Ethical Test Cheating. Would you cheat or not?

[YoungR3b3l]

No doubt is cheating is both a bad & immoral & unethical behaviour. However, if you are in a situation that you think a test that you are taking, regardless of what type it is, if included many unmentioned to study topics. For instance, a prof recommended three chapters and brought questions from the fourth chapter and you asked him about that and he doesnt answer. And your mate knows the answer as its one of his interests and offers you to cheat, would it be ethical to cheat with your friends permission to assure you remain your high gpa ? Or youd sacrifice it and marks would be lost thus a lower grade to your grading history consequently a lower gpa because of a prof oppression?

Id cheat, simply because rules are made to establish justice and equality at the same level. Oppression can be done with equality, but would vanish with justice. Cheating in such situation is a sneak logical way to achieve justice and surpass oppression.

What about you folks?

Edited August 10, 2014 by YoungR3b3l

[Eigen]

Cheating is cheating. 

 

And should result in suspension or expulsion from the program. 

 

I personally consider this a very hard line. 

[Sigaba]

@YoungR3b3l --

 

Your issue isn't the or or rules that to be broken to stop "oppression". Your issue is your attitude.

[Cookie]

@YoungR3b3l --

 

Your issue isn't the or or rules that to be broken to stop "oppression". Your issue is your attitude.

 

muahahaha     

 

YoungR3b3I,

To be honest, you can never justify cheating. I have never cheated any time in any form during my entire education, and still maintain close to perfect GPA. I'm not saying GPA is the most important, but since it's important to me, I work to earn it.

 

No offense, your English is very weird. I read it 3 times and am still not sure what you meant by "prof oppression".

Edited August 10, 2014 by Cookie

[bsharpe269]

I never cheat. It is unethical to cheat and this is of course one reason that I avoid it but it might not even be the main one. I honestly don't trust anyone else's answers enough to risk my points on them. If I lose points then I want it to be because I could not figure out the question and therefore deserve to lose points, not because a friend in my class couldn't figure it out.

[TakeruK]

No, I would not cheat in that situation. I would like to say that I would never ever cheat but "never" is a strong word and if one is imaginative enough, one can contrive some extreme/strange scenario where I would answer yes

 

In that situation, if I thought the test was unfair, I would still complete it to the best of my own ability and then complain to the professor about the test questions after the test. 

 

Cheating off a friend in this case does not actually create "equality" as you suggest. What about all the other people without friends that know the answers? They will still be unfairly disadvantaged. The most fair, equal and ethical way to resolve this situation is to not cheat and go through the official protocol for complaining about test fairness at your school. 

[the_sheath]

No, I would not cheat in that situation. I would like to say that I would never ever cheat but "never" is a strong word and if one is imaginative enough, one can contrive some extreme/strange scenario where I would answer yes

 

Suppose there was a computerized military training simulation that was essentially designed to be a no-win scenario. Let's say, in this case, it's a rescue mission in which, due to the programming implemented, any attempts at rescuing the stranded party are met with guaranteed failure. I would say "cheating" in the form of hacking into the programming to allow the situation to be winnable is not inherently wrong. In fact, I was given to understand that approaching a problem differently than how we're taught to do it is a large part of what many of us would be doing at some point.

 

Suppose, in a another situation, you were going into a field in which espionage and information gathering was key. Suppose you were taking a test to qualify for that field, and you are explicitly that getting caught cheating is an offense punishable by expulsion from the test. However, it becomes clear that the test is also designed to be impossible to complete with the knowledge level you are expected to have at that point, and that the only way to succeed is to cheat. In fact, the unspoken purpose of the exam is to test the test-takers' skills in cheating--two fake test-takers are planted in the room, but they have all the answers, and the real test-takers' task is to extract that information without being spotted. I.e.the thing being tested is not their ability to complete the exam, but their ability to stealthily gather some target information.

 

Or maybe we can take a page from that one thing that actually happened in that one class in UCLA where cheating was actually encouraged.

 

There are probably a lot of situations in which "cheating" isn't wrong, or at least falls into a gray area. It's not that hard to imagine (I mean come on, imagination is kinda part of our schtick).

 

Back to the original situation. From what I think is going on, your professor told you to study 3 chapters for the test, and the they put questions from a 4th chapter on the test, and you realize this during the test. Is it wrong / unethical to copy off a friend who knows the answer? Probably, yeah. Is your professor a dick for not telling you to study that fourth chapter? Probably. But I mean, it sounds like you knew that the questions were from another chapter when you first saw them, so I'm guessing you covered that section already in class but didn't study it. That's on you--you're responsible for material you already covered. Though if the class hadn't gotten to that material at all, it's a little greyer there.

 

But honestly, OP, get over yourself. You talk about professor "oppression" and cheating as "justice", but in the end, what you're doing only benefits you. If you really cared about "justice", your solution would benefit everyone taking the test. Like complaining to the professor to have the questions not count toward the grade. What you're suggesting isn't just immoral, it's petty and selfish. It's clearly about you, your grade, your GPA, and what you think you're entitled to.

[Vene]

But honestly, OP, get over yourself. You talk about professor "oppression" and cheating as "justice", but in the end, what you're doing only benefits you. If you really cared about "justice", your solution would benefit everyone taking the test. Like complaining to the professor to have the questions not count toward the grade. What you're suggesting isn't just immoral, it's petty and selfish. It's clearly about you, your grade, your GPA, and what you think you're entitled to.

This is exactly right. Even if we assume there was an injustice being committed cheating means you and you alone are able to overcome it. It does absolutely nothing for every other person taking the test and does absolutely nothing for people who may take it in the future. What to do in such a situation is discuss the matter with the department's chair, the dean, or other university official.

 

But, let's be honest, this has nothing to do with some hypothetical professor. This is all about the GRE, which YoungR is now absolutely obsessed with. To put it bluntly YoungR, you don't have the necessary skills to study in the US. Your grammatical and language skills are at the elementary level. You may be able to improve them with time, but it's just not enough to make it in a university environment. You're also coming across as incredibly juvenile, entitled, and petty with your complaints about the GRE. Yes, it has its flaws and it is not nearly as valuable as ETS thinks it is. And I will agree that it sucks to have to spend a few hundred dollars on a test of marginal value just to get admitted. But this supposed injustice is trivial. Get over yourself.

[Between Fields]

If you're thinking about cheating before you're even in grad school, maybe it's not the right path for you.

[TakeruK]

@the_sheath: Hahaha, Kobayashi Maru is a great example of what I meant But I was also thinking something more simpler where my desire for academic honesty/ethics is overwhelmed by some other desire. For example, I receive a threat that if I do not help someone cheat in a test, they would kill someone important to me, etc. 

 

Basically, I think that in the OP's scenario, there are plenty of ways to achieve a fair result for everyone without cheating and in fact, cheating would only make the unfairness even worse!

[spunky]

@YoungR3b3l --

 

Your issue isn't the or or rules that to be broken to stop "oppression". Your issue is your attitude.

 

 

No offense, your English is very weird. I read it 3 times and am still not sure what you meant by "prof oppression".

 

To put it bluntly YoungR, you don't have the necessary skills to study in the US. Your grammatical and language skills are at the elementary level. 

 

i think the more we repeat it the more it'll start sinking in because seriously, YoungR3b3l, this is starting to get hold.

 

you flunked the GRE. boo-Fing-hoo.  get over yourself and study more for the next time. or just aim for less prestigious universities. or go to Europe. or stay in your home country. or just do something and stop complaining about "the system"! 

Edited August 10, 2014 by spunky

[VulpesZerda]

Before announcing here that you think cheating can be acceptable, remember that this is a public forum where anyone can read any post, and that anonymity isn't 100% guaranteed. Just sayin'

[YoungR3b3l]

 

But, let's be honest, this has nothing to do with some hypothetical professor. To put it bluntly YoungR, you don't have the necessary skills to study in the US. Your grammatical and language skills are at the elementary level. You may be able to improve them with time, but it's just not enough to make it in a university environment. You're also coming across as incredibly juvenile, entitled, and petty with your complaints about the GRE. Yes, it has its flaws and it is not nearly as valuable as ETS thinks it is. And I will agree that it sucks to have to spend a few hundred dollars on a test of marginal value just to get admitted. But this supposed injustice is trivial. Get over yourself.

Who you think you are to determine am i qualified enough or not? You're at the utmost expectations are a grad student who got several rejections before gotten admitted. Have you seen my reseach papers? Did you know that I am with a continuous contact with American University, Harvard Kennedy School (Government Dept), Duke University, Georgetown University, Texas at Austin University faculty members are cooperating in several academic papers and they actually have shown interests for my papers to reference in their academic subfields?

I am in terms of an undergrad & Grad GPA (yes am a grad student), english proficiency tests, experiences, extracurricular activities, achievements (two books on comparative politics, published article) and honors. I am qualified to apply to about 85% of the US grad programs in my major, the one and only defect which is in my profile is my low GRE scores WHICH can be fixed by studying which I NEVER did when I took my once and only GRE, hence it is very logical to occur.

I have proven that I am eligible in english proficiency tests in both in the IELTS and TOEFL. I have scored a 7.5/9 in the IELTS listening & speaking portions which is equivalent to 27/30 on TOEFL. I have scored a 23/30 writing on TOEFL before 3 years without even practicing and my vocabulary and grammar were less mature than now.

Empirically, I am Qualified to be a competitive applicant except that I have to WORK on my GRE which is doable. Remember english is my second language & I speak generally three languages, Native in Arabic, full fluency in English, average in French.

You have 0 qualifications to evaluate and judge my profile.

[spec789]

Firstly, please calm down. I want to believe that you are genuinely who you say you are, but frankly, your *RAGE*RAGE*RAGE* attitude has me half believing that you are just a troll.

Secondly, why are you so concerned about the GRE's? You claim in your post that you are so accomplished and have all these contacts at many prestigious American universities who practically begging to work with you. In graduate admissions in the US, even if admissions is done at the departmental level, professors can and do bypass the committee, and tell them to overlook the GRE if the professors are particularly keen on working with a specific applicant. This is why one of the first pieces of advice you will see on practically any forum about the graduate applications process, is to contact professors with whom you would like to work with.

Thirdly, your attitude has me concerned in general for your future if you carry this attitude with you to the US. Do you notice how many of the posters on this thread are taking issue you with your attitude? It will be the same at any American university you end up in. No matter how brilliant you are or how long and accomplished your CV is, no one wants to work with an ass.

[Vene]

Young, good on you. Now prove you're worth it and apply to their PhD programs and get accepted. Instead of going all morose and self-pitying brush yourself off and do something. Retake the GRE if you have to, use your connections, highlight your other abilities but don't sit and whinge on an internet forum.

[AAdAAm]

Firstly, please calm down. I want to believe that you are genuinely who you say you are, but frankly, your *RAGE*RAGE*RAGE* attitude has me half believing that you are just a troll.

 

 

I've kind of been wondering the same for a while. His previous posts have this general feel of "oh-god-i'm-so-butt-hurt-that-I-need-to-blame-everyone-but-myself" and suddenly he turns out to be a stellar candidate (minus the GRE)?

 

Either he's not as special as he wishes to portray himself or is just a general-variety troll.  

[YoungR3b3l]

Firstly, please calm down. I want to believe that you are genuinely who you say you are, but frankly, your *RAGE*RAGE*RAGE* attitude has me half believing that you are just a troll.

Secondly, why are you so concerned about the GRE's? You claim in your post that you are so accomplished and have all these contacts at many prestigious American universities who practically begging to work with you. In graduate admissions in the US, even if admissions is done at the departmental level, professors can and do bypass the committee, and tell them to overlook the GRE if the professors are particularly keen on working with a specific applicant. This is why one of the first pieces of advice you will see on practically any forum about the graduate applications process, is to contact professors with whom you would like to work with.

Thirdly, your attitude has me concerned in general for your future if you carry this attitude with you to the US. Do you notice how many of the posters on this thread are taking issue you with your attitude? It will be the same at any American university you end up in. No matter how brilliant you are or how long and accomplished your CV is, no one wants to work with an ass.

What i did is simply stating a brief information regarding my overall abilities & achievements that you actually were a denial on. And when i respond you find that weird?

And what attitude are you talking about? Is it because of a hypothetical situation that I imaginized in a topic that I wanted to have a philosophical argument regarding morals of ethics ?

[YoungR3b3l]

I've kind of been wondering the same for a while. His previous posts have this general feel of "oh-god-i'm-so-butt-hurt-that-I-need-to-blame-everyone-but-myself" and suddenly he turns out to be a stellar candidate (minus the GRE)?

 

Either he's not as special as he wishes to portray himself or is just a general-variety troll.

None forced you to believe sir. And what about the GRE "hand"kissing here? Is this some sort of an authoritarian forum where hemogenous ideas are likely to be perfect while criticizing ETS is a major issue?

[YoungR3b3l]

Young, good on you. Now prove you're worth it and apply to their PhD programs and get accepted. Instead of going all morose and self-pitying brush yourself off and do something. Retake the GRE if you have to, use your connections, highlight your other abilities but don't sit and whinge on an internet forum.

Nice mass crowd phenomenon going on. Id recommend you to read Gustav Lebon's masterpiece "Psychology of the crowd" youll definitely find yourself underlying within the context of his analysis.

[victorydance]

I've kind of been wondering the same for a while. His previous posts have this general feel of "oh-god-i'm-so-butt-hurt-that-I-need-to-blame-everyone-but-myself" and suddenly he turns out to be a stellar candidate (minus the GRE)?

 

Either he's not as special as he wishes to portray himself or is just a general-variety troll.  

 

I really doubt he is as special as he portrays himself to be.

 

He has already been through a cycle and got declined. Even if his GRE was sub-par or poor, if he had actually published multiple papers and books (virtually unheard of for anyone without a Ph.D. in the field of political science) he would have got admitted easily. Especially considering he applied to universities of the calibre of the University of South Carolina.

 

And when pressed about some of the more suspicious aspects of his self-portrayed profile, he of course hasn't replied to the thread which is odd considering he has replied to every thread he has created when prompted to do so.

 

He is either completely delusional or outright lying about things.

Edited August 11, 2014 by victorydance

[VulpesZerda]

Who you think you are to determine am i qualified enough or not? You're at the utmost expectations are a grad student who got several rejections before gotten admitted. Have you seen my reseach papers? Did you know that I am with a continuous contact with American University, Harvard Kennedy School (Government Dept), Duke University, Georgetown University, Texas at Austin University faculty members are cooperating in several academic papers and they actually have shown interests for my papers to reference in their academic subfields?

 

So like I said before (assuming this is all true), information like this is making it even easier to connect you to your GC profile. Things like naming specific departments you have been in contact with, your stats, and the (unique) way that you write are all enough to make it easy for an admissions person to connect the dots between a self proclaimed cheater and your application.

 

I won't even comment on the rest of what's going on in the thread. But kudos to you for making GC very interesting lately!

[the_sheath]

@the_sheath: Hahaha, Kobayashi Maru is a great example of what I meant But I was also thinking something more simpler where my desire for academic honesty/ethics is overwhelmed by some other desire. For example, I receive a threat that if I do not help someone cheat in a test, they would kill someone important to me, etc. 

 

Basically, I think that in the OP's scenario, there are plenty of ways to achieve a fair result for everyone without cheating and in fact, cheating would only make the unfairness even worse!

 

I am so glad you got at least one of those references. I was thinking of examples like yours as well, but I thought "well, this is a topic about cheating so I HAVE to include a reference to Kobayashi Maru".

 

And I totally agree--in the interest of fairness/"justice" there's just so many objectively better ways to go than the cheating thing.

 

I was just responding to the earlier sentiment that seemed to crop up in the topic where cheating was seen as wrong in every circumstance. But I disagree with that too. Guess I just can't understand those lawful good types.

[Between Fields]

So like I said before (assuming this is all true), information like this is making it even easier to connect you to your GC profile. Things like naming specific departments you have been in contact with, your stats, and the (unique) way that you write are all enough to make it easy for an admissions person to connect the dots between a self proclaimed cheater and your application.

 

I won't even comment on the rest of what's going on in the thread. But kudos to you for making GC very interesting lately!

 

No worries. He's changed his location to Uganda and gender to Female. That ought to throw them off his trail.

[danieleWrites]

First: yeah, it was unethical and uncool of Kirk to cheat on the Kobayashi Maru. He failed to learn the lesson the test was designed to impart. Further, failing the test was required to "pass" the test. Fact of the matter is that no win situations do happen in battle and it's better for someone to learn to fail, and live with the trauma of that failure, in a safe environment where no one gets hurt, than to try to learn to live with failure. Not that the Kobayashi Maru would do what it was supposed to do. Seriously, Spock? It's not like there's a vaccine for PTSD!

Second: OP, you invoked oppression and justice in terms of a test. I will invoke a man who explained the ethics of dealing with injustice and oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote: "One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." While this seems to hold your position, that it is appropriate to cheat on an unjust test as there is no moral responsibility to obey the rules of the unjust test, you will note that King wrote this while he was in Birmingham city jail, and he was in this jail because he broke the very unjust laws of what we in the USA refer to as the Jim Crow South. King believed that people have a legal responsibility to obey unjust laws (a legal responsibility to not cheat on an unjust exam). For King, and I agree with him, this means that he had a moral responsibility to break the unjust law and a legal responsibility to accept and submit to the legal consequences of breaking his legal responsibility to obey the unjust law.

If you truly believe that the GRE is an unjust tool of oppression, then you have a moral responsibility to "break the law" of the exam, that is cheat, AND you have a legal responsibility to face the consequences for "breaking the law" of the exam, that is cheat, by informing the place that proctored the exam that you cheated and accepting the consequences for it. If you cheat without submitting to the punishment of the law, you have done nothing to change the oppressive status of the GRE.

If you feel that you are unfairly oppressed and your human rights have been violated by the unfairness of the GRE, and you feel you have the moral responsibility to do something about the unfairness and oppression, that means that your moral responsibility does not stop with cheating the test for personal gain. That means that you must cheat the test for social gain, which means that it must be publicly clear that you have cheated and you are willing to face the consequences of cheating in order to make it known that the test is oppressive and unfair so that it can be changed.

Otherwise, you clearly show that you do not believe the GRE to be immoral, but rather, a difficult stumbling block that you couldn't overcome without cheating, so you must now throw out words like oppression and equality in order to justify your own unethical behavior.

Since you haven't fessed up to ETS that you cheated, and there's nothing in the wind (try Twitter! GRE haters are everywhere!) about rising up against the oppression of a test that does nothing but measure the ability of a person to pass the GRE, then I assume that you, OP, are trying to make yourself feel better about cheating because you know that cheating for personal gain is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

[juilletmercredi]

Since the topic at hand isn't really about cheating, I just wanted to address this:

 

Did you know that I am with a continuous contact with American University, Harvard Kennedy School (Government Dept), Duke University, Georgetown University, Texas at Austin University faculty members are cooperating in several academic papers and they actually have shown interests for my papers to reference in their academic subfields?

 

People in Internet fora frequently claim such things.  It's difficult to confirm such things, but there are reasons to be skeptical.  Number one, the last university is the University of Texas at Austin.  Second of all, this sentence is not grammatically correct and its structure impedes comprehension, so I'm not really sure what you were trying to say - do you mean that a group of researchers are working together on a paper, and they want to reference your paper in their paper?  If that's the case, that's not actually that uncommon - all papers reference other papers, and occasionally the authors contact the author of the referenced paper for clarification.  And normally, I would not be a dick and point out the grammatical structure of the sentence - but I only did so because it's so difficult to read and to address your other claims.  As has already been pointed out, the TOEFL is a very basic test of English comprehension; it doesn't ensure that the test-taker is actually ready to write at an academic level or study English literature.  It just ensures that you can understand fairly basic written and spoken English communication.

 

Actually, I think I will answer the question now.

 

When I was in college, I was never really that concerned with my GPA.  I know that sounds trite, but it's true - I wanted to learn the material but in most cases I didn't really care whether I got a B or an A.  (In fact, I got a few Cs - my undergrad GPA was a 3.42.)  Given this, I never asked a professor what was going to be on the test.  If she was giving a midterm, I assumed that everything she had taught up to midterm was fair game and made sure that I had a grasp on it.  (Honestly, I wish my students would just do that.  What's going to be on the test?  EVERYTHING.  ASSUME EVERYTHING.  If we've gone over it then it might be there!)  As such, I can't really recall a situation in which I thought only chapters 1-3 were going to be on the exam, even though we read up to chapter 4, and the professor introduced stuff from chapter 4.

 

But let's say that I did fall into this hypothetical situation.  No, I wouldn't cheat.  Personally I would just suck it up and resolve to do better on the next exam, and make sure that I prepared ALL of the material we read, not just part of it.  In fact, if there were only a few questions from chapter 4, then most likely I would still do pretty well on the exam - maybe a solid B, which would satisfy me.  Especially if you are a grad student, you know that asking what's going to be on the exam 1) irritates most professors and 2) is an irrelevant, obvious question.  The answer is everything.  Everything is going to be on the exam.  This is especially true of qualifying exams, if you are trying to get into PhD programs - they give you a reading list and you should assume that you can be asked about anything on the lists, and probably some things that aren't.

 

Also, I would really like you to look up "oppression," because a professor assigning you a few questions from a chapter you've already ready but just didn't expect is not oppression.