An Offer to Teach Cheating 101

After reading your recent article on cheating (How does Harvard Define Cheating?," Tuesday, Feb. 15), I was highly distressed over the confusion about what does and does not constitute cheating at Harvard. In response I would be willing to teach a course on the ethics and advisability of various actions that may or may not constitute cheating.

To pique potential students' interests, let me discuss some of the important material that this course would cover. We would analyze the clearly fallacious comment made by the article's author, who says that while "turning in someone else's research or thesis paper...constitutes a breach of both ethics and university policy, this is where the clarity ends." Such a statement betrays a clear misunderstanding of the ethics of cheating and the practicality of doing so. After all, if turning in a problem set based on solutions that have already been writen up, mass produced, and posted is not considered cheating, how can we say that it is unethical to copy material from your roommate's unpublished thesis? The main problem here is that your roommate would probably be more likely to take action against you. Thus, the author confuses the impracticality of stealing with the ethical considerations of doing so, which at Harvard apparently should be moot.

Other topics, which are beyond my abilities to cover, would be delegated to special guest lecturers. For example, before reading Dean Mackay-Smith's comments in the article, I was not aware that failing to do a week-long assignment until the night before it was due (when the student was sufficiently exhausted) constituted extenuating circumstances which justify copying someone else's work, especially if the offending student is later appalled at what he or she did. This yields a fertile new area for research. As a friend of mine pointed out, the same logic should let her murder somebody if she was feeling tired or stressed out, as long a she was suitably appalled the next day.

Dean Buell says that it would be impossible to agree to an FAS-wide policy on what constitutes cheating. I think that with the participation of a wide range of faculty, my class could make some first steps in at least delineating some common actions that we would all agree constitute cheating. Getting rid of the inherent unfairness and stifling nature of most rules against cheating would naturally be a major goal of this course. For example, I would argue that we should allow students to copy problem set solutions from official answer keys as long as they followed the standard policy of enclosing directly quoted material in quotation marks and footnoting any material that was either copied of paraphrased. This seems like a reasonable compromise between those who are sticklers for honesty and those who quaintly insist that students should actually do their own work. Most importantly, it would free students of any unwarranted, nagging fears that they are somehow cheating when they borrow ideas or words from printed solutions.

Other issues we could address would be exactly how late at night it would have to be before a student would be allowed to copy his or her roommate's problem set answers. Finally, I think that we could take a stab at the question that so befuddled the author of the article: exactly why do some people feel that it is wrong to copy a thesis but not problem set solutions? If it is because a thesis is larger, then should we allow students to copy answers to small problem sets, but not larger ones? Such a solution would have to be rejected on the grounds that it would be very unfair to students in classes with long assignments such as papers or essays. Or, if it is because theses show more original work, are we not unfairly penalizing students whose roommates' problem set solutions may be equally original? Clearly, such a policy, and the policy of preventing students from copying other students' theses itself, are very stifling and inherently unfair, especially to those students who prefer to hand in assignments with answers that they obtained in a more "creative" fashion than most. Dave Tabak

Graduate Student, Economics