The road snaked between crops of boulders, a vague shimmer in the heat. Black and red petroglyphs adorned the rock before me. A park sign explained this as a defacement: tourists painting over the carvings to make them easier to see. I cannot say I was sorry for the vandalism and pulled myself up onto a lower ledge for a better look. The sign had prohibited that as well, something about oils in the hand and cultural meaning. If not everyone did it, it would be fine.
These six feet made the difference, apparently, and my cell phone returned to life with a series of angry beeps. Elsewhere there was a catastrophe. A young relative had been caught cheating on an essay: he had ChatGPT write it for him and anyone with half a brain or a subscription to TurnItIn’s AI detector could tell that plain as day.
The universe is a kind place. The teacher had granted him a mercy: he had one day to rewrite the piece. Well, if he had been able to write it himself, he would have just done so in the first place. That was where I came in. Everyone did this kind of thing. It would be fine.
So, turning from the petroglyphs and the Joshua trees, in those brief oases when the phone connected to a network, I tapped a quick treatise on the space race into a Google document. Not much could be said for it — I knew nothing about the subject and lacked a consistent connection to look anything up — but that ignorance served an effective camouflage: neither did my client. The result was bad, uninformed, dashed off, but would pass the plagiarism checker and, ultimately, the class.
While the details of this case are modern, the basic structure are nothing new. The Chinese civil service exam, for instance, survived the better part of a millennium and never once managed to stamp out cheating. This is not for want of trying. Examiners, for instance, separated stronger from weaker candidates to minimize opportunities for copying. They marked exam pages to prevent candidates from swapping in prepared answers. Qing penal codes provided for the swift decapitation of examiners colluding with candidates.1
The existence of cheating is not a damning indictment of a system, at least compared to the alternatives. The civil service exam, as a method for selecting bureaucrats, even considering its corruption, at the least improved on the system of pure nepotism that preceded it. The pervasiveness and persistence of cheating, however, does suggest the existence of perverse incentives.
Using a very basic economic model, we can say that people cheat when the expected benefit of cheating — roughly, how much the cheater stands to gain by getting away with cheating multiplied by the likelihood of their getting away with it — outweighs the expected costs of cheating — how much the cheater stands to lose by getting caught multiplied by the likelihood of being caught. Exactly what these amount to varies broadly in the situation and also on the candidate’s likelihood to succeed without cheating. If you’re likely to succeed without cheating, it is not worth taking the risk.
When we think of efforts to tamp down on cheating, i.e. to lower the expected benefits of cheating, we think first either of better detection or increased punishments. Better detection can be a game of whack-a-mole, as cheaters simply change methods, and can impose significant collateral costs on non-cheaters. Any college student who has had to install borderline-malware and send their webcam footage off to a center in Bangalore just to assure their examiner it was really them taking an exam, only to be falsely flagged and failed, has some sense at how dystopian this can get. Similarly, ramping up the punishment can simply intensify a system’s arbitrary cruelties. It is no great surprise that civil service exam was the occasion of much resentment and the occasional riot.
Lowering the stakes of cheating is less often attempted, but can prove effective. When I was a graduate student, my roommate became a convert and then proselytizer of ungrading: conducting classes without graded assignments or examinations. To him, this practice not only saved a lot of admin, but reoriented student’s relationship to the class and material. Admittedly some would take their newfound freedom and skip town: if nothing was being officially asked of them, they would do nothing. The better part, so my friend insisted, would take the running room to form a personal, authentic relationship to the material: without the extrinsic motivators of grades, the intrinsic motivation of curiosity would propel them forward. If nothing else, it saved a lot of admin.
Every time I filled out a cheating report, I wished I had followed this lead. In an American university, the handling of a case of “academic dishonesty” is a centralized process. The lecturer serves as detective and prosecutor, documenting a case against the student. But it is another department that serves as judge, legislator and executioner. There are the trappings of a court: an appeals process, extra penalties for repeat offenders. It’s so much admin.
And why, exactly, is all of this necessary? If, for example, the liberated, grade-free class could teach students more and prevent cheating, simply because it left nothing to cheat on, why not follow this model? The answer is straightforward but depressing. The university (and, indeed, the education system as a whole) is not in the first instance an institution of learning. It is instead an institution of grading, in the most meat-factory sense of the expression, man handling students and slapping on bright stickers: ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D,’ ‘F.’
How could it be otherwise? The primary consumers of education are employers. The degree a candidate possesses, the number and institution of this degree, these form the crucial items in a job candidate’s application, especially for an entry-level position. This is a simple fact, universally understood. Universities understand the implications: to maximize the value of degrees, they must be selective, accepting and passing on only the most employable. Students too understand: if they are going to spend four years and five, six figures on a piece of paper, it better be a good-ass piece of paper.
Now, there still might be some room for education in this picture. Universities would like to maximize the value of the degrees they grant, as that translates fairly directly into alumni donations, tuitions, and prestige. However, simply granting more degrees could, like a central bank printing more notes, simply devalue each individual degree as the link between degree and employability weakens. Education promises itself as a means to pump out more degrees without devaluing them.
There is a legitimate question about how much education actually gets accomplished in the education system. I’m inclined to side with skeptics like Bryan Caplan (in The Case Against Education) that the answer is very little. But we can put that question to the side here. The observation that matters here is that education is a secondary means by which “educational” institutions can maximize their primary function: grades. Individual acts of utopic anarchy, like my friend’s ungrading, can survive within the system, indeed at “new” and “alternative” schools can be the primary mode, but this is simply a matter of this system, like any, being less than perfectly efficient, less than perfectly organized to its purpose. Freedom is a temporary anomaly.
All of this might be taken to be an elaborate defense of my being an accomplice to cheating. It is not. For one thing, nothing in the above goes so far as to show that the educational system is unjust or immoral. It may be that this grading function is socially necessary. Certainly it is hard to imagine any economy, capitalist or otherwise, functioning at all without some sort of system of qualifications.
Further, even if we think that the educational system is immoral or unjust in some way or other, this does not justify any and all breaking of rules. Even in an unjust regime, most laws are worth following most of the time. With cheating, the harms are socially dispersed. The cheater does a small damage to their educational institution, weakening the relationship between grade and employability, but this damage redounds to other students who have or will receive that grade.
What we have here then is a tragedy of the commons. Many parties are broadly interested in the integrity of grades: that they serve as a reliable signal of certain skills or abilities. Employers want such a signal directly. Students want to possess qualities employers are interested in, and so want the grade and want employers to want the grades they will earn. Educational institutions want to be in control of something valuable. And broadly, the whole economy benefits to the extent that work broadly gets assigned to those competent to do it. So this integrity is a public good.
We can think of norms against cheating, then, as taxes meant for the preservation of this public good. Each of a set of taxpayers (the students in this case) are asked to pay a cost (the opportunity cost of not cheating) for the maintenance of a public good. Cast in these terms, we can see a central problem: this is a highly regressive tax. Those who are hurt most by the prohibition on cheating are those who are least able to pay it, i.e. those who are most likely to fail if they don’t cheat. Call them the D-students.
Now, we need to be a bit cautious here. I have just made an argument that is very general. We could say something similar not just about cheating but any norm violation. To take the extreme example: murder. Public safety is a public good. So we can say the prohibition on murder is a kind of tax for the maintenance of public safety. We might go on to say that it is a regressive one, falling on those with the most interest in murder. Psycho-sexual sadists, for example.
It sounds silly to describe the sadist as over- or unfairly burdened with the costs of maintaining a society free of murder. But there is a point to be made here, namely that we don’t regard the sadist’s desire to murder as a legitimate interest. Certainly, the sadist might be displeased by enforcement of the prohibition against murder. But this displeasure, along with their desire to murder, are pathological. We do not nor should we regret to any extent the denial of the pleasures of the kill. At most, we pity them for having such disordered desires.
The situation is quite otherwise with an example closer to cheating: stealing. We can similarly say the prohibition against stealing is a regressive tax that burdens most those who have the most to gain by stealing: namely the poor. Here, though, the burden feels all the more real. We have all listened to the soundtrack to Les Miserables, have all felt sympathy for Valjean’s stealing a loaf of bread to survive, have felt disgust at Javert’s insistence at exacting the full measure of the law for this infraction. Certainly there are some would-be thieves whose interest in theft is not respectable — those who shoplift for the thrill, say — but much of the interest is respectable. And as such, there is a real moral tension here: between maintaining the public value of a system of property and fairly sharing the burdens of maintaining a public value.
In this respect, the D-students have a raw deal. So much is at stake with this system of grades. This is true for them, especially, on the broadly-true generalization that parental socio-economic status correlates with a child’s academic performance. Of course there are inclinations to cheating, indolence and sloth, that are indefensible. But these are a minor case. As a rule: the burdens of the system of academic integrity fall on those least able to bear it.
To again insist that this is not an excuse for my own assistance with cheating: in my case, the kid’s parents were reasonably well off. He would have been fine either way. At most, this could be chocked up to a kind of familial loyalty.
Indeed, I am not interested in legislating one way or the other. What I think the above shows is that the moral antagonisms in the matter of academic cheating go deep. On the one hand, a norm against cheating is essential to our educational institutions as they exist: there is no simple, salutary change that does away with cheating or our educational institutions. On the other, in anything like our current economic systems the costs of such norms will be inequitably distributed. Technology my open up new fronts in this conflict, but the war does not change.
Elman, Benjamin A. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Harvard University Press, 2013. 82–87.↩︎