justifying cheating says that a person is not ashamed to accept what he has learned about his character.
And as disappointed as a professor must be to learn that people may have cheated, the actual cheating may not even be the worst part of this mess. It's the aftermath that may hurt more.
