Cheating Oneself
I was sorry to read, in asiancemagazine.com, of which I am very fond, some college student commenters defending the practice of buying term papers and passing them off as their own. Not only does that cheat the institution they attend, it cheats the other students and cheats the cheater himself. Let me explain.
Colleges both teach and certify. Part of teaching is assigning and evaluating term papers, identifying the strengths and weaknesses thereof, so that the student is praised for good performance and criticized for bad performance. Evaluating a purchased term paper has little teaching benefit. The course grade and even the degree eventually obtained depend somewhat on these purchased papers. If the student is not worthy of the grades or the degree, then the college reputation suffers a loss, however small.
Your excellent grade helps you but slightly diminishes the value of another student’s grade. If there are relatively many top grades, they carry less weight than if such grades were rare. If virtually everyone passes the course, passing has less significance. Thus, cheating to get a better grade, or even merely to pass, slightly harms other students, as they are evaluated in comparison to you. Those you harm, if they become aware of what is happening, will resent you and what you are doing.
What is the impact on you, personally? You can find excuses for cheating, but you almost certainly cannot be proud of it. If you evade the hard work of writing the term paper, you have lost an opportunity to strengthen yourself through work. You may think you understand the topic of the purchased paper, but you would likely know it better if you had written the paper yourself. If you are cheating, you either think it is common, giving you a low opinion of your fellow students, or you think it is rare, giving you a low opinion of yourself.
Perhaps it was only the short-hand of email, but I generally found the English language usage of the defenders of term paper buying to be deficient. Whoever hires them on the basis of their falsified college performance will soon be unpleasantly surprised, bad for both employer and employee.
Right after World War II, Japan accelerated industrial production rapidly, with an emphasis on low cost and high volume, with little regard to quality. This succeeded in the marketplace for years, but Japanese goods became tarnished with the reputation of poor quality. Subsequently, a revolution in Japanese quality control, aided by W. Edwards Deming’s works on statistical quality control, helped make Japanese goods renowned for high quality, to everyone’s benefit. The investments were major, but the rewards even greater.
“Virtue is its own reward,” in terms of how we feel about ourselves and how we treat each other. Cheating is corrosive to self-esteem and to trust and to fairness. Write your own term paper!
Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., is a freelance writer and a retired physicist, author of Ting and I: A Memoir of Love, Courage, and Devotion, available in paperback and ebook formats from amazon.com, bn.com, tingandi.com or outskirtspress.com/tingandi. Their web site is tingandi.com, and his email address is douglas@tingandi.com.
I suggest holding “writing clinics” that are supervised by Professors’ Aids or Graduate Students for University Program credit. That way the entire process is “monitored” and there is no question as to whether or not a research paper is “stolen”. Every student will receive a login number and each paper can enter the University catalog “database”.
It would definitely put an abrupt end to this business once and for all! So many students today graduate from the best Universities unable to write an essay. I notice that the problem exists mainly with Generation Y graduates because the internet enables cheating on a rampant scale. It has to stop!
That is just my humble opinion. Of course, Doug is the expert on this subject.
Jaymie — I could not and did not want to be too specific, but the thread associated with the Indian students and the “Sham University” had numerous comments relating to how to obtain pre-written term papers. I received many of these in my email mailbox, following that article from your university issue. All or almost all were anonymous, making me reluctant to point too specifically, but suggesting that the writers themselves had some qualms about what they were advocating. To be most judicious, we could argue that they were merely considering cheating, in which case my article can be take as an attempt to persuade them not to do so. Is it possible that somehow I received these emails but others did not? They seemed to be from the comments section following that article. It is awkward for me to stop in the middle of this comment to try to find them.
Doug – where are the cheaters? Point them out so we can debate! I don’t think any of our valuable readers would condone cheating!
Marisa — You are too kind…I think. I’m not actually an expert on cheating, but I did teach for seven years at a university decades ago, and I did read a set of comments here that led me to believe that purchasing term papers was happening or being considered. I do think my argument against cheating is well-founded, and I tried not to appeal to a particular moral code, as not everyone would share it.