"I can be hurt by you."
Last week, I caught a student plagiarizing in one of my classes.
The details aren't important. (I really shouldn't share the details anyways, because of privacy laws and good ethical practice.) But, as usual, dealing with the case sent me into a bit of a funk. Those of you who know me know that I take such cases seriously --- and a little personally.
I posted my frustrations on social media, and received a number of sympathetic replies --- particularly from former students and fellow faculty. And a little discussion broke out, as sometimes happens in such situations.
One of my high school friends, in offering comfort, said that "they are only cheating themselves". This is something that faculty say to one another in the face of such incidents. It reminds us that we are all responsible for our own actions, and that we can't be responsible if a student chooses to cheat in our course.
It is some small comfort to us when we think of all the cheating cases that we don't catch. We trust that, eventually, the School of Hard Knocks will punish the students who cheated by presenting them with a life situation where they need the skills they didn't learn when given the opportunity.
But this time, when I heard the comment, I realized that the comment isn't really true.
In an immediate context, a student who cheats also affects others students in the class. I grade most of my classes on a sliding scale/curve, because it's hard for me to write assessments that translate directly into the grades I want to assign. So, like many other faculty, I use class averages to get a sense of how difficult a given assessment was for the students, and assign grades accordingly. A student who cheats fouls up those averages, and thereby affects the grades of other students in the course. (For one or two students, it's probably not a big effect, but it's non-trivial.)
More than that, though ... increasingly, as I grow older and more (*cough*) experienced, every cheating incident makes me a little more cynical towards my students. I'm a little less likely to trust students, and a little more likely to make policies and procedures that take more effort on my part, in order to make cheating harder to perform. So, students who cheat in my class end up affecting future students who take my course, by poisoning our relationship before it even begins.
But the ultimate effect is long-term. When my students graduate, they take the name of my institution with them. We grant them diplomas as implicit letters of reference, telling the world that we believe they are competent in our field of study. If they go on to fail at their work, because they cheated in our coursework and never learned what they needed to learn, it reflects on the whole institution. Our reputation suffers because of those who claim our name and then defile it. And then the reputation of anyone else who claims our name suffers, too.
A former student of mine, Barbara Gjerstad, who was (and is) a proud member of a sorority, put it this way to me in a conversation long ago: "you are always wearing your letters". It was a reminder to her fellow sorority members (and brother fraternity members) that anything you do affects the reputation of your organization. "Guilt by association" is a real thing; perhaps it's not always deserved, but it happens nonetheless. And so you should always act as if your organization will get all the credit --- or blame --- for your actions.
In summary: no, cheating isn't a victimless crime. Cheaters don't only cheat themselves. They cheat other people, too.
In the last 5-10 years, we've learned (or failed to learn) how much our society is interconnected. We are at our best when we see our interconnections, and seek to pursue our common good. We are at our worst when we celebrate individual rights and freedoms, and seek our own individual well-being at the expense of others.
Two years ago, a Twitter friend of mine, Sarah Kinzer, put it this way:
To my students --- past, present, and future --- I say this:
I can be hurt by you.
Your fellow students can be hurt by you.
Future students, whom you've never met, can be hurt by you.
What you do affects us. What we do affects you.
We are deeply connected to each other.
Postscript: Barbara Gjerstad notes that the phrase "You are always wearing your letters" wasn't original with her, but comes from T.J. Sullivan. Here is a video of T.J. Sullivan talking about that idea.
Click to view