Cheating and Personal Happiness

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Last week, a report on cheating surveying 5,300 graduate students in the US and Canada, conducted by Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University and President of CAI (Centre for Academic Integrity), was widely released in different media, including the Financial Times and CNN.

The report, which will be published in the September issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, reveals that 56% of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, as compared to 54% of graduate engineering students, 50% of physical science students, 49% of medical and health-care students, 45% of law students, 43% of liberal arts students and 39% of social science and humanities students. Previous reports published by CAI are likely if not more alarming: the results of a 2005 survey of 50,000 undergraduates on more than 60 US campuses showed that on most campuses, 70% of students admit to some cheating. This diagnosis may be aggravated since, as McCabe said, it's likely that more students cheat than admit to it.

Do more students cheat nowadays than, say, four decades ago? It is debatable, although some analysts explain that some facts such as the easy access to almost infinite sources on the Web and the flourishing of virtual communities of cheaters have contributed to make the phenomenon rampant.

In my opinion, given the magnitude of the problem, two extreme reactions should be avoided. The first one is to despise the phenomenon, or even more perversely, to justify, for example, that cheating is a form of innovation or that there are diverse degrees of cheating, some acceptable. The second is to embark in a sensational crusade that may harm some pillars that sustain education and prestigious institutions, thus affecting also negatively those students that comply with the rules.

In this and a subsequent post I will deal with some of the possible approaches that schools can undertake to combat cheating, taking into account that, although eradicating the phenomenon may be almost impossible –in an analogous way as to prevent all people from lying of being disloyal to their partners- it is somehow achievable a state of being where cheating becomes really difficult or very risky.

To start with, there is a need of clarifying a conceptual issue. Normally, cheating is considered a reproachable behaviour because, as the Oxford Dictionary explains, cheating is "to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage". However, the first person who looses out is the cheater: first, by potentially exposing one’s personal reputation to be affected, sometimes for life; and second, and more importantly from a personal point of view, for relinquishing all the benefits that brings the learning process. The expression "You are only fooling yourself" springs to mind. We all know the intellectual satisfaction that results from understanding, memorising, rationalising and discussing theories, ideas and concepts. Those who take the shortcut and skip the wonders of learning are giving up a decisive part of personal development that is directly linked –I believe, in line with many philosophers- with happiness.