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From: liberte@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Cheating vs. Learning
Message-ID: <170800003@uiucdcsb>
Date: Fri, 24-Apr-87 19:01:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.170800003
Posted: Fri Apr 24 19:01:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Apr-87 20:54:34 EDT
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Nf-ID: #N:uiucdcsb:170800003:000:3146
Nf-From: uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu!liberte    Apr 24 18:01:00 1987


Here's a slightly different view on the cheating issue.  I tend to take
a more global perspective on these things and ask "What is cheating anyway?"
Others have addressed this question so I won't add more directly.

Instead I'll ask another question.  What is the purpose of education anyway?
My answer is that the purpose is to learn.  Students are supposed to be
learning, but hopefully teachers are learning too.  In fact, I would
go further and say that the purpose of life is to learn.  But I digress.

Some people might argue that the
purpose of being in school is to get out - to make more money, things like
that.  Students might learn something in the meantime, but that's incidental
or accidental.  To people who have this attitude, cheating is a way to
get around the rules of the game.  Cheating is like tax evasion.
However, getting the most out of the system is like finding loopholes
in the tax law irrespective of whether money is earned honorably.
Rules of what is cheating and what is not may be independent of what
is fair.

Some people might argue that the purpose of education is to teach
people a few things and then grade them according to how much they know.
This attitude assumes that grading is a fair measure of how much people
know and maybe that grading is useful for judging how much a person can learn.
Cheating, from this perspective, defeats the purpose of grading because 
presumably the person graded doesn't really know as much as the grade
indicates.  Furthermore, when grading on a curve, other peoples' grades
may be reduced by the increase in the cheater's grade.  But that by itself
is not a good argument against grading on a curve.

(Side issue on grading:

To some extent I agree with the value of grading as a measure of knowledge,
but it is generally unreliable as a measure of ability to learn.  Grading
on a curve measures knowledge relative to classmates rather than to
a more absolute (and therefore more objective) knowledge standard.

If education serves to grade people, what is the purpose of grading?
Considering all the different grading standards, I would not want to
trust grades to tell me much.  You should consider where a grade came
from just as you should consider whose movie review you are reading.)

If the purpose of education is to learn, then avoidance of learning is
cheating.  From this perspective, collaboration to solve a problem
may not be cheating, whereas getting hints from a TA may be considered 
cheating.  It all depends on whether learning is taking place.
There are different kinds of learning, of course.  Learning how a 
problem is solved is different from learning how to solve a problem.
The former is engineering while the latter is art and science.

To summarize, views on cheating relect views on the purpose of education.
To encourage healthy views on cheating, encourage healthy views of
education - and life in general.


Daniel LaLiberte   217-333-7937
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Department of Computer Science
1304 W Springfield
Urbana, IL  61801

liberte@a.cs.uiuc.edu
uiucdcs!liberte

{moderation in all things - including moderation}